One day I awoke to the realization that what I had playfully said all those years, tossed so lightly over my shoulder...I can't say anymore. That time is over and I am here at this very moment in the last quarter of my life. What an absolutely stunning thought!
I remember sitting on the beach in Southport with a good friend, talking about the years that would eventually come, about what we wanted to do. It was the early sixties. My friend and I were raising children and couldn't imagine managing a family and a job. "Oh, when I grow up I'll....." we tossed lightly into the air like a bridal bouquet. And brides we were. We talked about being able to go to Bloomingdales without the children and maybe having lunch. We talked about husbands and heartaches, movies and the children waking us up during the night protesting there were monsters under their beds. And we talked about therapy, the hot topic at that time: Jung and J.D.Laing.
I doubt if either one of us really had a plan for the future. It seemed so far away then. We didn't exactly feel grown up. Many women of our generation had married and had children because it was expected. Unless their parents had been savvy about opportunities out there in the world, the future was presented in a very narrow format: marriage, children....none of us really thought about the future. We thought far more about how to make ourselves happy in what we considered the fruitless job of homemaking, a job which wasn't respected. We loved our children but we felt incomplete and separated from the real world. The real world was where people went when they were grown up.
My friend and I talked for years about filling the creative need inside us. She did far better than I giving and taking dance class. I puttered, stripping furniture, applying my creativity to my home.
I had forgotten the phrase we used so much back then until one day just a few years ago, when I awoke to the reality that there was, in fact, no more time to grow up. I called my friend. We were simultaneously shocked, like young girls who hadn't understood the rules of the game. "So this is how it all turned out," my friend said "this is what happened to us."
My friend and I have a long history. We have celebrated together and suffered through every possible problem a friendship can face, but in the early morning she is the person I call. In the sixties we went to luncheons together and drank small lovely glasses of sherry. In the seventies she was the person who pressed me to go to a party where I met the man I subsequently married. When we finally faced the fact that the days of our lives were running down, we could have just given up and let our mouths droop at the corners, but we chose love and laughter instead.
Sometimes the slowing down of our bodies causes us to gripe, but that is only until one hears the complaint of the other; we listen and then move on with the day. It is so important to have that ear, that good friend to whom you can say those things. I believe that love and friendship, whether they be family members or not, get us through this time. Love sustains us and enables us to create.
One of the first things my friend and I discussed was the inherent desire to see certain friends and not others. We found ourselves becoming more selective about how we spent our time and with whom. Now that I am all grown up and as in charge of my life as any person can be, I want to spend time with the people I love and who love me. I want to disconnect from the people who used me in whatever form and to open my heart to new friendships that expand, broaden, are reciprocal. In that way, I'll be able to make each day count.
I hope you'll write and tell me about your experience.
All good wishes,
Christina
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Love this! So wise and real and brutally honest. To feel liberated from all the should and musts is just so complicated and difficult. Entire civilizations were and are built on these.... I am so fortunate because all of you, brave women of the sixties, opened the path for us, the modern women of today. I was always so different, but not only because of the narrow vision of women where I grew up. As for all of us, also because my personal history. I was programed to be the faithful caregiver... If you saw the movie, "Like water for Chocolate," you would understand. That was the message of generations of women before me, and my own mother. In the culture where I came from is just like that. Naturally, at certain age you were expected to do that and to get married and have children too. I broke all the rules because I was so furious! I always noticed the inequality with man and boys. Such a lonely and lonely and very lonely path! So in searching and protesting I left the country where I was born, Argentina, and I came here twenty years ago. And now I am a self-made woman. In the eyes of the women in my country, including my mother, now I am a total success, a celebrity. My rebellion in Argentina could be the best seller of the year, still today. That had a terrible cost. I was the outcast and I had to do immense things to prove myself worthy to the main characters in my family. When I came here in the middle of much darkness and invisibility, women like you showed me that I was discovering something that all of us, women of today and yesterday and tomorrow, owe to ourselves. But it is not, never was and never will be an easy thing to do. What do you chose? What do you do when you grow up as you are growing up? The journey continues. So does the search and the confusion. Yet, there is something so powerful about the process and the getting there. I am a woman of very few friends. The Universe gave me the best friends-companions-sisters-teachers. But I do not have any friends left form where I come from, only my family. In the middle of getting to grow up I lose so much! Migrating.... no technology in those days to communicate... Being the outcast for breaking so many rules. A true empty space in my heart and in my mind. So, I am so happy to know that you have this friend. I wonder how is it like to have somebody like her next to you, I mean a woman friend? Every year I visit my country, as I walk under the Parisian shadows of Buenos Aires I ask myself, where are they? Did they go through this transformation in some way close to mine? Did they stop growing up? Are they even thinking about this? Do they know that time can stop any time?
ReplyDeleteLife is such a beautiful thing, with all the looses, all the powers dissolved, all the new powers to be discovered and reframed so we do not grieve all the time.... Life is a beautiful thing!
And yes, life with the right friend next to you is meaningful and different and hurt less. Growing up with somebody old and somebody new next to you... even when you think that you stopped and there is nothing left...or when you think that there is so much left that you will never get there... is different. It has to be. It has to be different and transforming.
CHristina, wherever you are thank you.