by Miriam Horn
“I wanted to understand my parents and not hate them anymore. I found I could love them even with all their limitations. I try to help my mother, who nearly died from a thoracic aneurysm and is by herself. I’ve quit being angry at her for not developing her mind more. I see now that her father was so intimidating—he would not have permitted her to do other than what she did. When my father left her, she was fifty-eight and had never worked, but she got a job at Filene’s and became a terrific saleswoman, working till she was seventy-three. She made the steps she could, and was forced to, make.
“She was ghastly when I was in the hospital. She talked about what a hassle it was to get into town to visit me. I finally said, ‘Look, my life is in jeopardy here.’ And she said, with this look of utter terror on her face: ‘I just ask God, Why didn’t this happen to me? You’re a young person, and I’ve lived my life.’ I was touched by her wish to sacrifice herself for me, the ultimate motherly impulse. I saw that she really does have feelings she can’t ordinarily articulate. It would have given me a lot of consolation along the years to know that she was behind me in that way.
“My father, I also realized, has had a fairly miserable life. He was acutely unhappy with my mother. He’d loved being an auto mechanic and would have loved to go to college, but he felt forced to do things he didn’t love to make more money, to satisfy my mother’s desire to be more securely middle-class. He considers himself a failure; to me, he no longer seems a villain, but a victim of the times and men’s assigned roles. That he had to be the sole breadwinner limited his life terribly.
“He waited a long time to leave my mother, feeling it a bad thing to do, a great taboo. He’s a pretty tightly bound person. He wouldn’t be in the vanguard, but then the changes initiated by our generation rippled upward. He finally left, and moved into a one-room apartment, and has been married three times since, not so happily. His second wife died. His third was a disaster: He was with her when I had cancer, which seemed to make no impression on them at all. His fourth, well, with her he seems pretty happy. He’s certainly ended up in a far better place than he ever would have with my mother, which I guess is an argument for people to make the changes necessary to try to keep some happiness for themselves. He calls a lot now, and I go to see him.
“My parents are in their eighties, but there’s this funny bond, like we’re all old people wondering how much longer we have. I drew up my will and then made sure my mother’s was in order. I jumped into their generation. Everyone will enter this place in time. But somehow a young person faced with her mortality, well, I speak from a place most people my age don’t know.
“I never thought I’d go back to a Wellesley reunion, but for the twenty-fifth I sought them out. I was apprehensive, but wanted to understand why I’d hated it so badly, why it had been so traumatic. I ended up loving it, and came to think less about how fucked-up the college had been and more about who I was when I arrived there. I saw myself as a victim: that they were privileged and I was not, which I now think was mostly my inherited paranoia. And as much as I wish it had been happier, given who I was and my family, it was the only experience I could have had.
“In many ways, the sad tone of my life was set there. I hoped I’d find a place, and didn’t. To me it felt like a cul-de-sac, that things were closing down instead of opening up. Other people whose families thought they were great had a stronger sense of themselves, and just flowered. Martha Teichner knew she was a good storyteller and found her place in TV and … zoom. I wish I’d had that sense of myself early on, but I couldn’t have: My father was too critical of who I was, and what he told me about life was too poisonous and frightened. I thought you had to sell your soul to have a secure life. I felt alienated and lost, and that feeling stayed with me.
“At reunion, I stood up and said, ‘Here’s the most important thing that’s happened to me,’ and told them about my cancer. People were really moved, which moved me to tears. I thought, How kind to give me that recognition, to offer courage. And what a shame I had felt so isolated as a student, when I feel so close to these women now. What a terrific community I might have found. All the time I thought we had nothing in common, that they all had it made. Now I see they’ve struggled, too, that their lives played surprises on them, that everyone has endured grief. No one has gone unscathed. We had more choices than we knew how to deal with, and most of us still are confused. Should I be doing this, or that?”
