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.