Rebels in White Gloves (54 page)

While those who remained mostly home have come out into the world in midlife, some of those who have lived more publicly have turned increasingly inward. After her divorce from Jeff, Kris Olson began spending more time on the Warm Springs reservation, talking with the elders, fishing, walking the land. She also remarried, to another lawyer, whom she first described to me in terms of the political work he’s done: representing young black criminal defendants in Mississippi in the sixties, suing the makers of breast implants and the Dalkon Shield. She then added that in her new marriage, “I am experiencing for the first time in my life what it is to be really loved.” And though she has expanded her professional responsibilities, joining Janet Reno’s national advisory committee and working on matters like campaign finance reform, she looks forward to working on a smaller scale after 2001. She may teach at an Indian high school, surveying the history of federal Indian policy so that “these kids know why their parents and communities have been through such wrenching changes.”

Lonny Higgins renewed her private life in a more dramatic fashion. In 1995 she discovered that she was pregnant. She and David were both ecstatic. “We felt rejuvenated and rewarded.” Then six weeks later she realized that the embryo had stopped growing. She lost the fetus but never bled. “I said to the baby, ‘You don’t need to go away, you can just come back into me,’ ” and then watched on the ultrasound over the course of several days as the fetus was resorbed. “Strangely, contemplating new life made me face my own mortality. It’s like Timothy Leary said, ‘When you take off your watch, that’s when time stops.’ ”

With her two kids in college, Lonny felt urgently that she wanted to be pregnant again. She had just been through a grueling, if vindicating, professional ordeal: successfully defending herself against two malpractice suits for deliveries she’d performed fifteen years earlier, then countersuing the plaintiff’s attorney for defamation and malicious prosecution, winning a public apology and a half-million-dollar award. Demoralized by the effects such suits have on obstetrics (causing, for example, doctors to resort more often to cesarean delivery), Lonny quit delivering babies. Her motives were also personal: “My life has been defined by what other people needed, which in some ways is a very easy position, a ‘call.’ I wanted to learn to take care of myself.”

Having tried in vitro fertilization with her own eggs without success, Lonny went in search of an egg donor. She didn’t care if it was her genes in the baby; what she wanted was to give birth, which, “beginning with the intrauterine environment,” she counts “the ultimate form of creativity.” David resisted: “It’s you I love, and I only want to fertilize one of your eggs,” but after meeting the young woman Lonny had chosen, he agreed. Their grown kids were involved from the beginning, watching the embryos grow outside their mother’s body before implantation. At age forty-nine, Lonny gave birth to a baby boy, with whom she now happily spends all her days.

As with the women who stayed home, many of the working women’s mid-track switches have been involuntary. Linda Gibson Preston was living in Houston with her husband and four kids, getting rich in real estate and banking, driving lavish cars and working out in her mirrored home gym when oil prices crashed and wiped the family out. “You couldn’t sell, rent, lease, or develop real estate. The banks were underwater. We lost everything, including our confidence, and there was no way out.” They moved to New Jersey and, fifteen years later, are still “edging back.” More than her husband, Linda was able to find useful lessons in the disaster, believing it a good thing for her children (one of whom has Down’s syndrome) to have endured. “I think women may be better at changes that come because we’ve always had to anticipate abrupt disruptions in our lives.”

The belief that they have reaped good things from all the sidetrackings and collapses and rebuildings runs deep among these women. Johanna Branson told
Frontline:
“It really hit me at our tenth reunion. We were in our early thirties, so we still were optimistic about getting married, about having children, and everything still seemed to be going our way, and I remember looking around in this room full of women, all dressed in bright, solid-color jackets just ready for network news interviews that might drop on them and clutching these thick leather appointment books and running around networking, and I was thinking, This is getting borderline insufferably smug. The optimism was turning a little bit to something that seemed to me to be unfounded. And it was a different world five years later, for the fifteenth, because women were in their late thirties. Carter wasn’t in the White House. People had lost their snazzy jobs; maybe they were having to reinvent new jobs for
themselves. There wasn’t a track they could follow. Maybe people’s marriages weren’t existing anymore or they still hadn’t found somebody, and a lot of people were facing real fertility problems. So as a whole, I remember looking around that room and thinking, This is a much humbler but a much more interesting group of women, much more complex.”

