Inventing The Rest of Our Lives

GOOD NEWS/ BAD NEWS

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 19:06:00 +0000

The long election process is over, and the longer economic recovery lies ahead. There is an intriguing win-some/lose-some aspect to this moment for women. To start with the good news, women were 53 per cent of the electorate, for the first time reflecting our proportion of the population. Obama’s victory margin (6 %) is almost identical to the gender gap between women and men voters (7%). According to a Harvard sociologist, “In raw demographic terms, the most important factor in explaining the Obama victory was women voting by a 13 percent margin in his favor, while men were evenly split.” We picked up seats in the house, the senate, and governors' mansions. Though we haven’t achieved parity with men, we have clearly established ourselves as a critical mass in the political process.

We also moved beyond a double standard in the public consciousness. A woman is no longer considered a generic token. Voters showed that they knew the difference between a highly qualified woman, Hillary Clinton, who was widely acknowledged as viable president, and a totally unqualified woman, who was repudiated. (By a 60 to 38 percent margin, voters told pollsters that they found Sarah Palin unqualified.)

As the economic crisis deepens, there is no good news for anyone, but the bad news for women is intensifying. While women have moved into all professions and are rising to the top, the pay gap between women and men remains – 76 cents for a woman to every dollar a man makes. As consumers we are equally belittled. While women are the majority of buyers of new cars, consumer electronics, and home improvement, marketers play to such stereotypical trivia as color, slenderizing properties, and other women’s envy. While women aged between 50 and 75 are, according to one marketing executive, “the healthiest, the wealthiest, most educated, active and influential generation of women in history,” we are invisible in advertising. The notable exception has been the Dove campaign “for real beauty,” which featured real women with real bodies, and that campaign is credited with increased revenues for the parent company, Unilever. Will they never learn?

A more serious inequity is in health insurance costs. Recent studies show that there is a gap here too. The disparities between premiums charged women and men for policies (even when maternity benefits are excluded) is significant. The arguments that we go to doctors more often or that giving birth can predispose a woman for chronic conditions later on don't hold up, according to actuarial analysis. One major insurer offers a plan (with a $2500 deductible) for which a 30-year-old woman pays 31 percent more than a man of the same age. This is the pattern across the industry. Combine that with the salary gap, and you can see how unfair this is.

The grimmest statistic I have encountered is an unexpected rise in the suicide rate for midlife women. Researchers are bewildered. “Are these people living alone, with no major responsibility or others to take care of, or are they people overwhelmed with all of the jobs and responsibilities they have?” asked one.

I don’t know the answer, but I do know that loneliness (due, in part, to ageist lack of interest in women over 50), unmanageable care-giving responsibilities, financial inequities, and health worries can get to a person. Now that women have demonstrated that we are a force in the political arena we need to focus that power on achieving the societal fairness that is long overdue and unleashing the potential that remains constrained by gender-specific hardship.

(RE)NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:54:00 +0000

I know that I am not the only person who thinks of the fall as the new year. It may have to do with the back-to-school metabolism that regulated so much of our lives, as children and then as parents; or it may have to do with the new crispness in the air and the new gravitas of heavier and more formal clothes. For some of us it also has to do with the religious holidays of reflection and recommitment that occur in the fall.

Technically it should be spring that inspires thoughts of renewal, but the only promises I ever make in the spring is to get that diet going before the bathing suit season. In the fall I call friends who have fallen off my radar screen. I sign up for the sketch class I enjoy but have neglected. I do something radical with my hair – and, yes, vow to go on a diet.

This year, though, my thoughts of renewal, recommitment, and reconnection are consumed by the election. On bad days, I hear the voice of Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” bellowing “Mendacity! Mendacity!” to his uncomprehending family. On a good day I hear another voice – a loud, confident, passionate voice, a voice that Norman Mailer once said could “boil the fat off a New York cabdriver’s neck” – that tells me the constitution is strong, community is true, and social justice is worth fighting for.

Bella Abzug died ten years ago, but her political courage, her wit, and her savvy are a model for today’s candidates. Throughout much of the twentieth century (she was born in 1920, the year women got the vote) she spoke up, she organized, she legislated, she extended activist frontiers. The core values reflected in her work set the standard – in my book –for leadership, then and now. What would Bella do today?

Actually the answers are also in my book (an oral history of Bella I wrote with Mary Thom) which tells How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied Against War and for the Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way. (That’s the subtitle!)

Recently a long-time colleague of Bella’s, June Zeitlin, managed to enumerate some general Abzug-ian principles, and I have added a few more. Here are some political new year's resolutions a la Bella:

● When you are on the outside, always organize from the grassroots up.
● When you are on the inside, learn the rules – even the most obscure ones - and use that expertise to make the system work for your issues.
● Build alliances and be willing to talk to those you disagree with.
● And when you confront opponents, be better prepared than anyone else in the room.
● Don’t be afraid of raising your voice. (It gets the attention of the other side, though it sometimes also scares the life out of the people on your side.)
● Translate budget items into their human profit-and-loss values. (When I read that the $700 billion allocated to the bailout could eradicate world poverty for two years, I could imagine the outrage Bella would ignite.)
● Operate on a definition of politics that maintains that all people’s lives are interdependent, which is why, as Bella often maintained, every issue is a women’s issue.
● Always speak truth to power
● Never give up.

HAVING IT ALL

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:51:00 +0000

Bella Abzug – the shrewd, hard-hitting, passionate and idealistic legislative genius who led the women’s movement and represented New York in Congress – once remarked that we would only have true gender equality when an incompetent woman could go as far as an incompetent man. That milestone appears to have been achieved with the nomination of Sarah Palin for Vice President. Which is not to say that Palin couldn’t become competent, but Bella, who understood and believed in government so profoundly, would be horrified at how little expertise Palin brings to the table right now. Even the reportedly clear glasses she wears to play down her beauty-queen credential and enhance her gravitas can’t make up for experience. This is not an anti-woman statement; it is a pro-national leadership statement. Running the country is not a learn-as-you-go job.

It has been argued by her defenders that Palin – the Hockey Mom – can do it all and that any suggestions that she can’t are sexist. We, who know what sexism is because we helped define it before we began working to defeat it, can tell you that Having It All has been one of the crucibles of the struggle for equality. When the term began to circulate in the 1970s many women felt oppressed by the supposed message that in order to be “new women” they had to have high power careers, raise multiple children – and, as Jane O’Reilly once wrote, be “multi-orgasmic til dawn.” As the conversation went on, women modified that message and began to reassure each other that “you can have it all – just not all at once.” Until we have more reliable and universal child care and special needs options and until we can offer all teenagers advice besides the “abstinence only” approach Palin subscribes to, a mother in her circumstances would have a hard enough time getting to work every day, let alone being a heartbeat away from leading a family of nations she has never even traveled through.

