Inventing the Rest of Our Lives Women in Second Adulthood

by Levine, Suzanne Braun

• ISBN13: 9780670033119
• ISBN10: 0670033111
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-12-29
• Publisher: Viking Adult

Summary

The first generation of women to have tasted social, political, and economic empowerment-some thirty-seven million strong-has reached a new frontier that is unexpected and unexplored. Nearing their fifties and entering their sixties, they have fulfilled all the prescribed roles-daughter, wife, mother, employee; yet with longer life expectancy and better health they do not intend to retire from the world. They want to experience more. Inventing the Rest of Our Livesis an evocative and eye- opening road map across this uncharted terrain.Suzanne Braun Levine, the first editor of Ms. magazine and a long-time journalist, has been reporting on the lives of women like herself throughout their tumultuous first adulthood. Here she draws on personal stories, cutting-edge science, up-to-date trend analysis, and her own struggles to show that Second Adulthood women are simply not the same people they were, only older; they are changing-both inside and out. The latest research she has uncovered proves it: Certain areas of their brains are undergoing a growth spurt very similar to that in adolescence, their sexual and emotional rhythms are readjusting along with their hormones, and their priorities are shifting dramatically.From work to love, self-discovery to civic duty, health to economics, Inventing the Rest of Our Livesexamines every aspect of their lives, offers solutions, and shares stories-sometimes touching, sometimes joyous-of women who have found insights and answers to the three crucial questions that each confronts: What matters? What works? What’s next?Inventing the Rest of Our Livesis a bold, honest, and sharp-witted guidebook, companion, and source of inspiration for every woman entering these uncharted waters.

Author Biography

Suzanne Braun Levine is a writer, editor, and nationally recognized authority on women, media matters, and family issues. Editor of Ms. magazine from its founding in 1972 until 1989 and editor in chief of the Columbia Journalism Review, she is currently a contributing editor of More magazine . The author of a book about fatherhood and numerous articles and essays, she has also produced a Peabody Award-winning documentary about American women. She has appeared on Oprah and the Today show and has lectured widely.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Getting to What Matters: Letting Go and Saying No
1. You're Not Who You Were, Only Older	3	(22)
2. Second Adolescence
A Second Chance at Growing Up Strong	25	(15)
3. Defiance
Speaking Up, Speaking Out, Speaking Your Mind	40	(16)
4. The Fertile Void
Taking Your Time	56	(25)
Finding Out What Works: Recalibrating Your Life
5. Reconsidering Work and Beginning to Recalibrate Your Life	81	(25)
6. Rediscovering Your Passion, Facing Your Fear	106	(17)
7. Redefining Intimacy
Love, Sex, Friendship, and the New You	123	(26)
8. Confronting Adversity	149	(30)
Moving, On to What's Next: Making Peace and Taking Charge
9. Health, Beauty, and What You Cannot Change	179	(24)
10. Generations: Graduating from Our Child and Parent Voice to (at Last!) Our Own Adult Voice	203	(20)
11. Becoming a Critical Mass
The Personal Is Still Political	223	(12)
12. Riding the Spiral	235	(8)
Bibliography	243	(6)
Web Sites and Organization	249	(6)
Index	255

Excerpts

Getting to What Matters: Letting Go and Saying No CHAPTER ONE You?re Not Who You Were, Only Older The sense of danger must not disappear: The way is certainly both short and steep, However gradual it looks from here; Look if you like, but you will have to leap. . . . Much can be said for savoir-faire, But to rejoice when no one else is there Is even harder than it is to weep; No one is watching, but you have to leap. . . . Our dream of safety has to disappear. ?W. H. Auden, ?Leap Before You Look? My first step into Second Adulthood was backward off a ninety-foot cliff. On impulse, I had signed up for an Outward Bound program and found myself poised in full rappelling gear?harness, helmet, and guide rope?to walk down the face of what could just as well have been my twelve-story apartment building. The terror was pure. I was only mildly distracted by the reassuring words of our leader: ?Fear is the appropriate response here. After all, evolution doesn?t take much interest in creatures that step backward off ninety- foot cliffs.?I made it down, of course. I had learned the lesson the exercise was surely designed to teach, that fear is not an unacceptable response, but it can be confronted. And I fulfilled a personal mission: to find out if I was still a Tomboy. (The very word, I realize as I use it, is a throwback to a bygone era, not just my own past.) My tomboy self, long lost in a marriage to a nonathletic, non?nature-lover and a busy urban life, played a big part in my personal mythology. Ever since I crossed the fiftieth birthday barrier a couple of years earlier I had wanted to reconnect with that rugged, adventurous outdoorswoman, if indeed she was still an authentic component of who I am. If my tomboy was still there, I wanted to share that part of me with my daughter, who was growing up in a time more accepting of the ?big-boned? body type we share and as a young woman with an unequivocal appreciation of her body?s strength. But first I had to make sure I wasn?t perpetuating a myth about myself. Having grown up feeling I was often playing a part written by others, I wanted, as best I could, to get to the truth about my life. As my feet hit the ground and I looked back up the craggy cliff toward the blue sky and my cheering companions, I was overcome with emotion?emotions really, more than I can identify even now?and I began to sob and laugh uncontrollably. But it was after I calmed down and had gone kind of limp that a totally unexpected breakthrough of really cosmic proportions hit. The descent down the cliff came on the fifth day of a seven-day program. I had done everything asked of me?jumping into icy water at dawn, sleeping on oars lined across an open boat, climbing a telephone pole, swinging on a rope into a spider-web net?so I was primed to obediently take on the next assignment. It was to keep our harnesses and ropes in place and climb back upthe wall. Maybe it was because I was so totally wasted by the emotional and physical exertion, but I would like to think it was overcoming fear on the way down that gave me the courage to say noto going back up. The only others in the group who declined to climb were two women in their fifties. We realized with some astonishment that, for us, saying no was as monumental an achievement as stepping backward off the cliff. Both challenges were more meaningful to the three of us because we were women of a certain age. Each of us had a different reason for coming to the wilderness, yet we shared an awakening drive to sort out our thinking about the next stage of our lives. In our dealings with that cliff we had encountered two essential themes of Second Adulthood: Letting Goand Saying No. Letting Go and Saying No &l