New Thresholds
The story ends where it begins, with most questions unanswered and with these women crossing thresholds once again: into empty nests, menopause, late pregnancies, altered ambitions, new reflections on their past, gentled relations with their parents, and deepened friendships with each other.
At Wellesley, they had crossed the threshold between the personal and the political. One by one, they had left the domestic shelter of their childhood families for a larger world. Together, they had enacted the same leave-taking on a historic scale: ending a long epoch of women’s confinement to the private sphere and marking out the forward edges of a new era, when women would take their full place in public life. They began, at Wellesley and in the years after, mixing the language of the two realms, bringing the vocabulary of maternity and nurture to the workplace, the language of power and justice home. They began publicizing their private confusions and struggles, and also requiring of themselves that their political values be enacted in their personal lives.
In midlife, the thresholds they are crossing again bridge the boundary between private and public life. Some are, at age fifty, only now completing that earlier crossing: coming out of their homes into school and work, or deepening their public commitments; more than half say they are more ambitious now than at graduation. Some are working for the first time, or again, or more than before out of a legitimate fear of poverty in old age: Their part-time and short-lived jobs and lower wages have left many ill prepared for retirement. Others are being pushed outward by menopause and empty nests, which foreclose for good their reproductive and maternal roles. A few are reversing the motion: Having rushed into the world after graduation, they are turning back to home and their inner life. Nearly all feel as Lonny Laszlo Higgins described feeling each time her family set sail, leaving a familiar island for some unknown part of the archipelago: filled with terrible nostalgia and exhilarating freedom.
For the moms in the class who spent their years mostly at home, the new beginnings at midlife have usually meant a return to school or to work. Fifteen years after leaving her vice-presidency at the bank, Jan Mercer has started a landscape-design business, just as her husband decided “by merger” to start a new career. She is torn about whether to expand the enterprise. “The overachiever says crank up to something that will impress everyone. But I don’t feel the drive like I used to. I used to love the adrenaline rush. Now yoga deep breathing feels much better.” Kathy Ruckman, with just one of four children still at home, has entered George Washington University’s night law school. She was not, after all, immune to the frustrations that had plagued her mother. “I realized that I was bored and going nowhere with my tutoring job, that I wanted something exciting instead of make-do work. I gave up the bell choir and my other volunteer work, quite happily. Then I tried writing a résumé, which was tricky. If you’ve run a household you have managerial skills, but that’s hard to put in. I tried to make my volunteer things look like executive work. I finally faced that I needed some real skills to do a real job. I don’t think teaching ever really did captivate me. What I’d love to do is work for the Children’s Defense Fund, making a difference and using my brain. Roger’s glad. He’s seen my frustration, which would sort of boil over periodically. He knows he’s had all these wonderful opportunities to develop a career and that I’ve not had intellectual excitement or any of the outside encouragement that comes with a career.”
Lorna Rinear has been a single mom since 1976; she sought a divorce after moving seven times to new horse farms with her volati
le husband, who verbally warred with his bosses and his eldest son. Her mother, still living in Manhattan opulence, told Lorna after the divorce, “You’ve made your bed and you should lie in it,” and suggested she apply for welfare. Lorna did, unsuccessfully, then spent the next fifteen years supporting her sons by working in electronics factories, sometimes holding down two or three jobs. At forty-seven, she returned to Wellesley to finish her degree, with her son footing the bill. She is now pursuing a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century women’s history. For her fiftieth birthday, she bought herself a retired racehorse to ride. “This is a wonderful time. I had the life of being the perfect child, the wife, the mom; now I’m not responsible for anyone but myself. Of course I have regrets. When my son would ask me to play badminton, I wished I’d done more of that, because now there’s no one to play badminton with. But people think I put myself places inadvertently, and I say no, I chose this.”
