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Introduction
“All language is a longing for home,” wrote Rumi, the thirteenth century poet. In the twenty-first century, I’d take that a step further and say that the longing for home itself is a powerful force, especially as we get older.
And what is that home we hunger for? Home means many things to different people. It can be a physical place, an emotional space, or an activity where we can be ourselves, where we can reveal our true nature and be known for who we are. It is a source of inner peace and inspiration, both a journey and a destination...
As you meet the eighteen women in this book who each followed a different path home, you’ll see that home is both the activity and the feeling it engenders. Home is that feeling of wholeness, which is with us no matter where we are or whom we’re with. We take it with us wherever we go, because it resides within our own head and heart.
Growing up with a family in the furniture business, I’ve always been interested in the concept of home. My physical home was a red brick house at 432 Wolf Street in a working class neighborhood two blocks from Lake Michigan in Racine, Wisconsin. Our home was the center for every holiday dinner since none of my extended family cooked. My mother would roast the brisket and potatoes, boil the vegetables, bake the sour cream coffee cake, and brew the coffee for every Thanksgiving and Passover and each minor holiday in between. All the cousins gathered at our house, sitting around the huge open fireplace. I felt so happy with everyone there.
It took me years to recreate that same feeling when I was living in Philadelphia with a family of my own, and my parents, relatives and sister were hundreds of miles away. Since our family was small, I invited friends to join us, so our holidays became a fusion of family and friends, and I developed a reputation for making friends feel like family. Today, living in Santa Fe, nothing makes me happier than having all my children and grandchildren under one roof, and if friends need a place to celebrate the holidays, of course, they are welcome too.
Growing up, I was an only child for four years and then my sister and I were one of the few children in a family top heavy with adults. As the first child, I felt pressure to obey the rules and be good, or as my sister Anne would say, “Patti was always perfect” (in her eyes).
Of course, I wasn’t perfect, but I tried to please my parents and win their approval by conforming to their wishes. One incident stands out: I remember sitting in the back seat of the Pontiac with my parents up front. I was sixteen years old, and we were going to pick up my cousin Lillian for her brother Ted’s funeral. Ted, one of my favorite older cousins, had dropped dead from a heart attack in his fifties while fishing in the Canadian wilderness. I was sitting in the back seat quietly crying when Mother turned around and said sharply, “Stop crying. Don’t let anyone see you cry! You’ll upset Lillian.”
Because of occurrences like this, I learned to hide my feelings under a placid veneer and not reveal my emotions. I became so adept at this that after awhile, I didn’t know how I felt. It wasn’t until I went to social work school and had to acknowledge and report every feeling—on waking, in the shower, throughout the day—that I started getting back in touch with my feelings.
I wrote my master’s thesis on the use of spontaneity in the casework situation. That was the beginning of my interest in being authentic, a theme that has been consistent throughout my writing.
Because I was unable to find part-time social work when my children were small, I turned to writing, something I had always longed to do. I wrote on topics that interested me professionally: personality profiles and feature articles on health, medicine, and psychological issues. With my social work background as a foundation, I was comfortable writing about people and their problems. After writing research-based nonfiction for ten or twelve years, I yearned for something more, something deeper. As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I felt a need to write from my heart.
That’s when I started writing about my own personal experiences. I wrote about my challenges after my children left home, my friendships at midlife, my relationship with my sister, and what yoga meant to me. I still had to do research, but now I enriched the research with my own narrative. Since I am a private person, this proved difficult at first, but as I shared more I was able to unearth my own voice, reveal my impressions and emotions, and connect more intimately with others.
As I moved further away from the intellectual, I was ripe for an experience “beyond the mind.” In my early fifties, I was going through a difficult time and needed something to help me cope. I decided to try yoga. I loved it from the moment I walked into my first class in a studio bathed in white. Even before I started moving and breathing consciously, I felt a huge sense of relief. I had walked in uptight and edgy, not having slept the night before. When I walked out after that first class, I was in a very different place. I knew the problems were still there but somehow they seemed more distant, and I was able to handle them better. From the nurturing I received and the connection I felt, I couldn’t wait to go back for more. There was no question that yoga would be an important piece of my life from then on.
Since that first class eighteen years ago, yoga has been my daily companion. In my last book, Yoga For Women At Midlife & Beyond: A Home Companion, I wrote: “Yoga is a homecoming: a coming home to ourselves.” And that’s exactly how I feel—every single day.
More recently, yoga helped me return to my other “home”: writing. After completing my last book in 2005, I didn’t think I’d write another one. With no inspiration, my ideas had dried up, and I felt that my life as a writer was over. Nonetheless, I continued to call myself a writer—even though I wasn’t writing. During this period, I knew something was missing. I felt unsettled and unproductive, but couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. I took poetry classes, dabbled in book arts and sampled the rich cultural scene in Santa Fe. Although these activities were enjoyable, they didn’t satisfy me on a visceral level as my writing had.
The one thing that grounded me during this disconcerting period was my yoga practice. Through doing meditation, yoga and breath work, I was able to connect to who I truly am, reflect on what I wanted to do with my life, and gain clarity about what mattered most to me.
