Composing a Life

many women give up on breast-feeding. The first week of an exercise program, especially one I tackle unguided, is enough to make me give up in despair, saying I “don’t have the energy.” If I ran a little too far in the morning, I would doze in the office; if I ran a distance that I had worked up to gradually, I would be wide awake all through those insane days that started before six and often lasted until ten or eleven at night. At middle age, the difference between enough and too much was very narrow and would have been easy to miss without guidance.
    The limits on the human capacity for all kinds of exertion are clearly similar, whether it is the capacity for running, or making love, or nursing a baby. Each activity has a core set of physical limitations surrounded by a complex of hopes and habits and anxieties. These are cybernetic systems, where capacity over time is governed not by addition and subtraction but by a feedback system that has the capacity, within limits, to spiral up to greater productivity or down-ward to failure. Hamlet praised his mother’s love for his father by saying she hung on him, “As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on” (
Hamlet
I, ii, 144). Indeed. His comment about the middle-aged queen contains a more general truth about human sexuality and also about creativity and self-confidence.
    Just as the capacity for sex or nursing or exercise is not governed by an arithmetic of addition and subtraction, so the possibility of combining these activities should be looked at in terms of synergy rather than competition. Having an active sex life at night does not necessarily make a man or a woman less productive on the job, yet even sex can become difficult and laborious or be overdone. The self-reinforcing effect of exercise works within a certain range, which can be adjusted, but is always liable to be disrupted by extremes. When schedules become rigid, adjustment is impossible and the level of effort that can be sustained over time drops.
    One of the things that has fascinated me during my interviews is discovering how many things the women in this project fit into their days. Ellen is the only one with preschool children now, and she repeatedly described simplifying her life and reducing her commitments so that she can concentrate on caring for her son and daughter. But with a little probing, out comes a long list of activities, including joint projects with a number of women friends. In fact, Ellen did not so much reduce her professional life to have children as change the way that life was organized, learning to compose the disparate elements in novel and less rigid ways.
    “From the time I hit the doors of medical school, my life had been structured. I knew what I was doing every day, and I was very busy and had little space. And I remember one day having the realization—it was like an aha! experience—I’m not going to be able to work like this and have a child. And having some clarity that, if I were ever going to have a kid, I’d have to quit my job. And feeling like I really didn’t want to give it up and being very torn. I also felt taken in by some of the feminist ideology. I know a lot of successful women doctors that seem to have a very adequate and happy home life and take care of kids and also work in that kind of setting, going to work every day early in the morning, and coming home late at night, and having full-time childcare, but knowing me, I just knew I couldn’t do that. And I remember what a jarring experience that was. I remember thinking, they did it, but they must have had to pay some price for it, because there are just so many hours in the day. I was burning candles at ten ends already, between a full-time administrative position in the hospital, a full-time clinical practice, ongoing clinical research, and teaching. There were really four major areas. So something had to be given up. You know, when you are in your twenties and thirties, you don’t think about the limitations of things.”
    Ellen gave up her administrative position as director of the psychiatric emergency service and most of her clinical practice. She increased her research and writing, picked up a number of consulting contracts, and has been increasingly involved in projects related to the homeless. The most important difference between her life then and now is that in escaping from a career track in which her rhythms were dictated from above, she has become able