For the several years since the show was discontinued, I turn to “West Wing” reruns to visit with cherished but vicarious friends and colleagues, to bask in the camaraderie of shared mission, well-worn work habits, recognized foibles and strengths – and trust. I really miss the part of my life that got left behind when I moved out of the going-to-an-office life experience. I now have a different kind of community – although many of the players are women whom I worked with back then – which I have called my “circle of trust.” It is smaller – and tighter – than the workplace group, and we see each other less often – every couple of weeks rather than every day. But what it lacks in size and frequency it makes up for in intensity. So I am doing well in the community department.

But I am becoming increasingly aware that many women are not. Recently a couple incidents focused my attention on the longing that many women feel for more connection with other women who are in the same boat.

Last month I joined the therapists Karen VanAllen and Ruth Neubauer (who is a childhood “best friend” of mine with whom I reconnected over women’s midlife issues) to lead a workshop on the transition into Second Adulthood. We met on a Sunday morning (one woman said it was the first time she had missed church in as long as she could remember) in Chevy Chase, on the fringe of Washington D.C. We had a wonderful time – laughing about our predicament, delighting in the discovery that none of us was alone, and supporting one another in facing the tough decisions we described. But what struck me was how isolated these women felt, living in scattered suburbs around a high-power city, and how rejected they felt by the workplace community, where everyone was younger and more ambitious than they. It didn’t surprise me that the most concrete result of that workshop was a commitment to a regular pot luck supper to which just about everyone had signed up.

Another event that caught my attention was the response to the glorious Dove “pro-aging” ad campaign. We all loved the images of exuberant, proud, and totally beautiful women photographed in all their nude and grown-up glory. I am sure many women rush out, as I did, to buy the products in order to support the company’s support of us. And many rushed to the Dove website to register our delight and gratitude. But once there, those women didn’t want to leave – they posted long, passionate, honest entries about how they felt about their bodies and about being women in an ageist culture. They wrote like girl friends. And they wrote like women who didn’t have enough girl friends they could share all this with. I don’t think the Dove folks anticipated creating such a dynamic and meaningful community.

The third event that gave me pause was a visit with a cousin I don’t see very often. She was saying nice things about my writing, but she wanted to take issue with my wholehearted and unrelenting evocation of a “circle of trust” in the stories of the women I have talked to. Her experience has been different, she told me. She has never trusted women and still doesn’t. “If anything, I trust men more,” she said. This despite the fact that her first husband betrayed her big time. The lesson she took from that and the other events in her life among women is that they can’t be trusted not to try to steal your man. And they can’t be trusted to wish you well. Not that she didn’t long for a circle she could feel comfortable with, but when she went to a meeting of a group that sews for a charity gift shop, she was dismayed by the tone of the conversation and not surprised to find that the group’s nickname is “stitch and bitch.” She is still looking.

Her point of view made me reconsider some of my assumptions about a “circle of trust.” I had been writing from a perspective that assumed that our generation had outgrown that wariness of other women. But what about those who had been betrayed by women and couldn’t really buy into my rosy generalizations? I had assumed something else - that readers would understand that I knew not every woman was a potential “sister.” Well and good, but how do you figure out who has what it takes to join your inner circle?

I can see that there is a lot to be said about how we go about building those vital intimate support systems. I had already been thinking about the difficulties of making new friends at our age, but we also need to think about getting better at sizing up perspective friends with appropriate wariness.

What these random encounters with the notion of community tell me is that while many women feel cut off from the kind of friendships they are increasingly feel they need, they are going to find new ways to connect with each other and share their stories. Once again we are defining a life experience by living it.

Labels: aging, business, women

We refer to childhood friends as “people we grew up with.” The phrase conjures kids coming over after school, giggling in my room, raiding our refrigerator, endorsing my annoyance with my little brother, knowing my parents in their prime. There is a special intimacy about that shared history, and whenever I run unto Someone I Grew Up With, I count on that special bond to bridge the years.

