The idea for this blog first came to me last summer, a year into my forties, as I looked back on my emotional roller coaster of a life. Coming up with that inaugural post, however, proved to be something of a challenge. I knew what I wanted to say, but it seemed safer to post nothing than to set the wrong tone. Last weekend changed all that.
Twenty years had passed since I graduated from Smith College, and this time I wasn't going to miss the party. I made my way to Northampton, MA, for reunion. As Ivy Day gave way to late night glasses of Pinot Grigio and off-key choruses of Pump up the Jam, Facebook-style posturing went out the window. A common voice began to emerge. Attending a prestigious liberal arts college had not necessarily been the golden ticket to a lifetime of success and happiness that many of us had expected. And for the women of our generation, the stakes had been particularly high.
We were the daughters of Madonna, heirs to the Women's Movement, girls who came of age in the 80s when anything and everything seemed possible. We were told, promised even, that we could have it all - a fulfilling career and domestic bliss. That sacrifice and compromise would not dictate the patterns of our lives, as it had the lives of our mothers and grandmothers. The war had been won for us and we damn well better not disappoint.
I had flirted with feminism in high school, took it for granted at a women's college, then, conveniently forgotten about it in graduate school. As I entered middle age, a nagging discontent took hold. No success had been great enough. Failures and disappointments were magnified. I came to realize that the joys and sorrows of my life could not be disentangled from the web of what is, uniquely, the female experience. The feminist rhetoric that washed over me twenty years ago was suddenly palpable and pressing. We've come so far, but I couldn't help but feel we'd taken a wrong turn along the way. Having it all, for the majority of us, was simply an impossibility. And yet so many of us had come to loath ourselves for it.
It wasn't just me. Granted, not everyone at reunion voiced the same experience, the same concerns. But many did. And so, we absolved ourselves of the sin of imperfection. For the weekend anyway. Sisterhood is powerful. It took twenty years, but I finally got the message.