Then I spent a week devoted to authors at The Chautauqua Institution in a beautiful wooded location on a clear lake in upstate New York. Each day different authors spoke about their work, about the writer’s life, and about their own journey as an author. There were poetry readings, talks on memoir writing, and book signings. I felt drawn to writing and writers as never before and journaled with a fervor in that rich, nourishing atmosphere. I left that week knowing that I wanted to write again and be a part of the creative fabric of Santa Fe. The idea for this book began to percolate and emerge as I threw myself into journal writing on my return, reflected on the meaning of home as we age, and discussed these ideas with friends.
Yoga is my home. It doesn’t matter whether I’m standing on one foot in tree pose on my mat in my own bedroom or in a motel room a thousand miles away: I feel centered and grounded. When I come off the mat, I take that feeling with me and it gives me comfort and confidence to be myself—wherever I am or whoever I’m with.
Knowing this about myself, I wondered what path others would take or what they needed to do to reach the same sense of wholeness that I receive from yoga. I imagined that there were many ways to come home but was curious about whether the process was universal for older women with only the content and context different.
Did it matter what their cultural and religious background was or what part of the country they lived in? Was it significant whether they were straight or gay, rich or poor? Would they all arrive at the same destination at the end of their journey? And, most importantly, how would they know when they’d arrived?
Searching for answers to these questions motivated me to find a diverse, multi-cultural group of women to include in my book. I sent out a “Call for Stories” on the Internet to friends, acquaintances and colleagues and received a torrent of replies; many women wrote to me wanting to be a part of this book. It was not unusual to receive two to three paged single-spaced replies in which women poured out their life stories. They’d often end with a comment like, “If this is not what you want, don’t worry. Getting information about your project was the inspiration I needed to take the time to reflect on these experiences and put them into words.” Truly an amazing response!
Many sent information about a career change they’d made, but this book is not about career change. It is about something much deeper and more fundamental: It is about experiencing a turning point later in life that transforms our self-concept and our self-perception as we learn about ourselves and the world, and look at ourselves differently through the lens and wisdom of our sixty-plus years.
Through an elaborate screening process, I was able to winnow down the applicants and select eighteen women. I have chosen the number eighteen, because it is a spiritual number in Judaism. The Hebrew word for “alive” or “life” is chai, which has a numerical value of eighteen. Jews often give donations and monetary gifts in multiples of eighteen as a way to convey blessings for a long life. I’m using it in my title as a symbolic way to honor the richness of the lives and the longevity of the women featured in the book.
These women are truly remarkable. They are courageous, outspoken, feisty and determined. In working with me, they were generous with their time and open in sharing their life stories. They are not celebrities but women like you and me.
I did not include women who had found their path years ago and followed it through midlife into their sixties and seventies, like my friends Lorraine and Diane, who knew from a young age, with a single-minded focus, that they would be artists and that art was their passion and their home. I was fascinated by women who followed an established path or lived a life without intention for years and then experienced this turning point or an insight or revelation that transformed their sense of self and changed their lives in profound ways. Victoria Zackheim, a writer and editor whom you’ll get to know in this book, would have told you that life was good two years ago. Her work was satisfying, the anthologies she edited received rave reviews, and her twin granddaughters brought her much joy. But everything changed in the summer of 2008: she fell down the stairs of her loft. Actually, her life outwardly did not change that much, but the internal shifts from the fall dramatically altered her life. As you’ll read in her chapter, she discovered her fragility, came to terms with her mortality, and developed a newfound ability to accept help from friends and family.
Like Victoria, each woman I’ve written about has her own chapter, which consists of two parts: It begins with her profile, summing up her life to the present; this is followed by a larger section in which she speaks in her own words, which I’ve developed from our interviews, about how she found her “home,” her path of getting there, and how this process transformed her view of herself and her world.
I am hoping that the women in this book, who range in age from fifty-six to seventy-seven, will serve as role models and inspiration for younger women who are interested in actualizing themselves. While someone who is forty or fifty may think she can’t identify with a woman who is sixty or seventy, once she reads these stories, I know she’ll feel a strong connection to these extraordinary women and abandon the common stereotypes that older women are invisible, dull, and “over the hill.”
Home is a haven within where we can express ourselves without masks or airs, where we can be authentic and feel comfortable and safe. It is different from finding a resting place in troubled times; it is an emotional and psychological state that creates the sense of belonging and well-being we crave. It is a sense of harmony: our internal and external selves matching, our inner and outer voices becoming one. Home is an emotional experience that grounds us and gives us a sense of contentment. At earlier periods in our lives we may have felt we were inadequate, but not anymore. At forty when her ex-husband was leaving, Elena Montano, whom you’ll meet on these pages, says, “I felt ugly, old and terrible. Today at seventy, I feel younger, I love myself, and I take good care of me.” Thirty years made a huge difference in her self-concept.
At this stage, we know we’re not perfect and certainly not finished growing, but we’re in a very different space than when we were younger. We are not constantly second guessing ourselves or desperately seeking approval of everyone we meet. If “they” don’t like us, that’s their problem. After participating in a panel discussion, a friend told me, “It took me sixty-five years to find my voice. When I spoke, I felt grounded and solid, and I didn’t care if I offended anyone.”
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