Speaking of the free world – and that red phone that can ring at three in the morning: If the argument is that should she have to answer, she will have serious advisors to turn to, that seems to me a highly sexist assumption: she won’t bother her pretty little head about world crises and will do as she is told. It might be worse, though, if she didn’t defer to cooler heads. “The difference between a pit bull and a mom,” she has said, “is lipstick.” Does being pugnacious and defensive – and an enthusiastic hunter by helicopter - prepare one for the judgment calls and diplomatic subtelties required of the defender of the free world?

McCain knows enough about government to know that it takes more than adrenalin – or testosterone for that matter – to respond to threats of war. He obviously chose Palin primarily because she is a woman. Again, this is not an anti-Palin observation; it is an anti-sexist point. It is cynical to nominate someone just because she is a woman on the assumption that because she is a woman other women will vote for her. Even women who do not share any of her beliefs. That is just an updated version of the argument against women’s suffrage that there was no point in granting women the vote because they would just cast their ballot the way their husbands told them to.

How, I wonder, can women executives like Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, who put in the time, who worked through countless professional and personal challenges, who learned how the world works and succeeded because they were considered really good at what they did – how can women who know what building a career in a still-sexist world is like - say she is ready? Only if they have been so imbued with the sexism they claim has been defeated that they think little of their own accomplishments and less of the kind of leadership women have to offer.

LETTERS HOME

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:07:00 +0000

Not long ago I came across some letters I had written home from camp. The envelopes were marked S.W.A.K. (For those who weren’t preteens back then, that stands for “Sealed With A Kiss.”) In the same shoe box were a few stilted “newsy” letters that my parents, who had no vocabulary for that kind of correspondence, had sent me - and several letters from friends. I recognized the handwriting on just about every one. After all, we had signed each others autograph books, corresponded over many summers and, in several cases, for years afterwards, and exchanged our hand-written homework at school.

Soon after that find, I unearthed some letters that my daughter had written home from camp at about the same age, some fifteen years ago. Accounts of theatrical triumphs, color-war games, and bunk gossip were intermixed with exclamation points and pleas to be taken home – standard fare. I loved the sight of her new-found script writing and smiled at the recollections of those emotionally tumultuous years evoked in her letters. So much like the ones I sent off decades earlier.

When I mentioned this vein of history to a friend with younger kids, she informed me that campers now e-mailed home. Where her children went, e-mailing was allowed on only one day in the week. And cell phones were prohibited. Very Spartan by prevailing standards, but enough to preclude letter-writing. It is unlikely that she or her children will come across a shoebox of memories in the future. And I am pretty sure her kids won’t have seen enough of their friends’ handwriting to recognize it fifty years later.

I’m not bemoaning the lost intimacy of yesteryear, but I am aware of how capturing experience and communicating it between parents and children is different now. When they go away from home for long periods of time, our kids don’t have a mailing address except for packages and don’t get a local phone number. The contact info is the same – an e-mail address and cell phone. They could be anywhere in the world, for all we would know.

On the other hand, they are much more connected to us than we were to our parents, according to studies of their generation. A recruiter for a major investment firm cited one of those studies to explain why when her company is wooing perspective college graduates, they sometimes fly the parents as well as the candidate to the important interview. They have found that young adults these days actually value their parents’ opinions.

We also have many more levels of intimacy at our disposal than previous families. Not just doing things together. Or talking on the phone. When my daughter was at college, I learned to pick up clues from the medium of choice in her communiqués. An e-mail was either business or school work (another channel of intimacy for us was sharing her papers) or something she didn’t want to hear my reaction to right away. An IM was usually about something she hadn’t processed yet emotionally, and while she wanted feedback in real time, she felt she needed a little time to frame her responses. Text messages were generally about logistics.

While we have lost the notion of snapshots of our children’s early years – I am picturing those yellowing black-and-white photos with the scalloped edges, as well as the decorated envelopes and childish handwriting - we have gained, I think, an evolving comfort zone between our lives that didn’t exist back when my contemporaries were beginning to detach from our parents. That is surely a good thing. I must admit, though, that I regret that the time-capsule evidence of long-ago innocence – mine as well as my children’s – embodied in those letters is not being generated any more.

GROWING UP AND GROWING DOWN

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:45:00 +0000

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.

EQUAL BUT DIFFERENT

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:57:00 +0000

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.”

TRADITIONS AND TRANSITIONS

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:47:00 +0000

“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.

MARRIED AND STILL ENGAGED

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:18:00 +0000

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.

INSIGHT-SEEING

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:46:00 +0000

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.

"Good! Now Sit Down"

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:38:00 +0000

I recently attended a really terrific and very interesting luncheon. The conversation was fresh and informed (we were talking politics, of course) and the women were smart and funny. Yet, after the coffee, but well before anyone else seemed ready to get up, I was grumbling to myself: “I gotta get out of here! It’s enough already.” I was reminded of the anecdote told by Phil Donahue about Bella Abzug, a truly impatient woman. They were at a dinner honoring a group of Nobel Laureates, and as each one got up to speak, Bella listened for a few sentences and then whispered to Phil, “Good! Now sit down!”

I have always been a very impatient person, but recently I have noticed the familiar hissing reflex becoming activated in a whole new array of situations. Like all New Yorkers, I am exasperated waiting in line or to cross the street; now I am impatient when my husband won’t fast forward through age-old graphic opening to “Mystery!” And get this: I can no longer sit for both a hair cut and hair coloring on the same day. By the second hour in the chair I am squirming like a three-year-old.

What’s odd about this upsurge in impatience is that I am, at the same time, also becoming more patient about things that used to seem intolerable. Nowadays I go for the brake rather than the gas when the traffic light goes yellow. I am able to “hold for the next available representative” for minutes rather than seconds. I am willing to actually read directions for a new piece of equipment rather than plug it in and push all the buttons until something does something. When dicing vegetables, I even keep to small chops throughout rather than building to chunks as I rush to finish. And I am newly philosophical about how, in time, things in life – especially in the lives of my children – will “work themselves out.”

This recalibration is minor indeed, but is, I think, yet one more confirmation of the useful insight that none of us is “who we were – only older.” In the same way as we are reshuffling other life-long priorities – work and family, friendships and hobbies, dreams and discards – I feel the imperative to get things done as efficiently as humanly possible giving way to a different kind of impatience – to get on with my life. Like so much of the reinvention process, this adjustment is an intriguing mix of good news and bad news. I don’t particularly like the fact that it is getting harder to multi-task efficiently as I get older; on the other hand I very much do like the fact that I feel less compelled to manage everything for everyone else and more interested in getting on with my own life.

Psychologists point to a “mellowing” that occurs as we outgrow the more intense phase of adulthood, and I do feel better equipped to roll with the punches. Rather than letting time-management dictate my allocation of time as I have always done, I schedule my hair maintenance in a totally inefficient two-visit schedule that takes the pressure off. And if I want to move on a few minutes before an event winds down, who says I have to wait for someone else to be the first to leave? Mellowness, as I am experiencing it in ways large and small, is about how few things are all that big a deal.

