By Suzanne Braun Levine,
@Feminist.com
My new Column at Feminist.com – Navigating Second Adulthood – will look at the many challenges raised by the question: “What Will I Do with the Rest of My Life?” The answers are different for every woman, but they all reflect new opportunities for self-discovery, intimacy, and activism.
The first column in the Ongoing Series – “We are Each Other’s Role Models” – is an excerpt from How We Love Now: Sex and the New Intimacy in Second Adulthood:
We have gone through so many transformations as we shed the roles we were raised to play, that looking into the uncharted future, we expect that there is still more to discover. About becoming who we want to be. We long for someone to show the way. We look for a connection with our mothers’ experience, but we are unlikely to find the guidance we need there; instead, like her, we look to the women alongside us in a common search for authenticity.
Although there are few role models for us, in the sense of mentors and mothers sharing their wisdom about coping with experiences they have been through, we are establishing a team of guides and protectors. They are us. It has not escaped me that when I call us “we,” I am referring to women who are far enough apart in age— roughly forty- five to seventy five— to be mothers and daughters, technically different generations. But when it comes to finding support, wisdom, and intimacy that will sustain us moving forward, we are a single generation.
Together we struggled to stay afloat in the midst of earth- shattering changes for women in our first adulthood, and we are struggling to assimilate those changes in our Second. I call the women who are meeting the same challenges Horizontal Role Models…