For the past twenty years I have spent a June week on Nantucket with my mother and my kids. (Pastels and scrimshaw are not my husband’s cup of tea.) Those annual trips became, like height marks on the kitchen door, a measure of my children’s growing up. Our bike-riding history reflects their progress from one plateau of independence to the next. In the early years I left the baby at the cottage with my mother, and pedaled gingerly along with my toddler strapped into a child seat behind me. We graduated to small bikes and short rides. I still smile at the memory of how we must have looked for a year or two, the proud mother riding ahead with two furiously pedaling goslings in a staggering row behind. My favorite stage was also the shortest lived: when we were confident cyclists on ten-mile tours, one or another pulling ahead and meeting up at predetermined rest stops to compare notes on the ride so far.

Soon, though, I was left in the dust. My children would disappear over the horizon, sometimes doubling back to make sure I was still okay or heading off into town on their own. While I kept pedaling, they moved on to scooters and dune-riding in a rented jeep – it all went by so fast. I now bike alone.

This summer I realized that while I was concentrating on how my kids were growing up, I had missed the evidence that my mother was growing down. In my recollections she was a constant ingredient in the Nantucket experience - an enthusiastic browser in the tourist shops; a devotee of Aunt Leah’s fudge; and events manager, spending hours combing the local paper for auctions, star-gazing, and amateur theater productions. She was always fascinated by new information about the island’s whaling history. Then she wasn’t.

Looking back, I now see that somewhere along the way she stopped driving the car to meet us at our biking destination. Somewhere else along the way, I began to feel discomfort at leaving her at the beach with the kids while I went grocery shopping. Her walk slowed, and the cobblestones threw her off balance. Then last year I left her in a shop picking out souvenirs for her friends, and when I came back she was standing where I had left her, staring into the same basket of bracelets.

This year she didn’t know where she was. “Whose house is this?” she asked over and over. “Where are the kids?” As the days went by she occasionally recognized the place, and when she didn’t, it must have been somewhere in her mind, because she kept suggesting that we “go to Nantucket for a visit soon.” She sat on the deck happily sniffing the damp air and watching the trees blow in the wind. She no longer expressed any interest in going into town, and when we went out to dinner, she seemed agitated by the unfamiliar sounds and crowds. But she enjoyed the meals we cooked back at the house and lingered over the sweet corn until the last kernel was nibbled. She didn’t know where she was, but she was happy to be there.

As the ferry pulled out of the harbor on our last morning, we joined the other passengers on deck tossing pennies into the gray water lapping at the Brant Point lighthouse – a wish and a promise to return to the island. Only this time my mother wasn’t at the railing; she was inside looking placidly out the window. We each threw a penny for her. But I doubt she will be back.

The fog closed in as we headed out to the open sea, and I thought about growing up and growing down. My mother is drifting toward a deeper and deeper fog. My kids, on the other hand, are heading away from the shore of their childhoods toward a new world; it is as though they are still on their bikes, way ahead of me in the salty mist – on their own expeditions of discovery.

Recently the New York Times magazine ran an article about how sports injuries in girls can be much more serious than in boys. To me the 1973 Title IX legislation is the single most important breakthrough for girls. It enabled them to be winners. I hate to think that there have to be limitations on their drive to compete. But I also hate to think of their bodies being abused by playing soccer, for instance.

For decades I have been arguing that as a feminist I am committed to achieving the social, political, and economic equality of women with men. In recent years, though, I have become increasingly aware of the factors outside of that commitment – the differences between men and women that should have nothing to do with equality. So in the case of girls’ sports I argue against more restrictions and for more scientific research into the ways young female bodies develop. For too long all medical research was done on males and adjusted by weight for females. We now know that women are not just small men, but there is a lot of catching up to do in terms of understanding how we are distinctive and how to care for the female body.

Differences shouldn’t involve comparisons, but sometimes I can’t help it. When I lecture, I tend to celebrate what is happening to women as we age, while putting down what happens to men – “We are going through a Second Adulthood,” I say, “while they are going through a second childhood.” This is a little cruel, because I also know that midlife men are one of the most depressed and suicidal groups in the society. The demoralizing loss of career definition and reduction of physical prowess, combined with the absence of life-enhancing friendships, make it hard for many men to discover the possibilities among the risks and challenges ahead.


I do think our collaborative instincts – which are reinforced by distinctive brain and hormone factors - and our both/and thinking are a great improvement over the male model of every man for himself. I point to the studies that show women don’t respond to stress and danger in the classic male-mode “Fight or Flight” adrenalin-rich style, but exhibit a more peaceable “tend and befriend” behavior that is oxytocin (the “cuddle hormone”) driven.

While I rejoice in such differences between women and men, I despair when the shoe is on the other foot - the evidence that we are still second-class citizens. We are in many more jobs than we were twenty or thirty years ago, but we are still way behind in salaries and promotions. We are pressured by societal expectations to take up the responsibility for caretaking our children or our parents, but we lose ground if we do. We are not represented in the media or in the halls of congress in anywhere near proportion to our numbers in the population.

