Suzanne Braun Levine - Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood

2. Second Adolescence
A Second Chance at Growing Up Strong

3. Defiance
Speaking Up, Speaking Out, Speaking Your Mind

4. The Fertile Void
Taking Your Time

7. Redefining Intimacy
Love, Sex, Friendship, and the New You

11. Becoming a Critical Mass
The Personal Is Still Political

My first step into Second Adulthood was backward off a ninety-foot cliff. On impulse, I had signed up for an Outward Bound program and found myself poised in full rappelling gearharness, helmet, and guide ropeto walk down the face of what could just as well have been my twelve-story apartment building. The terror was pure. I was only mildly distracted by the reassuring words of our leader: Fear is the appropriate response here. After all, evolution doesnt take much interest in creatures that step backward off ninety-foot cliffs.

I made it down, of course. I had learned the lesson the exercise was surely designed to teach, that fear is not an unacceptable response, but it can be confronted. And I fulfilled a personal mission: to find out if I was still a tomboy. (The very word, I realize as I use it, is a throwback to a bygone era, not just my own past.) My tomboy self, long lost in a marriage to a nonathletic, nonnature-lover and a busy urban life, played a big part in my personal mythology. Ever since I crossed the fiftieth birthday barrier a couple of years earlier I had wanted to reconnect with that rugged, adventurous outdoorswoman, if indeed she was still an authentic component of who I am. If my tomboy was still there, I wanted to share that part of me with my daughter, who was growing up in a time more accepting of the big-boned body type we share and as a young woman with an unequivocal appreciation of her bodys strength. But first I had to make sure I wasnt perpetuating a myth about myself. Having grown up feeling I was often playing a part written by others, I wanted, as best I could, to get to the truth about my life.

As my feet hit the ground and I looked back up the craggy cliff toward the blue sky and my cheering companions, I was overcome with emotionemotions really, more than I can identify even nowand I began to sob and laugh uncontrollably. But it was after I calmed down and had gone kind of limp that a totally unexpected breakthrough of really cosmic proportions hit. The descent down the cliff came on the fifth day of a seven-day program. I had done everything asked of mejumping into icy water at dawn, sleeping on oars lined across an open boat, climbing a telephone pole, swinging on a rope into a spider-web netso I was primed to obediently take on the next assignment. It was to keep our harnesses and ropes in place and climb back up the wall. Maybe it was because I was so totally wasted by the emotional and physical exertion, but I would like to think it was overcoming fear on the way down that gave me the courage to say no to going back up.