I Love Your Term the Fertile Void…
Suzanne Braun Levine has been a hero of mine since age 16, when I was a charter subscriber to Ms. Magazine, where she was the first editor. Just as Ms. had many things to teach me about myself as a woman and a feminist, so Levine decades later continues to teach women about themselves, through her writing (in books like Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood and her contributions to MORE Magazine) and speaking. I was privileged to talk with her about her new book, Fifty Is the New Fifty: 10 Life Lessons for Women in Second Adulthood, and what more she has in store for us.
Philosophers and writers over the ages have written about the sort of wandering in the desert, in-between place of life. I love your term the Fertile Void to describe this beginning of Second Adulthood.
That’s a phrase I had heard a Gestalt therapist use, and I think it’s probably a Fritz Perls phrase. It really resonated for me because one of the things that I found so important for women to understand, especially women who have been so busy multitasking and working at four jobs, is that we can grow and we can find a lot of insights in limbo. We’re so used to making lists and a game plan and pushing ourselves to get through this or to solve it, thinking of change as a problem, and that makes it harder to really get through it, because you’ve established rigidity just where you need sort of free-fall.
I found that so many women were reassured by the experience that the rest of us have had, that it takes a year and a half or two years until you really feel that your feet are on the ground, and during that time I describe it as falling through the rabbit hole, because you feel upside down, you don’t know which way is up, you don’t know where you’re headed, you don’t know if you’re doing things that are going to be productive. The unknown is extremely confusing, but fighting it just makes it more confusing, because then you feel that you’re losing the fight and failing and that just adds to the anxiety.
So this Fertile Void period is a really important notion. And I have this lesson, “Do Unto Yourself as You Have Been Doing Unto Others.” I think that the Fertile Void is a way of doing unto yourself what you’ve been doing unto others, and certainly to your children, giving them time to emerge as who they were, waiting as they went through things that you thought you knew best how they were going to get through. And patience—everybody knows that one of the great qualities of parenting is patience, but we never extend patience to ourselves, and that’s what you need during this transition, during most transitions actually.
I think that TTN answers so many of the issues that come up at this stage of life. From the very beginning I have thought it’s a unique organization. And I think Charlotte Frank is one of the great visionaries. She’s always pushing the envelope.
One of your life lessons is “A ‘Circle of Trust’ is a Must,” about the importance of friendships with women. I guess I was surprised at one thing you found, are there really that many women out there still who have trouble making friendships and those that still have that clichéd mistrust and jealousy of other women?
It’s funny, because the answer to that question was one of the most surprising in all my conversations. There are lots of women who still feel competitive with other women. And still feel that every woman that comes into your social circle is out to steal your man, and a lot of those old things. I think it’s waning. I have never seen an inkling of that in my [23-year-old] daughter and her friends. So I have to assume that as the generations are coming along, that is fading away.
The other thing is, and this is less surprising but more disturbing, there are a lot of women who want to make these kinds of friendships, and don’t know where to begin. I did a TTN talk on Long Island a year or two ago, and it drew a gigantic crowd, and it was a little mystifying. But it became clear when at the end a woman got up and said “how many of you in this room are single?” And about 80% of them raised their hand. And it became clear to me that they were there to meet each other. And in a bedroom community like theirs, it was very hard to maintain a social life if you’ve lost your husband or gotten divorced. Because they’ve got this Noah’s Ark way of socializing.
Do you think that there’s an age pattern to that?
I think where you live and if your circumstances change are reasons some women have a hard time. But other reasons are that we all move a lot. Many women find themselves in a new town, and we work so hard, that the time of just encountering new people is reduced. The other thing is, as we go through the changes that we talk about, you can outgrow a lot of your friends. And that’s a very painful experience. You have historic friends, people you raised your kids with, or you went to school with, or lived in the same neighborhood with, and you love them as much as ever, but you can’t really give each other that kind of energy anymore, because you’re on different paths. And finding a woman friend to replace that energy is almost as hard as finding a man to replace your husband.
You introduce the concept of Horizontal Role Models, other women who may not be at our age or stage but whom we can learn from—“women who have been there, not chronologically, but emotionally, psychologically, or experientially.” I think this is really important in keeping women connected across generations and ages and other differences. How did you come up with that concept and term?
I think the concept in a way is the essence of TTN–women coming together to generously share what they know, and to help each other out. I mean, the Caring Collaborative is an amazing example of that. I don’t know how I came up with it; I knew that I wanted to come up with a term that was the opposite of a vertical pyramid. Because I do think that we in particular, and again, not necessarily the generation to come after us, don’t have as many role models because we’ve been the pioneers. And I often hear women say, “I work with this woman and I really admire her, I want to learn to do whatever it is she does just like her,” or “so-and-so is the kind of mother I want to be.” And it’s much more how other women have dealt with the challenges that we’re all dealing with; that’s more helpful than looking to how our mothers did it.
You talk about paring away at commitments and people that aren’t priorities. Do you think women have a hard time with this? How does it affect longstanding relationships?
