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.