Old-fashioned sexism is still with us. You don’t have to look further than the drumbeat of what British journalist Andrew Stephen called “gloating and unshackled sexism” surrounding the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. The nutcracker – on sale in any airport - that is her head and two women’s legs is only one egregious example.

Even the most devoted egalitarian can find pockets of internalized sexism in herself. I was guilty of it recently. My daughter and I were driving along a highway when the traffic slowed for an accident. A car pulled onto the margin of the road and a determined looking woman got out and rushed through the traffic toward the crushed vehicle. “She must be a nurse,” I said to my daughter. “How terrific that she is here to help.” “Or,” the voice of a bred-in-the-bone feminist reminded me. “She could be a doctor.”

“Tradition! Tradition!” sings Tevya in the rousing testimonial to rites of passage from “Fidler on the Roof.” Traditions mark transitions. They create community around significant life experiences. And force us to pause and take stock. Indeed, many of us have tried to initiate new traditions to commemorate neglected but major passages – such as a fiftieth birthday or a divorce.

I am thinking about all this because there are two big transitions coming up in my family’s life. One is well-marked milestone: My daughter is graduating from college this month, amid the usual flurry of robes and processions. I will surely cry more than once over the weekend at the realization that with her diploma in hand, she is officially launched into the world. I may even invoke the only insight I salvaged from my long-ago Kahlil (“The Prophet”) Gilbran period: parents are the bows that aim our children - the arrows – into their independent lives.

There is another transition connected to her graduation. It has a name, but no rituals. “The Empty Nest Syndrome” - the adjustments parents must make when children move on – is a passage without a bridge. Many emotions and choices are in play. It can be a liberating time for someone who can finally put herself first after twenty or thirty years in “the emotional management business.” It can be lonely for someone who doesn’t know how. Each parent may feel differently about it – one may be understandably (if a bit guiltily) relieved; the other bereft. Couples, thrown together on their own after years of child-rearing, are confronted with what they do and do not know about each other. Divorced or single parents will be allocating their time and emotional resources – as well as their money - in new ways too. It is hard to track our progress through all these changes. Yet this transition can be as determinative for the rest of our lives as our adolescence – a stage of life marked by an array of benchmarks from religious confirmation services to a first driver’s license.

I’m not arguing for an Empty Nest Mass or an Opened Bedroom Door Blow-out, but simply for a little more respect for the really big transition that particular readjustment is part of. We all – married or not, straight or gay, mothers or aunts, professionally rewarded or struggling to find our place – are crossing the threshold from who we were - in the world we became adults in - toward who we will be in the new stage for women that our generation is creating by living it I often meet women who are thrown by the prospect of entering a new chapter in their lives. Some see it simply as a milestone birthday that must be endured – no big deal. But it is a big deal. In the course of adjusting to the changes taking place in our bodies and our outlook on the world, most of us find ourselves reconsidering many of our priorities, reviewing our options and relationships, and confronting unfamiliar challenges.

That is why this transition takes so much longer than a simple “Welcome to Second Adulthood” party. If we respected the nature and the magnitude of the process, we would be less impatient with ourselves about figuring things out and getting on with it. The real challenge is to explore the possibilities of, as Gloria Steinem puts it, “doing unto yourself as you have been doing unto others.” And that takes time and effort and experimentation. All of us attending graduations should take note of the patience, understanding, and delight we invest in the uneven growing up process of the young and imagine offering the same kind of support to ourselves as we grow up again.

Recently I was stunned to hear that a couple I have known – and, to tell the truth, envied - for years have gotten divorced. They always seemed so loving, so intimate, so supportive with each other. For over twenty years, they worked together, they traveled together, and I would often see them jogging together – in an uncanny synchronicity of strides. What went wrong? Like everyone who hears of such an unexpected break-up, I want to find out; and not only because of their marriage, but to understand grown-up marriage itself, my own included.

It is a truism that no one knows what goes on in another person’s marriage, but that doesn’t keep us from trying to figure out why some marriages fall apart and others stick. The "why does she stay married to him" question has come up again recently in the context of the Spitzer meltdown. Certainly the stricken face of the disgraced governor’s humiliated wife Silda will haunt many of us for years to come. Her blank mask as she stood behind him on his Day of Shame recalls the iconic photographs of other women in other circumstances, the widows of assassinated leaders – Jackie Kennedy, Coretta King, Ethel Kennedy – at their husbands’ funerals. Behind the mask, what was each of those women thinking? Was she thinking about what her marriage was really like? What her husband was really like in the privacy of their "understanding"?