When Betty Demy’s children left home for school, the prospect of living alone for the first time frightened her: “It’s much easier for me to take care of others than to take care of myself.” She was in a job she didn’t like, trapped there by her need to keep her health insurance. She was dreading menopause, “which for married women may be liberating, but for women who aren’t is just another reminder that you feel less desirable.” Though she always had a “strong and rich group of women friends,” she was unsuccessful at meeting men. For years, she had traipsed to singles’ events, but found the men there to be “professionally single.” After a while, she gave up. “I hadn’t had positive experiences, and kept being drawn to smart, screwed-up men. Why be masochistic and keep seeking experiences that don’t feel good? The prospect of being alone for the rest of my life isn’t very happy, but I’ve pushed it aside. I have to build a life for myself without depending on someone else to make it good for me.”
Betty has succeeded in beginning anew. After “talking to Prozac” for a while, as she put it in a letter to her classmates, she dusted off an old fascination, returning to school for a master’s in museum professions. She is now director of external affairs at a girls’ school, which her son calls her “mini-Wellesley,” and has been traveling extensively, to Moscow, Paris, and Prague. “I come and go as I please, and do what I want to do, which is incredibly liberating. I’d always regretted that I hadn’t made a giant professional splash, and now I’m thinking it’s not over.”
A number of women in the class are scaling new professional heights in their fifties. In 1998, Susan Graber was confirmed for the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, one step below the Supreme Court. The same year, Crandall Close Bowles, ’69, was made chairman, CEO, and president of Springs Industries, a $2.5 billion textile company, leading Business Week to name her “one of the top two or three women executives in the country.” (Her husband, Erskine, was until 1998 Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and has had to testify before the grand jury as to why he tried to line up work for Hillary’s old law partner, Webster Hubbell.) Pam Colony, after more than twenty years, won tenure at last. She now directs the histotechnology and Women in Science programs at the State University of New York. She also, after her second marriage came to a horrible end, moved with her two sons to a farm and spent her fiftieth year building a barn, lifting and nailing the six-foot boards herself. Nancy Gist manages the largest grant-making organization in the U.S. Justice Department, dispensing nearly $2 billion a year to state, local, and tribal criminal justice systems. Because she is doing “the people’s business,” she travels widely to learn from communities how they are solving their problems. When she traveled to Oregon, her classmate Kris Olson picked her up at the airport. “Here comes the U.S. attorney with the Grateful Dead blasting on the car radio. We were hooting with laughter. Everywhere we went, people were so solicitous, as they tend to be with people who have power or money. We never imagined that either of us would have any power or money, much less official photos in front of the American flag.”
Returning Home
While those who remained mostly home have come out into the world in midlife, some of those who have lived more publicly have turned increasingly inward. After her divorce from Jeff, Kris Olson began spending more time on the Warm Springs reservation, talking with the elders, fishing, walking the land. She also remarried, to another lawyer, whom she first described to me in terms of the political work he’s done: representing young black criminal defendants in Mississippi in the sixties, suing the makers of breast implants and the Dalkon Shield. She then added that in her new marriage, “I am experiencing for the first time in my life what it is to be really loved.” And though she has expanded her professional responsibilities, joining Janet Reno’s national advisory committee and working on matters like campaign finance reform, she looks forward to working on a smaller scale after 2001. She may teach at an Indian high school, surveying the history of federal Indian policy so that “these kids know why their parents and communities have been through such wrenching changes.”
Lonny Higgins renewed her private life in a more dramatic fashion. In 1995 she discovered that she was pregnant. She and David were both ecstatic. “We felt rejuvenated and rewarded.” Then six weeks later she realized that the embryo had stopped growing. She lost the fetus but never bled. “I said to the baby, ‘You don’t need to go away, you can just come back into me,’ ” and then watched on the ultrasound over the course of several days as the fetus was resorbed. “Strangely, contemplating new life made me face my own mortality. It’s like Timothy Leary said, ‘When you take off your watch, that’s when time stops.’ ”
With her two kids in college, Lonny felt urgently that she wanted to be pregnant again. She had just been through a grueling, if vindicating, professional ordeal: successfully defending herself against two malpractice suits for deliveries she’d performed fifteen years earlier, then countersuing the plaintiff’s attorney for defamation and malicious prosecution, winning a public apology and a half-million-dollar award. Demoralized by the effects such suits have on obstetrics (causing, for example, doctors to resort more often to cesarean delivery), Lonny quit delivering babies. Her motives were also personal: “My life has been defined by what other people needed, which in some ways is a very easy position, a ‘call.’ I wanted to learn to take care of myself.”
