Read Online Composing a Further Life by Mary Catherine Bateson - Free Book Online
Authors: Mary Catherine Bateson
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rarely met, certainly not to be counted on. Today, with life expectancies in industrialized nations reaching and passing the biblical horizon, another change is indicated in the sense of self, one that is just beginning to reach consciousness. Who am I? and What do I want in my life? are very different questions when life is neither sweet and fleeting nor “nasty, brutish, and short,” in the words of Thomas Hobbes. Here, too, the meaning of success is in question as we try to understand the meaning of a “successful life.” Scientific and technological change have stimulated new possibilities and new spiritual search.
Thomas Kuhn, who developed the concept of paradigm shifts in science, discussed the way in which anomalous data begin to undermine an accepted theory. 2 For me the first such datum came when an American colleague working as a teacher in Iran told me that she was retiring at sixty and returning to the United States to look after her mother. Her mother? I was still in my forties. It had never occurred to me that a woman of her age would still have a mother to look after and be planning her life around that obligation. Shortly after my father died in 1980, his widow, Lois, who is only a decade older than I am, decided to relocate temporarily in North Carolina, where she had grown up and her parents were growing old, to contribute to their care, a responsibility that lasted fifteen years, long enough for her to grow new roots.
Our assumptions about the shape of lives and how long they last are necessarily changing. Over the years, I have watched families who had rallied around a deathbed when doctors said it was a matter of weeks struggling to sort out their responsibilities as weeks extended into months or years. And I have listened to friends, who had made choices for retirement as if it would last no longer than a few seasons, revising those plans as their healthy span extended and golf or fishing or travel proved unsatisfying.
In 2002, Ellen Goodman, author and syndicated columnist for
The Boston Globe
, then sixty-one years old, invited me to a small, informal conference with a group of women that she and Patricia Schroeder, who served for twenty-four years in the House of Representatives from Colorado, were organizing, to discuss the approach of retirement age and how they—we—felt about it. We met that December in Celebration, Florida, over a weekend, a group of seven women, all of whom had had careers and all of whom, somewhat to my surprise, were currently married and had grown-up children. We were all in our sixties, each with a range of degrees, books, and titles to her credit. A novelist. A psychotherapist. A college president. An entrepreneur. Women who had been active in different ways in the liberation movements of the twentieth century, and who had struggled for the right to work outside the home, now looking at retirement. Women who had “had it all.”
Most important from my point of view, everyone there had already once in her lifetime had to reject ready-made answers to the questions of purpose and identity and think them through as women in a new way. We recognized that we had been struggling with similar dilemmas and decided, even though we came from different parts of the country, to continue to meet semiannually and to invite two or three others to join the group. Because all of us were busy and engaged on a number of fronts, we agreed to concentrate on developing our common understanding rather than undertaking any new form of activism.
The two comments that I remember most vividly from that first gathering were Pat Schroeder’s, that in the women’s movement “We thought we had won a war but in fact we had only taken a beachhead for women’s equality,” and Ellen Goodman’s, that all of our obituaries were already written, neatly on file in newspaper offices, so that in a real sense we had nothing to prove. But there we were, wondering about how to be productive, how to
Thomas Kuhn, who developed the concept of paradigm shifts in science, discussed the way in which anomalous data begin to undermine an accepted theory. 2 For me the first such datum came when an American colleague working as a teacher in Iran told me that she was retiring at sixty and returning to the United States to look after her mother. Her mother? I was still in my forties. It had never occurred to me that a woman of her age would still have a mother to look after and be planning her life around that obligation. Shortly after my father died in 1980, his widow, Lois, who is only a decade older than I am, decided to relocate temporarily in North Carolina, where she had grown up and her parents were growing old, to contribute to their care, a responsibility that lasted fifteen years, long enough for her to grow new roots.
Our assumptions about the shape of lives and how long they last are necessarily changing. Over the years, I have watched families who had rallied around a deathbed when doctors said it was a matter of weeks struggling to sort out their responsibilities as weeks extended into months or years. And I have listened to friends, who had made choices for retirement as if it would last no longer than a few seasons, revising those plans as their healthy span extended and golf or fishing or travel proved unsatisfying.
In 2002, Ellen Goodman, author and syndicated columnist for
The Boston Globe
, then sixty-one years old, invited me to a small, informal conference with a group of women that she and Patricia Schroeder, who served for twenty-four years in the House of Representatives from Colorado, were organizing, to discuss the approach of retirement age and how they—we—felt about it. We met that December in Celebration, Florida, over a weekend, a group of seven women, all of whom had had careers and all of whom, somewhat to my surprise, were currently married and had grown-up children. We were all in our sixties, each with a range of degrees, books, and titles to her credit. A novelist. A psychotherapist. A college president. An entrepreneur. Women who had been active in different ways in the liberation movements of the twentieth century, and who had struggled for the right to work outside the home, now looking at retirement. Women who had “had it all.”
Most important from my point of view, everyone there had already once in her lifetime had to reject ready-made answers to the questions of purpose and identity and think them through as women in a new way. We recognized that we had been struggling with similar dilemmas and decided, even though we came from different parts of the country, to continue to meet semiannually and to invite two or three others to join the group. Because all of us were busy and engaged on a number of fronts, we agreed to concentrate on developing our common understanding rather than undertaking any new form of activism.
The two comments that I remember most vividly from that first gathering were Pat Schroeder’s, that in the women’s movement “We thought we had won a war but in fact we had only taken a beachhead for women’s equality,” and Ellen Goodman’s, that all of our obituaries were already written, neatly on file in newspaper offices, so that in a real sense we had nothing to prove. But there we were, wondering about how to be productive, how to
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