STARING DOWN THE EVIL EYE

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:03:00 +0000

My husband and I are leaving on the trip of a lifetime in early February. We are going to India for three weeks – to visit sites and spas and to make a pilgrimage to the southernmost tip of the country, where my late brother spent several transformative years. My husband is looking forward to it with all his characteristic energy and curiosity. I, on the other hand, am dreading it – not the vacation, but the going away.

Anne Morrow Lindburgh identified a common reluctance to set out on a trip – she said it was like being a slug glommed onto a rock – that lifts as soon as you are on your way. That is surely part of it. But I think I am also suffering from a bad case of It All Depends on Me Syndrome.

I have some real responsibilities that the trip will take me far away from: An almost-92-year-old mother, who is healthy but failing. A twenty-something son, who is struggling to get his rhythm in this world. A daughter who is a senior in college with countless decisions to make in the next few months. And a fifteen year old cat with a heart murmur. I worry about all of them now – going away is amplifying those worries.

The truth is, though, that whether here or in India, I have the same degree of control over their circumstances – which is not all that much. My mother is well-cared for, settled comfortably in her own home. I’ll be calling her as regularly as I do now, and if she needs medical attention, she will get it as fast as if I were here. My son has been in a state of becoming since he was a teenager, and if anyone is making a day-to-day difference, it is his girlfriend, not me. My daughter does like to consult intensely when making important decisions, but she usually makes the right one. As for the cat, he will be visited every single day while we are gone.

Given the precarious circumstances of my mother (and the cat) a certain amount of worry is understandable. But I am so much luckier than so many people caring for loved ones; I have a strong back-up team – all of whom have as good judgment and emergency reflexes as I do.

So what’s my problem? It is, I am beginning to understand, that I have assumed an additional responsibility that I cannot fulfill. I know I am not alone in believing somewhere in the primal depths of my care-taking soul that one of my jobs is to keep bad things at bay - fend off the Evil Eye. Unlike other more practical responsibilities, this one requires staying close – monitoring every emotional as well as physical breath – in order to jump between the Evil Eye and its victim. My mother-in-law believed it too; every time something good happened, she would move to shield the blessed one muttering “poo-poo-poo” – the shtetl spell for neutralizing the jealous demons.

Evil Eye anxiety is one notch beyond the I-should-be-able-to-make-everything better measure on the It All Depends on Me chart. Women like me have spent our adult life trying to withstand unattainable expectations of all kinds. We aren’t into perfection the way we used to be, but at least in my case, we are still into what one woman calls the “emotional management business” and I call the “everything management business.” It will probably be another generation that truly breaks free.

In that vein, here’s the syllogism I plan to pack in my suitcase – along with all those 4-ounce bottles: You can’t prepare yourself for - or protect yourself from - getting fired or for falling down stairs or for falling in love, for that matter. So why would you think you could do any more for anyone else? I hope it works. (Poo-poo-poo.)

FRIENDS - HIS, MINE, AND OURS

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:50:00 +0000

At the start of our multi-decade marriage, my husband and I had a Noah’s Ark social life. In the evenings anyway, we went out with other couples; single friends were for lunch. Around the time that I stopped performing such housewifely functions as putting the very heavy bedspread on the bed in the morning (to lug it off again only hours later), I got up the nerve to make an occasional dinner date on my own – usually with a woman friend and usually on a night when my husband already had something else going on.

As time passed we got in the habit of feeling free to make our own plans for the evening – after checking with each other. And occasionally we would both spend an evening in one of either of our friends. Of course, we continued to double-date too. While some couples were totally compatible, others included one person we liked and one we tolerated – not always the same one for both of us.

I hadn’t really considered the differences between single friends and couple friends until recently, when my husband and I had occasion to get together with three different pairs of long-married friends – people we have known forever, and love very much, but who live in different parts of the country and aren’t on our regular social timetable. It made me think about the special relationship we have with each and both of them and how that has changed over time.

With single friends, even in a group, the intimacy is one-on-one. With couples, I once calculated, there are twelve relationships among four people – each with each (including one’s partner, whose behavior may be affected by the other people in the mix); that mathematical fact complicates the dynamic exponentially. In the past, I had been very aware of the interplay between the partners we were visiting. In one case he was very successful and she very (overly?) supportive, in another he was a kind of a stumblebum and she quite critical, and in the third she struck me as very spiritual and he not on her wavelength.

This time, though, the rough edges between them were less apparent – to me, anyway. The supportive wife seemed much more assertive and her husband more appreciative; the critical wife seemed more accepting and her husband more on top of things; the less spiritual husband revealed a deep and abiding inner life. In each of the visits, our friends spoke openly of their affection for each other; it was the first time that I could remember. They all seemed so much better suited to each other. Who knows if my original take on their relationships ever had any connection to reality – what I perceived as new compatibility may have been what they saw in each other from the first. Maybe it was something in me – that I am less dismayed by difference than I had been earlier. Maybe I see them that way because there are fewer rough edges to my own partnership.

I suspect they had similar observations to make about us. Something does happen over decades of marriage. If you are going to last this long, at some point you – I, we – close the divorce option and conclude you are in it for the duration. At the same time, if you are going to enjoy it, you stop trying to change each other – you “give up” in a way, but what is lost are unrealistic expectations and worn-out gripes; what is gained is, if you are lucky, a rediscovered appreciation for the less-flawed aspects of each other. Over all, you become more relaxed about the relationship. If this sounds boring, I guess it can be, but as I contemplated us and our friend couples, I was moved by the realization that – for better and for worse - we had each become less than two but more than one.

THE BELLA FACTOR

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 01:43:00 +0000

I have spent the last three years immersed in a book on the life of Bella Abzug (1920-1998), the peace activist, feminist, civil rights lawyer, and fearless congresswoman from New York. (She ran for office for the first time at age 50 – take heed, sister Boomers!) Now that it is about to come out, I am hoping that her passion will galvanize the cynical among its readers, the way she did me. Bella’s example literally got me through the recent political years of double-talk, triangulation, and – to use the worst expletive that Bag Daddy (in Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”) could come up with – “men-dah-sity!”

She had such profound faith in democracy and the Constitution that whether she was on the outside protesting or on the inside crafting legislation and twisting arms, she remained optimistic that justice would triumph. All it took was smarts, passion, coalition-building and never, ever, giving up.

She spoke up for the dispossessed and spoke out against bigotry and war. She also spoke foul language to anyone and yelled at everyone. Norman Mailer – no fan - once said that she had a voice that would “boil the fat off a taxi driver’s neck.” But most of all, she spoke truth to power.

Listen to the still-timely words of a passionate politician, a devoted wife and mother, and tireless reformer and ask yourself “What would Bella do today?”

I always feel that there is a sign of someone believing someone is equal when they’re willing to take you on – beat you up, instead of just making you feel like a fool.

