Composing a Life

instead of abandoning them, and I have taught or done research in linguistics and anthropology ever since. But the underlying assumptions of my life have until recently been very much the same as Joan’s: that family life would be constructed around my husband’s decisions about his career—which led him first to the Philippines and then to Iran—and my career would be subordinated to or contingent on the needs of family life, a husband, and a daughter. These assumptions were standard when I grew up, and we are not yet free of them. They continue to order many two-career families.
    In my own case, they represented a certain rebellion as well as a coming to terms with cultural norms. My mother, Margaret Mead, was one of the outstanding women of her time, probably the best known of American anthropologists. She constructed her life around professional constancies and made her marriages fit. She left two husbands and was then herself rejected by the third, my father, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. I had a rich and unusual childhood, with many adult caretakers, and I made my own synthesis from the models offered by my parents and the others I saw around me, assuming I would have a professional life of my own, but that I would construct it around my husband’s career. Today I can see that even in our differences my mother and I shared the struggle to combine multiple commitments, always liable to conflict or interruption. Each of us had to search in ambiguity for her own kind of integrity, learning to adapt and improvise in a culture in which we could only partly be at home.
    Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live. Women have always lived discontinuous and contingent lives, but men today are newly vulnerable, which turns women’s traditional adaptations into a resource. Historically, even women who devoted themselves to homemaking and childcare have had to put together a mosaic of activities and resolve conflicting demands on their time and attention. The physical rhythms of reproduction and maturation create sharper discontinuities in women’s lives than in men’s, the shifts of puberty and menopause, of pregnancy, birth, and lactation, the mirroring adaptations to the unfolding lives of children, their departures and returns, the ebb and flow of dependency, the birth of grandchildren, the probability of widowhood. As a result, the ability to shift from one preoccupation to another, to divide one’s attention, to improvise in new circumstances, has always been important to women. In the Philippines, when my training in Arabic linguistics was unusable, I retooled as a cultural anthropologist, but this is a less demanding shift than the shift from wife to mother, although perhaps a lonelier one. By examining the way women have coped with discontinuities in their lives, we may discover important clues that will help us all, men and women, cope with our unfolding lives.
    Because of the conditions of my life, I have had to learn something many of my academic colleagues don’t seem to know: that continuity is the exception in twentieth-century America, and that adjusting to discontinuity is not an idiosyncratic problem of my own but the emerging problem of our era. “How,” a young assistant professor wailed to me once, when I was Dean of the Faculty at Amherst College, “can they expect to know me well enough to make a judgment in only three years?” Because of our periods overseas, I had never held a job for over three years, other than that of wife and mother, and plenty of couples decide within less than three years that they know each other all too well.
    In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time. Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them. Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.
    I was in my mid-forties when I left Amherst. We are preoccupied today with midlife crises because these moments of reassessment and redirection occur now with half a lifetime of productivity still ahead, when opportunity still beckons beyond perplexity. We must expect that, over time, such moments will occur repeatedly, that we will live many lives. I found myself