We all know less extreme situations that still seem mysterious at the core. The smart, attractive, successful woman who stays with the philandering n’er-do-well or the upbeat, charming, generous husband who stays with his sour, narrow-minded, zenophobic wife. We assume that the one is putting up with the other, but given that we are exploring a mystery, we have to consider the possibility that the situation is reversed. Or there may be something that is very precious at the heart of their relationship – secrets shared, good sex, trust (even in the midst of betrayal?) – that makes all the rest secondary. When Hillary Clinton wrote in her autobiography about the dynamic of her relationship with Bill that they had "started a conversation" in 1971 and that it was still going on, she demystified that particular marriage to my satisfaction.

What makes a marriage endure? Do the partners themselves know what keeps them together? Can anyone say whether it is "good" for either or both of them? Is endurance a marital virtue? Or long shared history a reward? Such questions are particularly pertinent as we outgrow our youth. Children move on, for some of us our work moves into the background while for others it becomes foreground, and the place of her marriage in a woman’s life is open to new scrutiny. We know that two-thirds of over-age-fifty divorces are initiated by women. And most women can think of a hundred reasons why a break-up might happen then. But we know so little about the marriages that stick.

I suspect it has a lot to do with how the people involved are incorporating the changes taking place in their own lives – or how committed they both are to fending off change. I am sure that trust and judgment and laughter play a part, but there must be an ineffable something else – at least in the nurturing unions – that refreshes their curiosity about each other and about how things between them will continue to turn out. My guess is that when it comes down to it, we on the outside aren’t the only ones who don’t know what makes a given marriage work. Perhaps the intrigue of that mystery is the spark that keeps the partners engaged.

My father, who was an immigrant and became an ardent world traveler, believed that nothing was more important than education, and that no education was complete without an appreciation for what could be learned from travel. Even if it required sacrifices to get there, the rest of the world was, for him, a required course.

My first trans-Atlantic crossing was on a prop plane – it took 26 hours, making stops in Newfoundland, Iceland, Shannon (Ireland) and finally London. My bible on that trip was Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day. Over the intervening decades, I have been to places where I spoke the language and places where I couldn’t even read the street signs; I have traveled with friends, with groups, with my mother, with my children, with my husband – and alone. (My darkest moment was in a dingy youth hostel room with only a can of sardines to eat; the key broke off just as I began to roll back the lid, so I ended up picking out the pieces of fish with an eyebrow tweezer.)

Until my most recent trip, those experiences were like postcards in the scrapbook of my life; this time, I began to see the bigger picture. On the India trip, I became aware of how, for me, the experience of traveling is about a particular kind of looking; I’ll call it insight-seeing. By that I mean high-intensity staring - out of train or bus windows, sitting in cafes for hours on end - in an almost Zen state that generates a searching internal conversation very different from the random brooding I do back at home. (The altered state is magnified when those conversations aren’t interspersed with out-loud exchanges with other people. “I’m living on the edge of a shriek” my nineteen-year-old self, alone in North Africa, wrote in her journal).

Perhaps because of where I am in my life, or perhaps because so many of the women I write about are finding travel an emerging priority, I watched myself travel. During the long drives from Agra to Jaipur to Pushkar to Jodhpur to Udaipur, I paid attention to how what I saw hit my mind screen – split-second images of moments in strangers’ lives, multiplied over hours. Like the flicker of old-fashioned movies, it is hypnotic. Over time my thoughts go from micro to macro. No matter what the locale, sooner or later I catch myself thinking: “It’s amazing how every human being is basically just trying to live their life – eat, love, defecate, laugh, get from one place to another – just like me.” A cliché, but also a humbling thought.

Watching people laughing, gesticulating, or simply engaged in some transaction, I think about language. If I were standing next to them, I would be no better able to understand what they were saying than I am watching their silent body language. The sounds that make millions of other people laugh or cry or fight are meaningless to me. I am struck by how random communication is. And how miraculous.

The interaction of human beings and nature overwhelms me. The timeless world of agriculture. The violation created by plastic bags – in Morocco they hang on bushes in the desert like giant spider webs. The power of a rushing river and the pitiable look of a dried up riverbed. I am haunted by the cruelty to animals I have seen in Mexico and wonder at the eerie absence of birds in Beijing. I am moved beyond words in the rural north of India where the Hindu world view protects the hundreds of generic yellow dogs who wander the highways with impunity - while cars swerve maniacally - along with camels, elephants, and, of course, cows. And by the fortitude of the men and women walking alongside them.

Such epiphanies take on added meaning now, I think, because the travel experience translates into real-life terms and in a humanity-wide context, the questions women like me are exploring as we get older. We are confronting the unknown – testing our mettle against the unexpected – seeing things in a new light, reconsidering our personal agendas, and pushing against old frontiers. The ongoing conversations with ourselves that come with this transition in life, like those internal insight-seeing dialogues on the road, are a creative interplay between present-day possibilities and past experiences. And meditations on the nature of life. For us, traveling is both an answer to the question “What do I want to do with the rest of my life?” and an opportunity to take that question to a more profound level.