Red Hot Mamas: Coming into Our Own at Fifty - Couverture souple

Dowling, Colette

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0553374958 ISBN 13 : 9780553374957

Editeur : Random House Publishing Group, 1997

Synopsis

Book by Dowling Colette

A propos du livre

Extrait :

CHAPTER I
THE MAMAS
A GENERATION ARRIVES AT MIDLIFE
Coming Into Our Own · The Way It Was · The Way It Is · The Original Red Hot Mamas · Choice Points: The Revolution Among Midlife Women
 
IT WAS WILLA’S fiftieth. The women kept surging out onto the floor to dance, while the men stood around the edges of the lofty, cathedral-ceilinged living room and watched. Catherine had made a tape of all those songs from the 1970s, when their lives had begun to change. Tonight, there was something incantatory about the voices, the clapping, the Reeboks and cowboy boots beating rhythmically on the floor. The Mamas, many of them having reached fifty but some still in their forties, were jubilant. The dancing was hot. Claire, visiting from the city and dressed in black biker’s shorts, high-tops, and a motorcycle jacket, was especially fun to watch. Her hair was gray as weathered wood, short as a boy’s, and her smile was ecstatic. Her body moved as fluidly as if she were much younger, but with this assurance, this strength. That combination of social confidence and physical endurance, said Susan, back in the kitchen inhaling guacamole, was killer.
 
THERE are, for such a small town, a surprising number of us edging up to, or at, or just beyond the age of fifty. For us, this number means something entirely different from what it has in the past, although what it means we are not entirely sure. The town is Woodstock. Many of the women here are expatriates of New York who, at one time or another during the last twenty years, left the city and came a hundred miles north, to live in an arts community that was associated with freedom.
 
It isn’t the usual small town. Most of us still have a connection with New York; ex-husbands are there, or grown children, or agents or galleries. The women I know don’t relate to being “middle-aged,” although they’re quite proud of having arrived at fifty. They are bright, brash, irreverent, funny, introspective, neurotic, and caring—and they’re out there. It’s a new time, a new age, and these are new women. They wear their skirts short, their feet weighted down with Doc Martens. Whether or not they are currently “in a relationship” they feel a connection with their own sexual energy. It’s the same thing, my friend Willa says, as creative energy.
 
I have come to think of these women as the Mamas. They are bursting forth in their lives; they are engaged. Though shaped by the particular choices we’ve made, the Mamas reflect a generation—millions upon millions in our active and energetic prime who are bringing about a cultural shift. That menopause has come out of the closet is only a part of it. We are the first who came of age with the women’s movement to enter this stage of life, and we are doing it—as we’ve always done everything—differently.
 
Women entering their fifties today are better educated, more independent, more financially self-sufficient and more involved in community and political life than midlife women have ever been before. We have a chance, now, for a second bloom. It is our time, a vivid age when we are freer and more individuated than we were when we were younger. At last we are confident in our strengths, accepting of our limitations, and wise in our ability to adapt, be flexible, dance to the rhythm of our own needs.
 
But bringing this new chance for growth to fruition is not something that will happen automatically. The second bloom can be cut down, as could the first, by the freak weather of environmental stress, by illness, lack of nurturance, or by a failure of nerve, an inability to seize the moment. To bloom again one needs consciousness, information, perhaps even a sense of mission: I am going to take this decade by its lapels, and—
 
And what? How do we think about the future, how do we plan? What are the limitations, the goals, the possibilities? Could we actually change careers? Enter a new relationship? Pick up and move to Tuscany?
 
It is different today than it was for past generations of women who, if they were lucky (and how many actually were?) “retired” at midlife. Went out into the garden. Whiled away their afternoons in the sunshine telling stories to their grandchildren. Today—because the life span has opened up—the questions that lie before us at the midlife juncture are new.
 
What is the most exciting, the most fruitful, and the most organic way to use the next thirty or forty years?
 
How, where, and in whose company shall we spend them?
 
And what do we need to do to protect our options and harness our energy?
 