Well, I think that this is a consequence of the important lesson that I talk about which is “No is Not a Four-Letter Word.” Because I do feel that is the deepest quality that is holding us back. We’ve been trained to and certainly most women that I know want to say yes, want to be accommodating, want to be supportive, want to be helpful, want to make people happy. And the idea of saying no to such a request seems to be so counter-intuitive that it takes a while to really know for a fact what you are looking for in a friend, in a partner, in a job–because we haven’t asked ourselves “do we want to do that, yes or no?” “Do we like that person, yes or no?” “Do we want to step up to the plate, yes or no? So paring away friends is not necessarily turning on them, but it’s realizing that there are limitations to what you can expect from them.
Late in the book you talk a bit about “impostor syndrome.” Have you ever experienced it yourself?
Oh god! I tell you, every time I do an interview like this I experience it! I think it is, again, like saying no. That it’s the result of having been given and having followed scripts so conscientiously, that you’re so confused by all the things that aren’t you that you’re putting out there, that you can’t value the really important ones. And that’s why I talk about math anxiety, because I do think that’s the best example. Math anxiety is not [about] not doing well in math, it’s about believing that every time you got a right answer is a fluke, and that it’ll never happen again. And the male response to that of course is “I got another right answer, boy, look at me, I’m really cool and I’m on my way.” But I remember feeling this so intensely, the anxiety of thinking, “just because I got one right last time, doesn’t mean that I’m going to get one right next time,” all it means is more pressure. And that, to me, is the essence of the impostor syndrome. It’s that in a way we can’t believe in ourselves because we’re often so little acquainted with ourselves.
What have some of the seminal Second Adulthood transitions periods or “aha!” moments been for you personally?
As I say in the book, getting fired was certainly the most obvious one, because I was thrust out of the kind of work that I had gotten good at and even was beginning to believe I was good at, and into work that I wasn’t so sure. I had to find work that used those skills but wasn’t the same. And of course being fired is quite devastating, so that was one turning point. And I think having my kids leave home. Although it wasn’t as emotionally traumatic as it’s supposed to be, just in terms of my time, I drifted a little bit, because I wasn’t sure what to connect to in the time during the day that I had been connecting to my kids.
You remind women that “all Yellow Brick Roads need a stop sign at the bank.” A lot of the writing and advice out there on Second Adulthood and on reimagining and reinventing your life doesn’t address this, and makes it seem as though this sort of transition and the Fertile Void are only for women of privilege. What advice do you give to women whose economic circumstances complicate their ability to let this period of the Fertile Void unfold as slowly or organically as might be ideal? Women who maybe can’t move, can’t change jobs, can’t retire because of that?
I think that this idea is a continuation of the notion that the Women’s Movement was only for middle class people. And I think that notion was partly the result of the idea that at that time, breaking through in a job was the Women’s Movement. And in this case, the idea that this is all about quitting your job, or retiring from your job, is not at all what I have found. A lot of women find that their jobs become more comfortable or they simply want to stay where they are and not keep trying to make their way up in the organization. Obviously, if you cannot afford to find the time to think, if you’re scrounging or scrambling, this is not going to happen for you. But it has nothing to do with having a lot of money: it has to do with listening to what the changes are and adapting them to your circumstances.
And the problem with having more money is that women at that level are even more careless. And I am guilty of this myself, it’s just so unpleasant to deal with all the paperwork and the documents and the fine print, but we all really need to get a grip on our finances, whatever they are, so that we have control over the rest of our lives. And it’s even more important for women of your age [early 50s] because you have time to get them in order.
You talk about the hope for sustaining marriage with the wisdom of Second Adulthood. Do you think that second marriages made by women at this stage may have a better chance of success than marriages made earlier?
That’s a good question, and the immediate answer that comes to my mind is yes. Because of all the other things we’ve talked about. Because we are more confident, because we can support ourselves, because we’re tired of playing games and working by someone else’s script. Because we know what we want, because we can say no, which means you can say yes. And because I think a big element here is that you don’t go into a relationship expecting to change the other person the way we did earlier on. All of those things make for a more real and honest and egalitarian relationship. So I would say second marriages have a really good chance, given what I know about women at this stage of life.
What are you working on next?
I have a contract to write a new book which I’m slow in starting. It is tentatively but inaccurately titled Love at Midlife, about how we are inventing a new intimacy. What I’m going to try to do is redefine love as we experience it as we get older. Meaning that a lot of women that I talk to are having all kinds of love experiences that they had never had before in their lives, you know, from finding the love of their life, to finding a same sex partner, to finding that they like one night stands, to finding that their long-time partner is very comfortable and just what they want. And I want to talk a little bit about the other ways that we are passionately committed, if not to a person then to a project. I don’t know what the answers are going to be, but I do know that we do everything different, so it should be no surprise that we do love different.
Read Karen’s review of Suzanne’s book, “Fifty is the New Fifty.”
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Karen Kullgren is an avid reader and explorer of the inward and outward journeys of our lives, which she chronicles in her personal essay column “Grace in the Gray Areas” and her writing on topics such as books, travel, multiculturalism, parenting, arts, women’s wellness, spas, aging and spirituality. She is Contributing Editor of Washington Woman and Washington Parent magazines, and a freelance writer whose work has appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, Washingtonian, Organic Style, and Association Management.
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