I wrote a letter to the school saying, “I do not give permission for my children to duck under the desk [in civil defense drills] It is psychologically maiming; it’s totally political; and I think it’s insane to do it.” My kids used to say, “But nobody else thinks that way, Mom.” And I’d say, “They will. Don’t worry. They will.” I was hard on my kids.

I challenge the system – as a lawyer and as a member of Congress and as an activist in the movements of change. I’ve challenged all systems – the family, I never obeyed my father properly. In school I challenged. In the streets, I challenged the monopoly of what the boys thought that girls couldn’t participate in. I’ve spent a lifetime in challenge. There’s no way in which you can create any meaningful change unless you do that.

I have always enjoyed working with women because there are fewer boundaries and impediments and areas of potential conflict. It is always easier to come to a confluence of opinion.

Although women represent 53 percent of the electorate, there are only thirteen of us in Congress. The country has twenty-two million black citizens and there and only a dozen black congressmen. There are no artists, intellectuals, scientists, mathematicians, creative writers, architects, Vietnam veterans, musicians, and not even any leaders of the labor movement on Capitol Hill. There are no young people. The average age of a congressman is 51.9 years, and a senator, 56. Two-thirds of these people are lawyers, businessmen, or bankers. No wonder Congress is such a smug, incestuous, stagnant institution! It reeks of sameness.

My reputation is that of an extremely independent woman, and I am. But I was dependent, clearly, on [my husband] Martin [who died ten years before Bella]. He would embrace me in his furry chest and warm heart and protect me from the meanness one experiences in the kind of life I lead.

BELLA ABZUG: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied Against War and for the Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way An oral history by Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

SAFETY FIRST

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 14:44:00 +0000

Every once in a while an obscure study by little-known academics carries a mind-set-altering message. This one, reported in the Harvard Magazine (October 2007), may suggest a cure for machismo.

Robin J. Ely is a professor at the Harvard Business school and knows a thing or two about King of the Jungle behavior in the workplace, but she wanted to study “masculine norms” in an even less refined environment; so she set off to visit two oil drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico to examine macho in what she assumed would be its purest form. Instead, she was stunned to encounter men who were willing to say they didn’t know something, or that they were afraid, or that they needed help – qualities many of us have worn ourselves out trying to nurture in the men we love.

Not that they were domesticated in all ways. “Some were big and burly,” she recounts; “many drove Harleys and were into hunting and fishing; and their humor - while never mean-spirited – could be gross in that ‘peculiarly male’ way such as farting and then laughing about it.”

Ely and her co-author Debra E. Meyerson, an associate professor education and organizational behavior at Stanford University’s School of Education, determined to investigate why the workers were so unexpectedly in touch with their emotions and shortcomings.

They discovered the transformative influence was not sensitivity training – how to become more in tune with the feelings of others – but its opposite: self interest.

It turns out that the oil rig Ely visited was an anomaly (subsequent visits to other rigs encountered the expected level of testosterone). Safety measures had recently been instituted on that particular rig and workers were trained to put safety above image and to speak up when they were unsure about something. For safety’s sake. If a worker felt scared because of the way a piece of equipment was handling, he said so; or if another had problems at home a felt he might be distracted at work, he alerted his co-workers. And they were, Ely reports, “very supportive.” The behavior had nothing to do with age. The crew ranged from 21 to 58, but the older ones admitted that things had changed a lot. In the old days, one of them told Ely, “the guy that was in charge was the one who could basically outperform and out-shout and out-intimidate all the others.”

The safety program shifted the men’s focus from proving their masculinity to, as the Harvard Magazine reporter Samantha Henig sums up, “engaging in larger goals – ensuring safety, building community, and advancing the company’s mission.” The message couldn’t be more profound: “their employer was able to reshape their previous notions of what a manly man should look and sound like.”

The impact might not be so dramatic in other environments, Ely warns. “Not dying, not blowing up, not losing legs – that meant a lot to them. In the corporate environment, you don’t have that compelling incentive to change.”

It is fascinating to contemplate what other “compelling incentives” might be out there. Ely’s findings open up new realms of male-female interaction and emphasize the influence of male-to-male behavior. In the safety category, medical findings show that unmanaged anger – or suppressed feelings of any kind, including doubt and sadness – can be deadly. Or, to draw on the most clichéd example, imagine if men started advising one another to ask for directions. Thirty years ago Gloria Steinem famously speculated “if men could menstruate” they would compete over heavy flows and tampon use (and “abortion would be a sacrament”). Ely’s study suggests that if men can be induced to compete over sensitivity to danger, they may be encouraged to move on to other sensitivities. Perhaps then, they can begin to feel good about feeling feelings.

MY LIFE AT MS.

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:11:00 +0000

It is always stunning to me to realize that an event that still lives in my contemporary memory actually took place decades ago, so when I was invited to a 35th anniversary celebration for Ms. Magazine it was as though my life was flashing before my eyes. I joined the magazine in the summer of 1972 for the very first monthly issue. When we put Wonder Woman on the cover, we felt empowered and protected by her magic bracelets. But I had no idea what a life-changing and world-changing adventure I had signed up for.

At the time I was an only half-awake feminist. But I did have one bond with the magazine. When the Preview Issue came out the previous winter it featured a list of celebrities who admitted that they had had illegal abortions and a coupon for other women to add their names. I filled out the coupon, glad to step forward on an issue that mattered a lot to me. By the time those coupons were being compiled, I was on the job and actually found and opened my envelope.

The women I worked with came from a range of backgrounds – the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and those like myself who were magazine types and somewhat less activist. I wore a pink silk blouse and matching cashmere skirt to my first day of work – only to discover that my “desk” was a pile of boxes in a small dusty room I shared with three others. It didn’t take long before I – along with many of the readers of Ms. – was becoming radicalized by the unfairness of the status of women that we had been taking for granted. I was also a little scandalized by some of the more way-out seeming discussions that I found myself editing. Back then, I found the idea of not shaving your legs, for example, almost unthinkable. And “Liberating Masturbation” . . . Well, you can imagine.

The fact that we were even talking about such things in public was exhilarating, and the response to the conversation from women who had felt isolated and crazy and now were feeling empowered was even more exhilarating. That flood of gratitude was a little intimidating too. After all, who were we to be shaking up people’s lives? Most of us were in our twenties and thirties and had hardly gotten our own lives straightened out. And now women were looking to us for advice. The challenge was to NOT give advice, but to share the experiences of women in similar situations and enable the reader to make her own choices with the confidence that she had a supportive community to back her up. The modesty of the magazine’s voice, combined with its totally rude and fearless exposition of taboo subjects, created a powerful and unique touchstone for women.