Having tried in vitro fertilization with her own eggs without success, Lonny went in search of an egg donor. She didn’t care if it was her genes in the baby; what she wanted was to give birth, which, “beginning with the intrauterine environment,” she counts “the ultimate form of creativity.” David resisted: “It’s you I love, and I only want to fertilize one of your eggs,” but after meeting the young woman Lonny had chosen, he agreed. Their grown kids were involved from the beginning, watching the embryos grow outside their mother’s body before implantation. At age forty-nine, Lonny gave birth to a baby boy, with whom she now happily spends all her days.
As with the women who stayed home, many of the working women’s mid-track switches have been involuntary. Linda Gibson Preston was living in Houston with her husband and four kids, getting rich in real estate and banking, driving lavish cars and working out in her mirrored home gym when oil prices crashed and wiped the family out. “You couldn’t sell, rent, lease, or develop real estate. The banks were underwater. We lost everything, including our confidence, and there was no way out.” They moved to New Jersey and, fifteen years later, are still “edging back.” More than her husband, Linda was able to find useful lessons in the disaster, believing it a good thing for her children (one of whom has Down’s syndrome) to have endured. “I think women may be better at changes that come because we’ve always had to anticipate abrupt disruptions in our lives.”
The belief that they have reaped good things from all the sidetrackings and collapses and rebuildings runs deep among these women. Johanna Branson told Frontline: “It really hit me at our tenth reunion. We were in our early thirties, so we still were optimistic about getting married, about having children,
and everything still seemed to be going our way, and I remember looking around in this room full of women, all dressed in bright, solid-color jackets just ready for network news interviews that might drop on them and clutching these thick leather appointment books and running around networking, and I was thinking, This is getting borderline insufferably smug. The optimism was turning a little bit to something that seemed to me to be unfounded. And it was a different world five years later, for the fifteenth, because women were in their late thirties. Carter wasn’t in the White House. People had lost their snazzy jobs; maybe they were having to reinvent new jobs for themselves. There wasn’t a track they could follow. Maybe people’s marriages weren’t existing anymore or they still hadn’t found somebody, and a lot of people were facing real fertility problems. So as a whole, I remember looking around that room and thinking, This is a much humbler but a much more interesting group of women, much more complex.”
Their new beginnings have also, like Nancy Young’s, frequently “rippled upward.” Many have been divorced and, later, watched their parents split; many have also seen their mothers bloom late in life. Louise Carter’s frustrated mom got a job at the law firm where Louise was working the summer after her sophomore year. She loved it, went back to school, and worked until retirement for Bell Laboratories; “for a while she was the breadwinner, and her whole self-concept really changed.” Charlynn Maniatis’s mom had never learned to drive and had never shopped for groceries without her husband’s supervision when he abruptly left her, taking nearly everything they owned. “The first six months were incredible. She didn’t know how to balance a checkbook, but she started to take trips. She would visit me in New York. You saw this flower blossoming.” Nancy Wanderer’s mom, Marge, also began traveling after her husband died. “She has taken great interest in managing her money and has become a regular visitor to Merrill Lynch and the bank.” Dorothy Devine’s mom published her first book at age seventy-four, a collection of short stories dedicated to Dorothy’s grandmother, who “hid her typewriter in the laundry basket.” She is now at work on a novel about a mother and daughter whose family was destroyed by the Vietnam War. Though she cried when she figured out that Dorothy was gay, after her husband died she announced that she would never marry again and take care of a sick old man. She told Dorothy’s partner, “Women are the only ones who talk about anything real.”