We certainly didn’t register at the time that we weren’t just growing up alongside one another – we were helping each other make sense of our world, establish relationships, sort out emotions and over and over again set the markers for being grown up. In other words, we were extracting lessons from what was happening to each of us and translating them into principles to live by for people our age.

That mutual demystification of life is just as important to later stages, particularly the one about aging. I have written and lectured and mused to myself about the support I get from a good laugh with my friends as we search for What’s Her Name’s name, or the strength I get from the knowing warmth of a hug for no reason, or the real know-how gathered by their mobilized problem-solving powers. But recently I have become aware of a new dimension of growing up together.

My 90-year-old mother is increasingly bewildered by the aging process. Even when I try to explain that many of the memory problems, stiff joints, skin anomalies that she is noticing are shared by much younger women, she feels blind-sided by the kinds of things my friends and I laugh about regularly. It finally dawned on me that, because she never had a close community of women, “a circle of trust” as I call them, she has grown up alone. No one bemoaned her thinning hair before my mother noticed her own. No one set a light tone for coping with the memory lapses. No one described learning to do one thing at a time as the multi-tasking mechanism shifts into low gear. No one has given her an important life lesson from the field as a friend recently did to me. “You know I’m beginning to think about things I won’t do any more,” she said. “But I’m surprised to discover that it doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would.”

Growing up together is a life-long process, and we need to nurture and cherish our best friendships not only for their historical value but for the protection and guidance that our dear soul-mates contribute to coping with change and for how they make aging just one more stage of growing up.

Labels: aging, friends, women

Because I am working on a new book about the unprecedented stage of new life that women are discovering, I have an excuse to indulge in my favorite pastime: talking to women. And because our conversations get real pretty fast – even if we’ve only just met – I have heard a lot about sex in this strange new world of Second Adulthood. The responses can be sorted into three general categories: “Who needs it!” “Where do I get it?” and “What took so long?” (Perhaps this is the next-stage version of the question we posed in a memorable cover line on Ms. Magazine back in the '70s – How’s Your Sex Life? Better / Worse/ I forget.)

The First two categories are self-explanatory; the third – “What took so long?” - is the one that we need to talk about – particularly in the context of a new movie called “Heading South” that purports to deal with it. Countless women have told me how, to their amazement, sex has become not only better, but very different for them after menopause. For some the simple knowledge that pregnancy was no longer an option – or a risk – is so liberating that they feel more relaxed and better able to focus on their pleasure. Others say that the outrageous streak that they find erupting in their “Fuck-You Fifties” enables them to really throw themselves into sexual experimentation and self-expression. And still others have told me about their discovery of “casual sex” or “sex for its own sake” or even paying their way – the kind of sex we used to consider a male specialty.

The three middle aged women in “Heading South”- which takes place in the seventies for some reason - are regulars at a Haitian resort where they adopt the beautiful young black beach boys and give them money, gifts, and doting admiration in exchange for hot sex. The amazing Charlotte Rampling stars as a Wellesly professor who has enjoyed playing the game for several years until a rival (Karen Young) arrives at the resort, and jealousy drives her into “wanting a relationship” with her favorite. The emphasis of the movie is on the growing rivalry between the women, and much less attention is given to celebrating the joyous, liberating, self-empowering sexual experience the women characters talk about. The message is that no matter how hard women try to talk themselves out of competing for men or into enjoying simple delicious sex – no matter how liberated they think they are - the need to possess the beloved or to beat off a rival will win out in the end.

The message I have gotten from women who have sex with men with whom there is nowhere to go but back to bed is just the opposite. Jealousy and possessiveness are tired, old themes, to be dealt with if need be, but the real headline is the s-e-x. For them being old enough to know what they want and being able to go out and get it is so new and so titillating that it opens up an endless array of delicious possibilities. The movie didn’t go there; after positing the existence of female lust after fifty, it didn’t dare believe it. It's hard for the media to keep up with us. As I keep discovering, women are defining a new stage of life by living it!

Labels: aging, sex, women