THE fact is, we are in the middle of a social transition for which there are no guidelines. The first generation who came up with the women’s movement to hit fifty, the Mamas are breaking the age barrier. Once again, we’re pioneering uncharted territory. We like men, although there are times when we feel closer to women. What we have with our children—those of us who’ve had them—is open and satisfying. What we have with one another is supportive, empowering us to move out and do more. We feel more connected to more people than perhaps our mothers did at this age. At fifty, we are challenged by a sense of adventure, stimulated by the wit and irony of life. We see the possibilities of this “second half” of adulthood that lies ahead, and we don’t back off.
 
Although, of course, that isn’t all there is to it.
 
COMING INTO OUR OWN
 
THIS is a generation of women who’ve made new arrangements with life, who perhaps never married, or have been married and divorced a number of times, or have been separated for so long it feels like divorce. Some of us are already widowed. I was widowed when I was barely forty. At the time, it didn’t feel like being widowed since I’d left my husband years earlier and was then, and for some years thereafter, living with someone else. Now, for the first time in my life, I live alone. I have learned to like this very much; still, when asked on some official form to categorize myself I hesitate, unable to choose between Widow and Single. Actually, I like to think that I defy category. In Woodstock, most of us like to think that. Willa, still technically married, has been separated from her second husband for twelve years and remains hopelessly friendly with him. He lives in the same town.
 
Helen, long divorced—and thus, the forms would have it, Single—refuses to associate herself with any marital state. Fourteen years ago she cut her nails and sold her jewelry to come and live in Woodstock, renting a gatekeeper’s house and telling her children they’d better learn to like it. Their father had been building them a big colonial in Great Neck when Helen tired of life with long fingernails and left. In Woodstock she started a bookshop, bought, eventually, a farmhouse, and has had lovers over the years. Now she is with someone new, a man she’s been driving up the Thruway to see for over a year, a doctor-turned-sculptor, and they have decided that they will live together. “But I will never again,” she says, “make dinner for a man.”
 
The point being that nothing, anymore, is what it would have been in the lives of women our age even twenty years ago. The old categories are gone, and with them, certain expectations. Things have opened up.
 
There was a moment during a party recently when all the women were in my kitchen at the same time. (Probably it was time to clear the dishes for dessert.) Someone brought up age, and we discovered that the six of us ranged from 49 to 59. For some reason, this made us giddy. Immediately the subject turned to sex—or rather, to our ambivalence about it at this midpoint, when all the talk is of how to stay alive and still have a modicum of fun.
 
“Did you see today’s Woodstock Times?” asked Fiona.
 
“ ‘Caution! Air bubbles break condoms. Smooth out air bubbles as you roll condom onto erect (hard) penis’!” Susan had memorized the article word for word.
 
We laughed. Among the locals, The Woodstock Times is known as the school paper, its coverage limited to the campuslike environment in which, in this small mountain town, we live. The condom article was written to supply certain information to kids that they weren’t getting elsewhere and certainly not in school. By afternoon, everyone in Woodstock, regardless of age, gender, or sexual inclination was talking about it.
 
“I never knew about the air bubbles,” said Catherine contemplatively, as if the whole long history of her sex life were passing before her eyes.
 
“It isn’t worth it,” said Fiona, standing in the open doorway of the kitchen and holding her cigarette outside. Fiona wonders, sometimes, if she isn’t staying in her marriage mostly because of AIDS.
 
I stacked the dishwasher. Catherine, newly divorced, said these days a lot of people stay married just so they don’t have to use condoms.
 
Susan, whose husband has been known to wander, said maybe that isn’t so foolproof. Maybe everyone ought to use condoms, married or not, because who knows what has happened earlier in a person’s life? There is such a thing as denial, after all.
 
Willa says things are too tense to just go out and fool around. Not only is there AIDS to think about, there’s age. Does she even have the juice to motivate a search for someone new? “It’s like what happens to mortgage money when the market is down,” she says.
 
Things dry up, is what she means.
 

Biographie de l'auteur :

Colette Dowling is an internationally known writer and lecturer whose books have been translated into 20 languages. She is the author of numerous books, including Maxing Out, Red Hot Mamas, You Mean I Don't Have to Feel This Way?, and The Cinderella Complex, which has been in print since it was first published in 1981. Her articles have appeared in many magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, New York, and Harper's. She lives in Woodstock, New York.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Random House Publishing Group
• Date d'édition: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0553374958
• ISBN 13: 9780553374957
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 304