Despite our disclaimers, there were regular calls to our offices from people who had nowhere else to turn for life-changing referrals and advice. It was hard not to try to solve their problems - and we did our best within our pages – but we were not The Women’s Movement. We were not the Pravda of some monolithic party with a you-are-with-us-or-you-are-against-us agenda and a yellow pages of approved resources (though there were those even within the feminist community who accused us of trying to be that). There were also those who wanted to take us down individually and as a movement. Although as editor, I was an inside person and my colleagues who dealt with the public and the advertising community took the most abuse, there would be circumstances where I would dread having to drop the bomb that I worked at Ms. In almost any group there was at least one man who seemed unable to resist the challenge to Make The Feminist Cry by belittling our work or putting down the experiences that we were claiming in our lives. When those men tired of the sport, though, the women they were with would inch over and quietly exchange confidences.

There ware also women who wanted to take us on. About the way we dressed. About our lack of gratitude for all we had been allowed to achieve. About our bad manners. About how were making things worse for them not better. About how we shouldn’t presume to speak for all women.

It seems almost incredible now to consider those criticisms. And it is a measure of the impact of the magazine and the movement that women no longer dress in a uniform, that we don’t feel grateful for what a male-dominated society has given us, that we don’t need to “behave,” that no one can speak for all women but that collectively we have indeed made things better for all women. And certainly for this one woman.

I cannot imagine where I would be in my own life if I hadn’t joined that magazine 35 years ago – and stayed for 17 years! For one thing I would have missed out on the precious “chosen family” that my colleagues became then and have remained until this day. Nurtured on a shared mission, well-worn work habits, recognized foibles and strengths and immeasurable trust, we saw each other through birth, death, marriage, divorce, sickness and success. We celebrated and we laughed. Oh, how we laughed! I know that without them and without Ms., I would be more timid, less connected to other women, a less outspoken (and therefore more resentful) wife, a less accepting mother and less activist citizen. Quite simply I would be less than I could be if I hadn’t lived with and through those years at Ms.

NOT SHOWING UP

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 01:48:00 +0000

I used to have a fantasy gift that I hoped someone would give me – one canceled lunch per season. For years I gratefully received news that someone else couldn’t show up for something. It never occurred to me that I could initiate the gift of needed time or rescheduling to accommodate other priorities. I always showed up.

I remember once traveling an hour to spend a few minutes speaking to a journalism class when I was almost delirious with fever. Another time I showed up for an exam the day I had received some truly traumatic medical news – even though I knew plenty of people who regularly got excused from exams due to cramps! (I flunked, by the way.) I cannot remember ever changing a doctor’s appointment. Countless times a week I short-changed myself (skip the trip to the ladies room, postpone the make-up renewal, don’t catch my breath) in order to not only show up but show up on time.

No more! I now delight in the ease with which one can cancel, reschedule, or delay appointments. I had never learned because I never tried. Now that I am in the swing of it, I relish the moment when I hear myself tell myself, “Yeah, I don’t think I can get to that.” I am especially pleased when the true reason is no more earth-shattering than that I don’t feel like it. Saying No is one of the juiciest “symptoms” of this new stage of growing up. And not showing up is – along with telling off those who offend me – one of the unexpected benefits of learning to say No.

Which is not to say that I am careless with my commitments; everyone
knows that they can count on me when it counts. And, in fact, now that I don’t Show Up automatically – like clockwork – I am better able to get to where my friends need me to be or to do that thoughtful errand that will brighten someone’s day. I am just more discriminating about my time and more likely to factor my own needs into the schedule.

I know that I am an extreme case, but I am sure a lot of women my age recognize the compulsion to Show Up at all cost. What, I ask myself now, was I afraid would happen if I didn’t? For one thing, I was afraid that I would offend or antagonize someone. I was afraid of letting someone down. Good girls of my era didn’t do that. Good girls were punctual, conscientious, self-sacrificing, reliable, and never, ever inconvenienced someone else.

There was also a grown-up component to the fear of what would happen if I didn’t Show Up. I reached adulthood deeply invested in the belief/hope/delusion that playing by the rules, managing my activities flawlessly, fulfilling every responsibility I encountered would make me safe. Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking writes about the people she knew who “believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor.” She recognizes this quality - the “core belief in my ability to control events” – in herself. I recognize it too. But by this point in our lives we can no longer hold on to that wish; we have learned that, as Didion puts it, “some events just happen.”

The secret terror behind efficiency games we “managers” played with the Evil Eye was that we wouldn’t have the resources to cope if one of the events that “just happen” just happened. Every day – and more so as we age – we prove different. We do not need to control events in order to survive them. That sense of what anthropologists call “mastery” comes with life experience and reinforces our coping skills.

So, at least for me, canceling an appointment is more than just being willing to inconvenience someone in order to convenience myself. It is a willingness to take control of what I can control, because I am not afraid (or less afraid) of what I can’t. Showing up now means being present for my own life, not playing a role in someone else’s.

DAUGHTERS AND MOTHERS

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:15:00 +0000

In late June I went to Nantucket with my mother and my children for what is probably the twentieth summer in a row. The annual pilgrimage to my mother’s time-share on that lovely island began when my kids were babies and my mother was in her prime – about the age I am now. I’m not sure where I was, except overwhelmed by the classic juggling act.

Over the years I have enjoyed the benchmark that the Nantucket trip offered to monitor my children’s growing up. I see it most clearly in bike rides. First they were strapped in behind my seat; then after a few years, they were on small bikes, weaving perilously ahead of me, getting tired half way to wherever. Not long after that we were a proud string of straight-on cyclists – a mother duck and her little ones. That didn’t last long before I was left in the dust. Sometimes they would wait for me up ahead. Other times they were enjoying an ice cream cone at our destination when I got there. Nowadays I bike alone – they are renting jeeps and scooters.

The same time span has given me benchmarks to monitor my mother’s decline. At the beginning she shared the beach duty, digging alongside one of my kids or standing knee-deep in the water guarding against threatening waves. She would drive the car to meet us half way in our bike rides and help us load the bikes up and get back home. Then she got frailer and feared getting knocked over by the waves; then she stopped driving. In recent years, her slow pace has made us all ungenerously impatient. This trip she and my daughter and I went to a local spa where she had her first facial ever. She seemed to be delighted, but by the time we left, she couldn’t remember what service she had.

Considering the beloved generations on either side of me highlights the nature of mother-daughter bonds and how they have changed in my lifetime. A recent New York Times article reported on the emerging phenomenon of grown-daughter dependency - calling their mothers three or four times a day, consulting with them on decisions small and large, and discussing the most intimate details of their lives without inhibition (the article said nothing about the mothers sharing back, though they did characterize their daughters as "best friends"). The experts attribute this development to technological innovations such as the cell phone and e-mail. I think it is a totally different kind of breakthrough.

