DOING WHAT DAD WANTS TAKES A NEW TWIST!

Both our children are far away this year, so Father’s Day won’t be about the whole family “Doing What Dad Wants.” But it most definitely won’t be a joyless day. Instead, for my husband Bob and me it will be a celebration of “Dad’s Amazing New Project” – the BlueStone Gallery in Milford, PA (www.bluestonegallerymilford.com) which both our kids love.

We will be spending the afternoon where “Dad is Doing What He Wants.” In the past year, my husband has envisioned, brought to life, and become wildly energized by a ‘Very Second Adulthood Adventure”! He co-founded the BlueStone Gallery, with Dave Greenbaum, a local potter, to provide a space for the best artwork of artists living and working in the Pike County/Hudson Valley (NY) region.

Bob Levine and Dave Greenbaum

Their idea was to “exhibit not just traditional art, but also ‘functional’ art as well – art as broad ranging in its intention and execution as the artists’ imagination can reach.” The art is a stunning collection of fine (paintings, sculpture) and functional (carved wooden bowls, pottery, iron work, and kimonos made out of vintage scarves) art.

Gloria Steinem visiting Red Square wearing a Joe & Louise Fouts hat from BlueStone Gallery

It has also become a community meeting place. Friends stop by to meet and chat, tourists settle into the leather sofa to contemplate the art and relax, and the community comes together for events at the gallery. At a recent event, I talked about Fifty is the New Fify (wearing one of the fabulous kimonos) to raise money for the local battered women’s shelter, Safe Haven of Pike County.

Suzanne at the Safe Haven of Pike County Benefit, May 2009

While our day jobs still keep us in New York City, the Gallery has become a delightful add-on and “Encore” addition to our lives (www.encore.org) to our lives, proving that Second Adulthood is most definitely not only about shedding baggage but also about extending experience, taking risks and giving back to ones community.

How are you celebrating Father’s Day?

If you are in Milford, PA stop by at the BlueStone Gallery (104 East Ann Street, 570.296.9999).

Or you can share your Father’s Day experience, adventure and memories with us here.

When my kids were younger and I wanted to have a difficult conversation with one of them, I would wait until we were driving alone in the car. I found that it was easier for me to broach the subject when my gaze was fixed on the road, and it was more likely I would get some feedback if my son or daughter didn’t have to make eye contact either. In that circumstance, the avoidance of eye contact fostered intimacy.

But most of the time intimacy is, for me, precisely about eye contact. I need to see facial expressions, even the mouth moving, in order to continue the conversation, and I need to see something in the eyes in order to venture deeper into my feelings. People in love are all about eye contact. Eye contact is also the source of the momentary intimacy of two strangers acknowledging that, for example, that they both found the way a fellow customer was behaving out of line, or that they both noticed how cute the cocker spaniel in the middle of the sidewalk is.

Internet intimacy is something new for me, both disconcerting and intriguing. Virtual communities offer none of the visual cues I am used to. But they also eliminate other – often harmful – visual clues that enable someone to judge someone else by looks, accent, or station in life. In terms of content, there are almost no barriers, and no consequences. For women, in particular, it is exhilarating to express ourselves without concerns for propriety or hurt feelings.

Such conversations are empowering. Speaking the truth, sharing stories, researching expertise, and finding support – that used to be territory we only shared with our best flesh-and-blood friends. But even then, it was still hard to admit certain things; I once confessed to a friend that I was afraid of disciplining my children for fear of upsetting them, and she seemed so shocked that I regretted the whole conversation. Nowadays such raw admissions are common – and validated – in cyberspace.

An unheralded byproduct of this new intimacy is that we are all becoming fluent in self-expression. As far as I am concerned, this is major. I got an inkling of how transformative internet communication is when I was writing my next book (Fifty Is the New Fifty, out in April). I contacted hundreds of women who had signed up on my website and asked them all kinds of personal questions: How is it to be fifty or sixty or seventy? How are your relationships holding up? Are you burned out at your job? How is your sex life? Do you really understand your finances? The stories I got back were always honest and fresh, and – this was the most amazing aspect to me – they has the authenticity of spoken narrative. In the past, if I wanted a story or anecdote from someone, I had to sit with her – making eye contact – and skillfully draw out emotional details and anecdotes; if, instead, I asked her to write down her responses, the result would be stilted and devoid of detail. Now everyone on line has a loud and proud written voice. That voice speaks the truth to unseen intimates, but even if no one is listening, it gives personal expression – in the same way journaling does – to what we are feeling and experiencing. If I were looking for continuity, I could call this new dimension to communication “I- contact.”

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Beyond the physical demands of care-giving, are the drip-drip-drip anxieties of worrying and trying to problem-solve with every waking hour – including those in the middle of the night. All this is happening at just the point in our lives when we are trying to move on – or, as one woman told me, “go out of the emotional management business.” It is possible to care of loved ones and one’s self at the same time? Is there another alternative available to us besides the choice another woman summarized as “guilt or resentment”?

I know this predicament well. I am living it. And I don’t have any answers. But I am working on “doing the best I can” and letting it go at that. I choose the words “letting go” precisely because I do believe that along with all the other changes we are going through in the Second Adulthood of our lives, we are letting go of many outdated expectations of others and of ourselves, and we are trying to let go of burdens of guilt that load us down way beyond the point that we can rectify them. Every day I deal with my own flawed parenting, I get some reassurance from the fact that I really did the best I could. And when my mother apologizes for not being the mother she now thinks I needed, I can say to her with all my heart that I am sure she did the best she could.

That is all any of us can do. And even if – and when – something bad happens, I hope I will be able to accept that