Fifty Is the New Fifty by Suzanne Braun Levine

Author:Suzanne Braun Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

Many women need a wake-up call before they get to the point where Ava started and begin to factor themselves into their own lives, consciously, or, as Ava insists in her case, unconsciously. My favorite story about altruistic excess is Michealene’s lice disaster. She tells her story in This Is Not the Life I Ordered; it begins with “the dreaded pink note my three young boys brought home from school. It’s the note that makes any mother shudder: head lice had struck the classroom.” Her sons had not escaped. For a week she was washing all the sheets daily, treating her kids, checking her husband and even the dog. When the scourge had passed, she was exhausted and looking forward to the camping weekend the family had planned. But rest was not to be. “During our second day in the woods, I began to feel ill. I also found tender lumps behind my ears and in my armpits,” she recalls. When she began to run a fever, she decided it was time to get to the emergency room. Waiting there, she thought of “twenty-five terrible diseases I just knew I had. I thought of my children and my husband. How would they manage without me?”

When the ER doctor called her aside for his diagnosis, she was petrified. “My suspicions are confirmed,” he began ominously. “You have one of the worst cases of head lice I’ve seen in twenty-five years.” Her symptoms were an allergic reaction to the bites. A lightbulb lit up. “I had checked everyone in the household—even the dogs—but I had never once checked myself.” Michealene had learned a crucial Life Lesson. “My mistake was creating a to-do list that didn’t include me!”

If we really mean to do unto ourselves as we have been doing unto others, we have to counteract this kind of self-neglect. One remedy is a regimen of well-placed “not nows” and “not anymores.” “Not now”s recalibrate interpersonal timing. An interruption asserts one person’s need for something—even if it is just an answer—over that of the person who is doing something else. Babies interrupt all our activities, including our sleep, with their needs, but in many families such demands become entrenched. And the fulfiller is usually the same one person. I can’t forget Mary Catherine Bateson’s description, in Composing a Life, of the moment she suddenly realizes that throughout their twenty-year marriage, whenever her husband interrupted her, she put down the book—or thought or task—she was engaged in and snapped to attention; whereas when he was engrossed in something, she was totally accepting of his “Not now.” Reclaiming our time, our concentration, our privacy is a first step toward doing unto ourselves.

Reclaiming our own priorities is harder. That’s where “not anymore” comes in. It goes without saying that there will always be responsibilities we willingly assume for the caretaking of others and there will always be generous and helpful things we want to do for those we cherish, but that still leaves many errands, favors, and managerial functions that could be shed.

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