My 21-year-old daughter and I don’t talk endlessly or every day, and she doesn’t tell me “everything.” but I would say we have a very intimate, trusting, and fun relationship. I can’t say that about my mother. I have never felt that she knew who I was, and I am sure I made no effort to enlighten her. She had lots of secrets; I had a few too. The only time I took her into my confidence was when I was in college – back when abortions were illegal – and I needed help with an unwanted pregnancy. I must admit she rose to the occasion. But in general I thought of growing up as outgrowing my mother. Now that she is failing, I have to hold her hand when we go anywhere and help her undress in the doctor’s office, but that isn’t the kind of intimacy that I am talking about.

The big difference between the two mother-daughter relationships I am part of is the trust, respect, and honesty that women of my generation have come to expect from each other as a result of the common experience of growing up with the Women’s Movement. My mother never trusted women at all – she saw them as rivals; the conventional wisdom of her day was that in the cut-throat world of man-hunting, the female of the species would let nothing and no one stand in her way. When I was a teenager, it was understood that a call from a boy superseded any plans with other girls. It is hard to look back on those days when my best friends were not valued enough to be a priority. My daughter wouldn’t dream of canceling plans with her girlfriends and in fact often chooses them over invitations from boys.

By the time I was her age, I had learned to be wily with other women because they couldn’t be trusted; I learned to obfuscate with other women, because they couldn’t take the truth – and I was afraid that, being female, I was too fragile to take the consequences. But in my twenties and thirties I worked with women, engaged in political action with women, shared talk about experiences we thought were personal aberrations. Over the years we have become one another’s truth tellers; we watch one another’s back; we enjoy one another’s company -and laugh together like we laugh with no one else. That model, much more than my own experience as a daughter, has guided my relationship with my daughter. In many ways I feel I am growing up alongside her. I’d like to think we bring out the best in each other – even though we also know the worst

BUILDING A “CIRCLE OF TRUST"

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 14:44:00 +0000

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.

HORIZONTAL HEIRLOOMS

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Sat, 05 May 2007 17:28:00 +0000

Whenever I watch “Antiques Roadshow” I am struck by how many people have lots of things that “have been in the family” for generations. That phrase suggests longstanding roots and lovingly transported trunks that are not part of my history; my grandparents and my father were immigrants – the steerage kind – and couldn’t have brought along an exquisite 18th century high-boy, even if they had one.

There is one exception, though: my mother’s Victorian pendant - heart shaped and glittering with curls of tiny diamonds - that was never referred to as anything but her “lavaliere.” I have always marveled how such a piece found its way into the family. I will never know. All I do know is that it was given by her father’s mother to my mother’s mother, to my mother, and then on to me many years ago. On my daughter’s twenty-first birthday this month, I gave it to her. It was a wonderful feeling for me to put into my daughter’s hands a piece that had been held by so many generations of women that I was related to; I tried to imagine the vastly different circumstances under which each of us contemplated the lavaliere’s fragile beauty. Five generations of women. Connected. I like that.

I’ve been thinking about those links between women recently in another context. This weekend I will join twenty women and two therapists in a workshop they and I have devised to talk about the way the terrain changes as we move through Second Adulthood. We will explore new “hot spots” and old “garbage.” I am counting on the group to help me sort out What Matters, What Works, and What’s Next. Now.

I’ve certainly felt that some urgent challenges of a few years ago – particularly the question “What Will I do With the Rest of My Life?” – have morphed into a refreshing awareness of who I want to be for the rest of my life. I am experiencing a growing sense of authenticity and grounding. At the same time, other preoccupations that weren’t on the horizon before are now flashing warning beams – what I owe an aging parent and how to deal with an amorphous sense of dread.

Because I believe that as we move through this unprecedented new stage of life each of us is accumulating treasures of insight, practical expertise, reassurance, I am counting on the women in our workshop to share those new-minted nuggets of wisdom with me and each other. I imagine us becoming become one another’s heirs. Like the vertical line of women who handed down my family lavaliere, we are a chain of contemporaries who are exchanging “horizontal heirlooms.”

This process is particularly helpful, because each of us hits the multiple markers along our journey at different times, in her personal sequence, and in her unique context. So, for example, while I know quite a bit about the Fertile Void – that long free-fall of confusion – I am only just experiencing the Bag Lady Syndrome – the irrational fear of ending up without financial support, a beaten-down old woman surrounded by her worldly possessions in shopping bags. As the spotlight moves onto different corners of as yet unexplored terrain, I find myself listening for different messages when I talk to women today than I did a few years ago. And the women I may have talked to then will have new stories to tell.

Despite the fact that most of us feel more like a work in progress than we ever did, recognizing that increasing comfort with flux itself - the rock and roll of life as we are beginning to know it - is probably the most valuable byproduct of our experience so far. Not sweating the small stuff, cherishing the big stuff, an emerging confidence in our ability to roll with the punches and at the same time to make things happen. That awareness of a new sense of mastery is the Horizontal Heirloom I will bring to the “Second Adulthood Roadshow” this weekend. I wonder what I’ll find that I didn’t even know I needed among the other women’s offerings.

"WASBANDS" AND OTHER NEW REALITIES

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 02:09:00 +0000

Recently I was invited to speak to a group of about 300 women in the suburbs of New York City. They were full of energy, wit and candor about the changes they were experiencing. As always the “question” part of the evening became what we once called a consciousness-raising. And as always, there were surprises. Someone asked for a show of hands of the “single” – divorced, widowed, never married – women, and to my (and their) amazement two-thirds of the hands went up. (When I polled the divorcees further it turned out the two-thirds of them had initiated the split – reflecting a national statistic for our age group – and were damn glad they had!)

Now, we all know that two-thirds of suburban women are not single – this was a group that was seeking community. I was delighted to see them exchanging phone numbers and signing up for the Transition Network affiliate that had sponsored my talk.

The “singles” conversation reminded me of a reply to my website invitation to write me about what Second Adulthood is like. A woman named Kate referred to her former spouse as her “WASband.” First, the editor in me mentally corrected the typo; then I laughed out loud. That laugh was just the most recent taste of the nourishment we get from helping each other define and manage this new stage of life we are going through.

Here is more from Kate and a few of my other correspondents on the subject of the changes in their lives:

Kate:
I have gone from thinking I would be one of the Married-with-secure-life-style type of woman to a totally unknown Figure-it-out-as-you-go single. My wasband of 28 years told me he was not having a “midlife crisis” he was having a “midlife AWARENESS.” Well that awareness turned out to be named Vicki. Old story… new life …for me. That has begun quite a path to a new and different awareness … of myself as a person; as a dating single; as a divorced mother with grown children who have questioned and decided to blame; to deciding what it truly means to reinvent your life.

I started dating, went into a serious four-year relationship, followed my intuition and left that. I am 55 and it is time to breathe deeply and fully… and learn to do that on a daily basis.

One of the difficult things for me is the fact that although I have a wonderful, loving, caring circle of friends, they are all married. At my age it is difficult to find women who are single that are on the irreverent edge of life. There is SO much to go and do …and laugh about … and have a “fuck it” attitude one day, yet be available to walk the traditional path other days.

