Turning the Page September 2009
by Karen Kullgren

Fifty is the New Fifty: 10 Life Lessons for Women in Second Adulthood by Suzanne Braun Levine 
 
I have three words for you. Buy this book! And yes, though I am a devout library lover, I mean buy it. Because you’re going to want to highlight it, to make notes and place exclamation points in the margins. You’re going to want to carry it to your next women’s group meeting, to your doctor’s office, to your book club, to your office or to girls’ night out. You’re going to want to think about it, and definitely talk about it.

Suzanne Braun Levine was the first editor of Ms. Magazine, the editor of The Columbia Journalism Review and producer of the Peabody-Award-winning documentary, “She’s Nobody’s Baby: A History of American Women in the Twentieth Century.” She is the author of Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood (Viking, 2005) and she serves as Contributing Editor to More Magazine.

Levine’s new book is about priorities, about truth telling and authenticity. It’s about self care, which some may call selfishness. It’s about women’s friendships. It’s about our health and about what Judith Viorst famously termed “necessary losses.” It’s about our passions and our quality of life. It’s about finding out who we are beneath societal expectations and false fronts we have erected to navigate those. It’s about getting to know ourselves at this stage of life and shaping how we live out our lives.

From the Fertile Void, which is what she calls the transition period “where we are tossed about by confusing new impulses,” we move into the next stage of Second Adulthood, as “we begin to consolidate the knowledge, insights, and know-how—the wisdom—we have salvaged from that wrenching ride.”

The author does not offer any cookie-cutter standards of experience at this age, though she does glean many common truths. She sprinkles her own insights with interviews and first-person accounts from other women over 50.

Levine gives one of the best summaries of the aspirations of women in their Second Adulthood, and how we realize those aspirations, that I have ever heard:

Building a life of one’s own, one no and one yes at a time, is what we mean by the goal I hear articulated again and again: authenticity. We want to find our true path and follow it. We want to be honest and forthright with our friends. We want to draw loving limits within our families. We want to do our best work in the world. Each and every one of those objectives requires the courage of each woman’s convictions: what she rejects and what she affirms.

The book comes back to this over and over, to the process of discernment, about what we say no to—that which depletes us, makes us feel small, is toxic or wastes our precious time and energy—and what we say yes to—what works for us, what nourishes us, what gives us joy. We must “[prune] away expectations, responsibilities, even people who no longer apply in order to get down to a core sense of what really matters.” Thus we need to stop expending so much of our time and energy anticipating the needs and wants of others, anticipating their judgment and jumping to fix their problems.

I love Levine’s liberating revelation about what happens when, as one of the women in her book, Anne, puts it, you give yourself permission to put yourself first. “It suddenly dawned on me,” says Levine, “that in the course of inventing the rest of my life, I had stopped feeling compelled to show up where I was supposed to, simply because I was supposed to; I was learning to ask myself: “So, do you want to do that, do you need to do that—yes or no?”….I now delight in the ease with which appointments can be moved around and requests turned down without throwing the planet off its orbit. Which is not to say that I am careless with my commitments. Everyone who matters to me can count on me—even more so now that I am getting good at prioritizing my time.”

In her chapter on crisis (what she calls “the big-ticket disasters”) the author talks about the letting go that comes with Second Adulthood—letting go of our children, our driving ambition, old dreams, unrealistic body standards. And as we let go, of course, we make way for new possibilities and new ways of living in our own bodies and relationships and jobs and lives. Dread, she says, does not serve us well: “There is no future in anticipating the worst.”

Levine doesn’t sugarcoat it all though. She knows that there are the good days of confidence and empowerment vs. the bad days of falling down, going backwards, body betrayals, etc. She talks about the hang-ups about money we have carried into Second Adulthood, first being the fear of not being able to do the math and second being the bag lady syndrome: “Turning around this paradigm of helplessness is one of the troublesome requirements of inventing the rest of our lives.”

On health, she quotes Dr. Andrew Weil on the notion of “aging gracefully” as letting “nature take its course while doing everything in our power to delay the onset of age-related disease.” The trick, she says, is (again) discernment, about what is normal aging and what is cause for attention. She also spends a good deal of that chapter talking about taking charge of our sexual health, specifically protection against HIV. Levine also reminds us of our own collaborative power, “the health-giving properties of the medical information exchange among trusted friends and Horizontal Role Models,” how we share intimate experiences to help one another, mobilize networks of care, discuss finances and insurance and icky details on bodily functions with surgery or disease.

Her chapter on “A ‘Circles of Trust’ Is a Must” is about women’s friendships, and discusses everything from the anthropological to biological explanations for women’s support of one another. Levine reminds us, “The companionship of like-minded women gives us courage, reduces stress, and is the best problem-solving environment there is. And the laughter we generate together, is, as we all know, the elixir of life.”

Suzanne Braun Levine is a longtime friend of TTN and in the book highlights the work of Charlotte Frank in founding and building TTN and the Caring Collaborative

Levine closes Fifty is the New Fifty surprised and pleased at coming into equilibrium. “Who would have thought that given all the turmoil and false starts—all the conflicts and contradictions—of this stage of life, we would reach a plateau of reconciliation and synthesis?” She uses the analogy of a seesaw: “the grounded center that supports the highs and lows but doesn’t itself get thrown off balance…Seen from that one still point, the contradictory factors in our current lives appear to compensate for one another. You soar, you tumble, but you keep your seat.” In other words, after years of an either/or perspective, “The new paradigm is an exercise in both/and.”

Keep up with Levine on her website www.suzannebraunlevine.com.
Read Karen's interview with Suzanne: A Conversation with Suzanne Braun Levine

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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.