The Water We Swim In

Older fish: "Morning. How's the water?" Younger fish: "What the heck is water?" David Foster Wallace

What if the compromises I’ve been struggling with have less to do with me and more to do with the “water” women my age have been swimming in but just didn’t know it? 

Just like a fish doesn’t know it’s in water what if it’s impossible or at least a serious challenge to find wholeness as a woman in our society?

I recall I conversation with my daughter from two years ago:

“I’m not sure I want to go back to college after winter break.”

My insides start to churn but I will myself to remain calm and seemingly unaffected by my daughter’s declaration.  She’s just testing me.  Trying to see if she can get a response from me.

“OK what’s going on – what are you thinking?” I ask.

“I just don’t know what the point is?” she sighs. “The point of any of this. Going to school, getting a job.  Why does anyone work instead of just enjoying life and spending time with the people that make us happy?”

“Well,” I explain, as I try to keep my voice from betraying my feelings, “because life costs money and you’re going to school to hopefully find something you enjoy doing that will also allow you to work and provide for yourself.”

“But what if none of it sounds fun?  Do any adults really enjoy what they’re doing? “

“Look at you,” she taunts.   You’ve worked so hard all your life and what do you have to really show for it?  You’re not even happy, Mom, and it’s not like you’re rich.  Why should I work hard at a job that sucks just to be old and unhappy like you are?”

Ouch.  I don’t say the words out loud because I can’t possibly give her the satisfaction of knowing how deeply her assessment of me has cut to my core. 

I stare at this woman child.  This newly minted “adult” at least legally if not in practice.  I almost can’t believe she came out of my loins.  She stands before me with a poise and confidence I never had at her age but at the same time a sense of entitlement and arrogance that make me want to lash out in anger.

Time comes to a standstill as I vacillate between wanting to smack the ungrateful brat and kick her out of the house to learn the “hard knocks of life” and the part of me that wants to say – “You’re right.  It’s all fucked.  Our society, our values, the whole thing.  This isn’t what life is meant to be about.” 

Mostly I just want to cry.  Other people’s words only hurt us when they come a little too close to the truth.  Kayla wasn’t entirely correct – I’m not unhappy per se.  But there have been many nights that I have sat on the kitchen floor silently crying after the kids have gone to bed. 

The tears weren’t of unhappiness as much as frustration.  I guess I did think that by now I’d have more to show for all my years of work.  More than anything I didn’t think it’d be this hard.  Despite having a very successful business the money seemed to go out as quickly as it came in and there was never enough time in the day.

This conversation was two years before my “mid-life crisis”. 

I was still running my resort and in the daily chaos of small business ownership and solo parenting.

It isn’t that I hadn’t been looking for answers. My office bookshelves are lined with familiar titles from the “best of lists” of self-help literature.  The books taunt me not unlike my daughter – “so much for all the self-help work” – just one more area of my life where the effort stands in stark contrast to tangible results.

It’s not surprising that the largest consumers of this genre are women.  Most women I know are silently suffering.  Thoreau said “men live lives of quiet desperation.”  Now that we have accepted a seat at the table of the power and privilege of masculinity, I guess we also get a heaping dose of the desperation as well. 

On the surface it might like look - and we will certainly tell ourselves - that these are first world white girl problems.

What do we have to complain about?  We have the freedom to do and be whatever we want to be.  How quickly we can forget the brevity with which we’ve had these choices, power and freedom.  When in the herstory of women have we had it so good?

God forbid, though that we have a few hours to ourselves without something screaming to be done.  It’s in those quiet, still moments when there is no laundry to fold; no work email to respond to; no child needing our care or attention that the little voice inside of us creeps in and starts to nudge at the corners of our awareness.  Psst – it whispers – like a small child tugging on our sleeve for attention.

“Is this what I’ve worked so hard for?  The degrees, the promotions, the hours performing.”

To ask this question – to even question what we are striving for brings up the guilt that somehow, it’s unfeminist to not want a seat at the table of working and achievement and success.

If it’s not unfeminist, it’s definitely unAmerican.

I’m beginning to think that my crisis isn’t just personal but somehow connected to having signed up for a system – more than that a way of being – that I never really questioned the past 30 years. 

Perhaps the problem isn’t that I had failed or done something wrong.  In fact it’s the opposite.  Hadn’t I done everything right?  Hadn’t I gotten the grades and the degrees; achieved the promotions and the career positions.  Hadn’t I shown that I can and should be able to do everything a man can do and more?

Yes.  Yes, I had – yes, we all have…. And perhaps therein lies the problem.

We have done an excellent job of being men in women’s bodies.   We have spent the last 100+ years fighting to be equal to men – to have the same rights and privileges and opportunities - that we have forgotten that we aren’t men.

Yes, some of what we have been striving and fighting for are basic human rights.

But that doesn’t deny the fact that we have been clawing our way to have a seat at a table that was designed by men for men.  The only way we get to be at this table was by developing our masculine nature. 

This isn’t a bad thing per se.  In the journey to wholeness, we want to be able to express our masculine and feminine aspects.  There are times that a more masculine, direct and logical response is what’s called for.  However, the table hasn’t really changed to accommodate women.  It’s still the old boys table ~ we’re just allowed to sit at. Which also means conforming to and playing by the rules that they set.

What would it be like to have a new table one that was built from the ground up to not just accommodate women but to honor that we are different and in that difference is our strength and our magic?

Maybe the compromises that I made have less to do with personal self-betrayal as much as the best way to have navigated a system that wasn’t designed from the beginning to support my truest yearnings.

Maybe this is bigger than me – maybe we all need to be having a midlife crisis.