Barb:
You talk about those things we can change or just have to accept, but I do want you to know that a leaky bladder is not one of them. In fact, I left my 18-year career as a regular gynecologist to become a subspecialist in a new area of GYN called urogynecology that treats that area especially. I love working with (and hanging out with) women my age and up.

Maree:
I am now 58 and have been, for a few years, aware that if I want to grow, especially spiritually, I have to let go of concern about acquiring any more money. Slowly I am making some progress at living without the hangover of preoccupation about money. … As long as I have enough to visit my kids who live interstate and overseas, then I don’t need any more money.

Mary:
Money is still important to me, but I don’t have the drive to buy clothes and accessories like I used to. It is more likely because I don’t have a lot of places to wear them. I can repeat, since I am seldom with the same group.

Mary Louise:
Fifteen years ago (is that possible?) I met and started dating a man, and we have been dating ever since!!! No marriage, just dating…. He doesn’t want to get married and neither do I… “Once was enough” we both say, and as surely as fish swim in the water, if we got married with would last about three months, if that long!!! It’s something about having one’s own space and being in control of it and one’s own life without having to answer to anyone.

Norma:
Being unemployed for the first time in my life at age 53 hurt. Hurt even worse, as my resume and cover letter got me into interviews, even repeats, then having to come to realize no one seemed to want to hire someone as “experienced” as I. (One time after interviewing for a job, an ad popped up in a local paper for that exact job, now spelling out they were looking for someone with 5-10 years of experience – not my 20+ years experience). I was lucky to finally find another job a year later, through an employment agency, by doing a temporary stint, then ultimately getting hired at a school at a low level position. I have the summers off without pay but am able to keep the insurance going for a modest monthly fee. So I decided to accept this new situation (albeit not by my choosing) as having my life “reinvented” to enjoy the summers off for the freedom this offers; started watercolor painting and doing some quilting, along with taking short trips to the Maine coast.

Carole:
Frequently, lapsed friendships are due to different life paths at different times. However, those same friendships pick right up again where they left off, as our life paths converge again at future points. This too is an inspiring and amazing turn of events in our lives.

Audrey:
Here comes the next stage. We have lost many of our family and friends over the past few years, and each time a friend dies, it is so much of your own life’s memories that die with them. It seems to me that part of mourning erodes one’s own identity……Conversely this also has a dramatic effect. You say to yourself: I am still alive; I should not waste this life I have – which is a good sense to have.

Anyway, here’s to yet another year of adaptation. The rich tapestry of life.

TO JOIN THE CONVERSATION, PLEASE WRITE ME AT: Our2ndAdulthood@aol.com or check out my website www.SuzanneBraunLevine.com

ONE MORE TABOO

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 20:30:00 +0000

In 1984, when my brother came down with the mysterious disease that came to be called AIDS, the diagnosis was a death sentence; today it is a disconcerting and traumatic, but not fatal, surprise. Thanks to a miraculous cocktail of medications, countless Americans are living with the disease with few symptoms and tolerable side effects.

Many others are also living with the disease, but they are undiagnosed and therefore untreated. And a surprising number of them are women over 50. Women like you and me. The heterosexual transmission rate of HIV has doubled in the last ten years. Ten percent of the new infections occur in people over 50.

These statistics come from an article in the April issue of POZ, the 13-year-old magazine for people with HIV/AIDS. The editor, Regan Hoffmann, a gorgeous 39-year-old blond from New Jersey horse country is herself HIV positive – the result of an ill-fated relationship with a totally respectable man she would “date without hesitation today.” In lectures around the country she speaks of the double trauma of finding out that she is HIV positive and telling her friends, family and ultimately going public with her story. She worried that some of her friends wouldn’t be able to accept her as someone who would spend the rest of her life with those “shameful” initials attached to her identity; she worried that when she told prospective sexual partners, they would be turned off and run away; she worried about how the folks back in sedate New Jersey would respond. In some cases the worries were well-founded, but for the most part she found first incredulity and ultimately compassionate support.

Sometimes her mother, Nancy Cosentino, an equally stunning and well-bred looking woman in her early sixties, is in the audience and adds her perspective. She talks about how hard it was for her to accept the news and to share it with her friends. They were sympathetic about the fact that her daughter was very sick, but they had no point of reference for the disease. It was a taboo subject that had no place in their world.

Nancy herself had never participated in a conversation about AIDS – as it pertained to women, especially middle class women - and didn’t know where to begin. Devotion to her daughter was where she began. And together they are humanizing the issue for everyone who will listen to them.

In our generation, safe sex meant birth-control, which was first the diaphragm (remember that?) and then the Pill. By the time AIDS came along, many of us were in settled relationships and had no occasion to use a condom. As we move into menopause, we assume that we don’t need to “use anything,” and those of us who are divorced or widowed have enough problems getting back into the social swim to even think about the ickyness of learning to use a condom – let alone asking a man if he is HIV positive. According to the POZ article, “even women as young as 35 to 54 were much less likely to ask about their partner’s sexual and drug use history than women 20 to 34.”

All of the above is very risky behavior. Menopause causes dryness in the vaginal walls, which can be damaged during intercourse, making it more possible for the virus to enter the woman’s body. A new sex life with new partners creates multiple opportunities for infection. Viagra has enlarged the pool of candidates with a past - from the Midlife Stud to the retirement community lothario so common that he is known as a “Condo Romeo.”

Who knew? Like many of us, Nancy had never discussed sex, let alone safe sex or HIV infection, with her doctor – only 38% of women over fifty in a recent study had. Women our age may have doctors who are younger than we are, and they can be as embarrassed discussing sex with someone who could be their mother as we are raising the subject with them. Even if they believe that anyone over fifty actually has sex, many doctors are as ill-informed as we are.

We are the generation that shattered just about every taboo we could find. Now there’s one more – the HIV conversation.

WHAT'S NEXT?

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:37:00 +0000

The further I get into this transition to the rest of my life, the more I understand how it is a process not a "giant step" from one state to another. Experiences that seemed daunting when I started – like making peace with my waist-loss – are now in the past, but new challenges that I hadn’t anticipated – like reconfiguring friendships – have cropped up. I feel older, yes, and even a bit wiser, yet each new development catches me by surprise.

As the current picture fills in, I am trying to keep an eye on what’s over the ever-retreating horizon ahead. Since we are all defining this new stage of life for women by living it, we are going to have to keep sharing the experiences that keep on coming. That’s how we reassure ourselves that we are not - finally, after all the false alarms – really going crazy.

I am on the look-out for what a therapist friend of mine calls the “hot spots” that are emerging for those women who have been at this reinvention game for a while. For me the big one is care-giving, not only my aging mother whose management requires more and more of my time, and not only my twenty-something children who are gone from my physical reach but very much not forgotten (the helplessness of not being able to stand beside them when the world closes in is very painful), but even caring for my sick cat, and especially caring for myself. I have to really push hard to attend to all the necessary “maintenance” requirements, from hair care to eye check-up to getting around to buying that little squeeze-ball that I’m supposed to use to exercise my hands. It all seems like so much work. And time.