Their new beginnings have also, like Nancy Young’s, frequently “rippled upward.” Many have been divorced and, later, watched their parents split; many have also seen their mothers bloom late in life. Louise Carter’s frustrated mom got a job at the law firm where Louise was working the summer after her sophomore year. She loved it, went back to school, and worked until retirement for Bell Laboratories; “for a while she was the breadwinner, and her whole self-concept really changed.” Charlynn Maniatis’s mom had never learned to drive and had never shopped for groceries without her husband’s supervision when he abruptly left her, taking nearly everything they owned. “The first six months were incredible. She didn’t know how to balance a checkbook, but she started to take trips. She would visit me in New York. You saw this flower blossoming.” Nancy Wanderer’s mom, Marge, also began traveling after her husband died. “She has taken great interest in managing her money and has become a regular visitor to Merrill Lynch and the bank.” Dorothy Devine’s mom published her first book at age seventy-four, a collection of short stories dedicated to Dorothy’s grandmother, who “hid her typewriter in the laundry basket.” She is now at work on a novel about a mother and daughter whose family was destroyed by the Vietnam War. Though she cried when she figured out that Dorothy was gay, after her husband died she announced that she would never marry again and take care of a sick old man. She told Dorothy’s partner, “Women are the only ones who talk about anything real.”

Their mothers’ renaissance has often helped these women make peace with their parents and their past. After a long estrangement, Dorothy found her chance to reconnect with her family when her father fell ill; as his only daughter, she went home to help her mother take care of him. In twenty-five years, father and daughter had never reconciled; he could never forgive her for her years in Cuba and the SDS. But he developed Alzheimer’s “and forgot that he was angry,” and by the end the family was integrated again. Like Nancy Young, Dorothy developed empathy in
midlife for the struggles her parents had endured. “Looking back, I realize that my father’s breadwinning role isolated him, that he was connected to his children in only the most tenuous way, which was why the ideological splits broke the family apart. If he’d been more involved in raising us, we would have been more people to him. He would have understood better the choices we made.” Her view of her ex-husband and his radical colleagues also softened. “A lot of what we did, like trashing Cambridge, I look back on as a sad waste. Aggression breeds aggression; by being radical we just made everything polarized. People hated their kids; kids hated their parents. But I don’t anymore think that all men are spiritually lacking and dangerous and have ruined the world. My experience since has taught me that there’s violence in men, but in women, too.”

The once homeless Dorothy now holds a job that could seem the proper punch line for the most radical member of the class: She is a graphic designer, creating images for a management consulting firm. She has not, however, abandoned her political commitments. In fact, in midlife she has resumed her activism, though her concerns are now more local and small-scale. Living on a pond in Peace Dale, Rhode Island, where “it’s wonderful to come home from work and launch the canoe at the bottom of the back yard and follow the herons, glossy ibis, kingfishers, ducks, and swans around the pond as the day cools and the sun sets,” she has joined a neighborhood group trying to protect that environment. Having once tried to remake the world and bring down the enemy, she now believes that change happens only bit by bit, and by finding common cause. “As kids, we staked out the margins and became marginalized. Now, if my neighbors join me in my concern for the pond, I’m not going to test them on abortion or gay rights. It’s not a compromise of principle to try and make things better, a little better, where you are. That’s the kind of real work that has been done by women all along, at the church and the PTA. Though to say that it is up to women to clean things up in the world, well, that’s like saying it’s housework. I believe anyone can learn to be ecologically sensitive and nurturant.”

Dorothy’s peacemaking extends even to her own mistakes. “I wasted my twenties. I was in pain for a long time. I’m only now coming into my own. But I learned things. Ten years of living on less than ten thousand dollars a year, that makes you understand more kinds of people. My
mother is liberal, but when she talks about welfare mothers … well, if you spend your whole life protected, you don’t understand. Our generation didn’t want to be just safe and meet people only like us. Because I walked in more dangerous places, I can understand what it is to feel trapped and out of control.”

