Composing a Life

now I know how to pack my bags and how to unpack them, how to discover myself as a part of a new community.
    Composing a life is a little like making a Middle Eastern pastry, in which the butter must be layered in by repeated folding, or like making a samurai sword, whose layers of differently tempered metal are folded over and over. As a young college student, Joan knew with certainty that she was a dancer. Over time, this identity has meant being a teacher and a therapist, a wife and a mother, a craftswoman and a writer. From the vantage point of a seventeen year old, this would have looked like a jumble; seen now, from her eighties, it makes sense.
    In traditional societies, the transitions in the life cycle come more easily, for the fundamental recognition of one’s place in the social fabric dictates them. In our society, these transitions are more painful. College students feel under pressure to make the right career choices quickly, to get onto a track and stay on it, but life shifts constantly. When paths disappear in the underbrush or are blocked, we face the problem of finding a new path that will seem like a continuation of the old.
    Joan’s life has two patterns of discontinuity woven through it: the familiar discontinuities of women’s life cycle, bearing and raising three children, and the discontinuities of Erik’s career, involving constant reconstructions of her own. When Joan and Erik married, the practical side of life was more difficult than it has been for any of the rest of us, however much we had to scrimp and save as newly weds. Erik and Joan set up housekeeping in a tiny house, “like a peanut,” outside Vienna, far from the road. The only indoor plumbing was a pump in the kitchen that froze in the winter; so they had to bring water from outside. When Joan was pregnant she had the bad luck to find an indifferent and careless doctor, and Erik was sick when Kai was born in 1931 and then again when Jon was born in 1933. “Talk about couvade!” Joan said. “Erik always did it, though he couldn’t get anyone to minister to him.”
    Most discussions of the improvement in the status of women emphasize increasing rights and increasing conveniences. It is easy to forget how much safer childhood is than it used to be, and that this is a major liberating factor. We all worry when a child is sick, but the ordinary infectious diseases of childhood look very different in the age of antibiotics. Joan’s story is punctuated with tales of illness.
    “We had had a bad time in New Haven. The boys had both had chicken pox, and Jon had mastoid problems and needed surgery. Then, when Erik went to live with the Sioux, Kai got scarlet fever, and the two boys had to be isolated, one upstairs and one down, for six weeks. So that’s what I did while Erik was with the Sioux.” Erik’s trip was one of the first great efforts to examine psychoanalytic insights across cultural differences; Joan stayed at home. The following year, Jon had more mastoid problems, and they tried him out on sulfa and gave him an overdose. Joan was pregnant, running back and forth between Kai and Jon and feeling torn about leaving Jon in the hospital. He was pulled through with a transfusion given by Joan’s sister, but he was sick for a long time. “He needed somebody’s undivided attention, but he didn’t get it. I always felt badly about that. And then Sue arrived, and along came the decision to move to California. It would have been better if we had stayed another year on the East Coast and given a chance for Jon to recover and for me to look after Sue. It’s hard to balance between a newcomer and an older child that needs extra attention and is whiney and doesn’t evoke maternal instincts in the same way as a baby.
    “Sue’s arrival was an interesting event. First Kai and then Jon got mumps, and then I got it and swelled up like a toad. Just when I was through with the swelling, Sue decided to arrive, and since I was still in quarantine, they put me at the end of the contagious ward, but they couldn’t decide what to do with Sue. The pains stopped and started again, it was late at night and no attendant was available. Along came Erik in a white jacket, so he decided he would have to deliver, but then he sounded the alarm, and the docs all congregated in the hall discussing where to put the baby. I said, you’re not going to take this baby away. Since they couldn’t think of anything better to do they let me keep