As I sit down to write my new book, I know I will have to figure out what my care-giving melt-down is all about; I look forward to the nurturing reassurance that comes from comparing notes with other women on this and other “hot spots” we see across the uncharted terrain ahead. Given the special nature of that kind of girl talk, the “hot spot” therapist – her name is Ruth Neubauer – and I have come up with an idea, along with her colleague Karen Van Allen, to take their group-therapy work and my writing work to where the action is.

The three of us are offering a workshop for women who feel they have navigated the initial bewilderment of their new lives only to find themselves confronting an array of new challenges. We want to continue defining the experience we are all going though by exploring the questions that could only emerge once we have lived with the big one – “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?” – for a while. I can’t wait to find out what’s next.

The workshop will take place on May 6 in the Washington, D.C. area. If you can join us, please sign up at Ruth and Karen’s website www.RetirementOrWhatNext.com ; if you can’t be there but want to add to the conversation, do get in touch with me at mine www.SuzanneBraunLevine.com.

GROWING UP TOGETHER

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 19:22:00 +0000

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.

SHOPAPHOBIA

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 19:01:00 +0000

I am a shopaphobic. I hate shopping. I say this not out of moral superiority – quite the reverse. Especially this time of year, I feel real guilt about not being able to throw myself into coming up with the perfect gifts for those I love. The overriding symptoms of my condition are hair-tearing impatience the minute I enter even the tiniest shop and paralyzing indecisiveness when confronted with a purchase, both of which I read as character flaws that mark me as not a truly giving person.

Materialistic as it is, shopping isn’t about spending money. Not having shopping skills creates problems in unrelated areas of my life. When I travel, for example, the mention of a charming craft market and a free afternoon is not good news. Potentially more serious is the way that my lack of expertise in evaluating different merchandise makes me uncomfortable going for a second medical opinion. And my anxiety about returning something I bought extends to not complaining about shoddy work.

When I do need to buy something, I am handicapped by the fact that I don’t really know how to do it. So I usually go for one-stop shopping. I settle for a ball-park version of what I am looking for. And I usually end up paying either too much – after all, comparison shopping is shopping – or too little, because I don’t know how to shop for quality. A low point came a couple of years ago when I decided that the perfect gift for my daughter would be a pashmina shawl, like the one someone had given me that she borrowed all the time. I cruised a few boutiques but hadn’t found one that was square enough, when I came upon a street vendor with shawls that were the right size and the right color – for one tenth the price. I grabbed it. But when she opened the box and laid her eager hand on its not-anywhere-near-as-soft-as-the-real-thing surface, her face fell. She thanked me warmly, but she never wore it.

I am particularly aware of what it takes to be a real shopper, because I am married to one. He will spend days enthusiastically checking out all the possible sources for what he wants – even to the extent of seeing the perfect version but continuing with the search just to make sure and then adding another stop to his shopping by returning for it. Each venture becomes a personal seminar about the product, a chance to figure out what makes the right one exactly right and what ingredient he hadn’t thought of that would make it even better. That is only part of the process. The real sport for him is getting the best price. He checks Target weekly for designer shirts at 70% off. And he goes through the entire sales rack to make sure. For him shopping is an art form - a flea market is an opportunity to indulge his really spectacular ability to pick out the one real find and to get a bargain on it. For me it is like having a case of fleas – I can’t wait to get out of there.

To get back to the problem at hand, my real desire to find well-chosen and meaningful gifts this year for my friends and family. Here’s my plan: Every day for the next couple of weeks on the way to or from some appointment I will devote just a half an hour to shopping. I will look for items I’ve thought of and will keep my eyes open for things that jump out at me. After thirty minutes I will either buy what I think I have found that I think I like, or I will move on and try again the next day. I’m actually looking forward to this regimen. After all, phobias are no fun – and watching someone open a well-chosen gift is lots of fun.

GO TEAM!

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanne Braun Levine) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 17:53:00 +0000

I have a regret that washes over me whenever I see girl athletes going all out to win. I coulda-shoulda-woulda been one of them, but the times weren’t right and I wasn’t determined enough. Back when I was playing varsity basketball in high school, I lived for the game –even for the after school practices and walking home all grubby in the gathering dusk. We only played half-court, of course, because girls weren’t supposed to have the stamina to run up and down for fifteen minutes straight. And heaven forbid we should sweat. Having your period meant automatic sidelining – again, in deference to our delicate constitutions. And hardly anyone came to our games – not even parents, if memory serves.

When I got to college there was no girls’ basketball or softball – my other favorite - team, but the gym coach said she would work with one if I organized it. I didn’t. I went on to other things, more appropriate pursuits. I married a man who wouldn’t step outside in the winter and didn’t own a pair of sneakers. So my sporting days were over. Tennis is fun, but it is not a team sport.

It wasn’t until 1973 that I felt my first wave of regret about this turn of events. That was when the New Jersey Little League, challenged by a feisty mother and daughter, was ordered by the court to admit girls. The photograph of eight- and nine-year-olds, waving their lovingly-broken-in mitts brought on real tears. I was so elated for them and as I followed their story, so inspired by the courage they showed in the face of persistent put-downs from teammates, coaches and parents.

Then in 1974 came Title IX the legislation requiring equal resources for girls and boys in colleges receiving federal aid. That really changed everything.

By the time my daughter was in high school playing her sport, volleyball, the state of girls’ sports had changed. She can’t imagine not taking it seriously –getting up at dawn on weekends to get to tournaments, traveling on seedy buses to distant games, working on drills with her team, calling her coach “coach.” And never for one minute “running like a girl.”

I became the team’s head “groupie,” showing up at obscure away games, cheering my head off, and bursting into tears with embarrassing frequency. I was just so moved by their freedom, their power, their desire to win, their team spirit.

Recently I met an amazing woman who has lived this saga first-hand. Her name is C.Vivian Stringer and in the most recent five of her 35 years of coaching, she has built the Rutgers women’s basketball team into an NCAA finalist. She was playing half-court - in a mining town in Pennsylvania - about the same time I was, only she wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Why?” became her response to restrictions and rejections. By the time Title IX came along, she was there fighting for the rights of her team – to locker space, to practice time, to travel expenses, to scholarships. If only I’d had a coach like Vivian…….

But Vivian is worried. There are efforts afoot to dismantle Title IX – because it is “not fair” to big time male sports. She wants us to be vigilant for our daughters. And she has a challenge for us. “When people argue with me about the value of women’s sports,” she says, “they point to the low turnout in the bleachers for my games. And I don’t have a real good answer.” We parents and fans have to step up to the plate. We shoulda-coulda-woulda athletes, in particular, busy as we are, have to support our teams. Otherwise we all lose. Again.