Secret Paths: Women in the New Midlife
Terri Apter
Language: English
Pages: 306
ISBN: 0393315002
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this groundbreaking and insightful study Terri Apter traces womens midlife course, drawing on detailed interviews with women in their forties and fifties. Apter finds that women experience a renewed sense of themselves and see the second half of life as an opportunity for psychological growth and fulfillment instead of a time of despair over lost youth and beauty.
She divides midlife women into four categories--traditional, innovative, expansive, protesting--and shows the cause for the midlife crisis and the path toward resolution for each type.
with all those attachments that seem inevitable and all those occurrences that may be mere chance. From this, she has to fashion the story that means the most to her—the story of her own life, its effect on others, its potential for achievement. In youth, the belief that one is unique often leads to a conviction that one can manage easily what others have failed to contend with. Micky Riley recalled how convinced she was that things would be different for her, because “when you’re young the
imagined how I would lie, on the carpet of my childhood bedroom where this chill thought found me. I would be discovered, dead, before anyone could disclose the evil secret of my maturity. I cannot date this bizarre fantasy. There are no signs to help me—no coinciding memories of toys, or wallpaper, or events to mark a before or after of that grim “decision.” But I recall the air of petulance. The isolation in which these thoughts arose must have been due to some punishment, which most
this question, or shelve it, I was prevented by my youngest daughter. An artistically talented ten-yearold drew two pictures for her, one of her and one of her sister as she envisaged them 50 years from now. These beautifully executed sketches were hideous images of women with skinny legs and swollen knees, with protruding noses decorated by warts, with mouths twisted into malicious grins. As this ten-year-old’s imagination turned the clock forward, it saw only caricatures, which blotted out
its time zone. Time becomes “a proxy indicator for performance, based on some crazy assumption that the more time, the better.”8 When unemployment threatens, no employee can afford to work less hard than another employee. When financial rewards are offered for long, constant work, then long work seems like good work, even though it may not be productive. When corporations believe, however mistakenly, that it is more efficient to work its employees hard, then people who want to be employed have
listened to the story of the other as though she could read her own answers from it. IN CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AROUSES pain, but not moral outrage, which might offer protection in spite of the pain. Nicola Campbell recalled “on and off” an episode in which she had been abused by her father’s brother, who often looked after her, since he was unemployed and both her own parents worked. “I didn’t see it as something I should remember, any more than you remember every scolding. And sometimes when I