Kate Halfpenny has always been in a hurry – I wanted to get life happening from 15, she tells me. At 18 she landed a cadetship at the Melbourne Herald, was married at 24, had her first baby at 26, had three babies by 31. All while running her full blown supersonic media career which included her long stint as executive editor at WHO magazine. She’s now a columnist for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, a regular on ABC radio and runs her own successful content creation business Bad Mother Media.
Living by the advice of her mum—standing still is death to ambition, relationships and career—this woman is spectacular. And yet, she manages to move at pace with such calm and grace and seemingly endless amounts of time to give her friends and family that I am keen to tap into her elixir. Kate puts it down to salt water. It’s her cure all in three forms: sea, sweat and tears.
For 30+ years Kate navigated a multitude of roles—mother, wife, employee, daughter, sister, friend, which at its heart was a body of work dedicated to other people. She masterminded it and it meant a great deal to her, but life for her today is now vastly different. In 2020, when Covid hit, she made some big life decisions to change it all up. She moved away from the city for a sea-change, stopped working full time for the first time in 35 years, and started her own business.
I feel like Kate is a kindred spirit and I so want to be best friends because everything she says resonates exactly with how I feel right now. Being 50-ish (me too!) has allowed her to make some different but very conscious decisions to focus more on herself (me too!) As an empty nester (almost me too!) she has more time, but it is more than that—she is at a time in her life where marriages seem to be ending (OMG, yes – me too!), parents are aging (ah huh), friends are becoming ill and even dying (this is getting spooky), and with that comes a lot of self reflection (yes!).
Kate is a magnificent wordsmith and she manages to articulate in one breathless sentence how I (and probably every other 50-ish woman on earth) feel—Being 50-ish has refocused me: what do I still want to achieve for me? It’s not a ‘selfish’ question, it’s a realistic one. I want to use the next 30 years wisely. We are all madly saving our superannuation, but time is more precious and using my time well is my overriding consideration. I choose boogie boarding, not ironing.
Ok, she had me at ‘time is more precious’.
God I love being 50-ish. Seriously. And so does Kate—I still have the energy and desire but in a funny way I feel even more creative because my energy is now dedicated to me.
Today, Kate is most loving having choice over what she does each day. She has written extensively about this in her column for The Age, and regularly cops criticism for being a ‘privileged white Pollyanna’, and this infuriates me (while Kate is much more accepting and shares that she has developed a thick skin). As a successful, intelligent, hardworking, creative woman, Kate has been working her arse off since she was 15 (and even bought her parents a house.) Back off haters.
[We then spend a bit of time discussing how annoying it is that as intelligent women we feel the need to justify our choices and our lifestyle to the critics out there. Blah blah blah. But seriously, my discussion with Kate has been so incredibly uplifting that I am resolving right now to never again justify the choices I make. It’s my life, my choice, so please butt out…].
But I digress.
Kate’s decisions these days are driven by a desire to live her best life. Her day starts with a workout followed by a swim. She has a standing appointment with herself at 4pm to read books for an hour, enjoys craft and hits up the op-shops. She visits her aged parents around the corner most day and checks in on her kids. Parenthood is still her biggest and best experience and her happiest times are when her family are all together—she loves having a front row seat to her kids’ lives.
And what’s next? Kate is learning golf. She says it’s easy and in her most recent round was only 57 over par—hilarious. She wants to swap out flop and drop holidays for meaningful travel. In 2022 she did a five day hike in Tasmania with her adult kids and in 2023 cycled, kayaked and hiked in Vietnam: I’m not abandoning Thailand,just cheating on it for a little while. She wants to volunteer more, is focused on getting her financial house in order (or hopes that one of her kids will invent a successful app), and is making a weird home remedy for mosquitos that involves flat beer. Ok.
Like me, and you, Kate says she gets a shock when she looks in the mirror because she is expecting to see her 27 year old self—I used to be absorbed by responsibility. Now I’m less so. I feel experienced, not old.
Love her.