As in their prior life stages, the way these women see their own midlife has been strongly shaped by—and has also shaped—the many studies and books that invariably follow in their generation’s broad wake. Many of these have focused on the body—the fading of beauty, the onset of menopause—and most have been determinedly cheering, painting the end of the reproductive years as another rejuvenating passage, a liberation from the need to attract and please men, a time when women can become demanding, unruly, politically and spiritually bold. Jan Mercer wrote to her classmates that she “welcomed the freedom from the hormonal ebbs and flows.” Nancy Wanderer sees her “warm flashes” as a “sign of ripening.” Betty Demy thinks it “might be fun to just break out. On my kindergarten report card, my teacher wrote, ‘Betty is a happy conformist’; it was true then and ever since. Now is my chance to be eccentric.”

Some are enjoying a new sense of matriarchal responsibility to younger women. When Ann Landsberg’s stepdaughter had a miscarriage, “I felt catapulted into my new generational slot, became acutely aware that I am the mother of this clan. I had a grown daughter to deal with. I had to draw on my own experience with childbearing to bring her empathy and support and wisdom, even though it was only eight years since my son was born.” When, after her mother’s death, Ann’s father began calling to ask how to cook this dish or get out that stain, she realized that “my mom’s history and everything she knew is gone. I am the bearer of whatever she passed on.”

Others have set out to reclaim for “the old woman” her premodern stature as venerable, visionary, wise. Dorothy Devine’s goddess group marks a woman’s entry into menopause by seating her upon a “throne,” garlanding her with flowers, and rubbing her with fragrant oils. Then they all “sit humbly at the crone’s feet and say, ‘Please tell us your wisdom.’ It’s a counterweight to the Madison Avenue culture that says you’re old and ugly and your husband will leave you. It will be a fabulous experience when my sisters do that for me.”

Not all are aging so happily. Their twenty-fifth-reunion book is striking in the number of women describing serious illness, such as Epstein-Barr virus or chronic fatigue syndrome. This may reflect the emergence of new viruses and environmental insults to the immune system, or it may provide these women a legitimate reason to finally take care of themselves, or even justify stasis or middling success. A great many women in the class are consumers and practitioners of New Age therapies: Cynthia Gilbert-Marlow still works as a flight attendant but suffered an injury on the right side of her neck and back, “where you store anger.” The wife of her acupuncturist, she was glad to discover, does telepathic psychology: “We get in harmony with the universe. Then she senses my body’s responses. She’ll ask yes or no questions, and her body moves with the answers.” Menopause has given some a difficult time. Kathy Ruckman suffered hot flashes and interrupted sleep, and was anxious to get estrogen. Her doctor started hormone therapy but then stopped it when she began bleeding, and “wanted at the drop of a hat to do a D and C.” Others are more suspicious of hormone replacement, worrying that it perpetuates the view, well known to their mothers, that menopause is a deficiency disease requiring treatment so that women remain supple and desirable for men.

Though most in the class are aging “naturally” and are, like Louise Carter, “not very depressed by my older face and streaks of gray hair,” the altered face in the mirror does dispirit a few. Susan Alexander finds much to celebrate about midlife. She describes an abundant creative life, writing novels and musicals and films, directing theater, performing professionally on violin, piano, and flute, growing herbs on her balcony, loving and valuing her friends. She speaks rapturously of her son, “tall, handsome and athletic like his dad [with] a wonderful capacity for friendship with women.” She has reconnected with the Church, helping the Presbytery of New York City create an Internet site, which she hopes will serve as a platform for some of the poorer churches and social service organizations. She appreciates her matured confidence, the sure knowledge that she can survive anything. All of it makes for what she calls an “intense core of joy at the center of my being, [that] runs from finding delight in small things to the borders of spiritual ecstasy.” The “lengthy and arduous process” required to uncover it, she says, was “a most wonderful journey.”