Composing a Life

her. I had such a ball. Having a girl was kind of necessary with two boys. Great fun to be so intimate with the other sex as it were, really getting to know something he-male, but now I had the daughter I had longed for. So that was the start of rooming-in in New Haven Hospital.”
    Joan was whimsical about the problems of settling in California. “On the first day the boys went to school, I had sent them in knickerbockers. They were furious: ‘Nobody wears things like this!’ So I had to get them somehow into jeans for the next day. Then they went scouting off to see the town and got lost and had to ask their way. Finally they asked a policeman—they knew the address but not how to find it—so he brought them back and said, ‘You better teach these kids their phone number.’ ‘I didn’t get it done yesterday,’ I said, ‘but by tomorrow I’ll get it clear.’”
    The first major uprooting had occurred when the Eriksons decided in 1933, with the approach of the Nazi danger, to leave Austria. They quickly discovered that resettling in Denmark, where Erik had been born, would be almost impossible because Erik had been adopted by his German stepfather. Later, when they were in the United States (first in Connecticut and then in California) and war began, Erik was classified as a refugee scholar, but Canadian-born Joan was startled to find herself classified as an enemy alien because she had married a German citizen.
    The United States no longer lets such changes of legal status override birth without personal choice, but many countries still do; changes at one level involve the threat of changes at other levels, redefinitions of identity. When I was interviewing the foreign wives of Iranians, I found that for many of them, their cultural problems were overshadowed by the fact that in marrying an Iranian they had automatically become subjects of the shah. Marriage literally determined identity. The United States did not deny their citizenship, but they could no longer use American passports to leave Iran and could only leave with Iranian passports, which required their husbands’ permission. In the same way, regardless of conviction, their marriages technically made them Muslims and subject to Muslim laws of marriage, divorce, and inheritance.
    A second political move came in 1951, an echo of the first as Joan and Erik withdrew once again from a changing political atmosphere. They had of course both taken oaths of loyalty to the United States when they were granted citizenship, but as Joseph McCarthy’s waves of red-baiting increased, the University of California started to require annual loyalty oaths from all faculty. Erik first refused to sign. Then, seeing friends pressured into signing, even though the university was unwilling actually to dismiss him, he resigned. The family moved back East.
    Each of these moves, as well as four or five less painful moves over the years, meant that Joan first had to concentrate on reestablishing home life and then look again for her own distinctive niche. Joan was what used to be called “just a housewife” from about 1933 to 1948. In fact, she was also busy in those years organizing activities in the arts for her children. In doing so, she was laying the groundwork for a theory of the relationship between artistic and sensory learning on the one hand, and development and healing on the other. She was also collaborating on all of Erik’s work, so that in 1950 when the work on the life cycle was presented at a conference, it bore her name along with Erik’s. It was not until 1948 that Joan started to learn jewelry making, finding the space and time for a new art after an apparent fifteen-year hiatus. The forging of a sense of identity is never finished. Instead, it feels like catching one’s image reflected in a mirror next to a carousel—“Here I am again.” Johnnetta, describing the experience of returning to work at a black college in the South, quoted Malcolm X: “What go round come round.”
    Almost everyone faces discontinuities that take as long to recover from as a distant move, for almost all of us must deal with the deaths of our parents. A year is the magic time period that is often given for recovery from bereavement—longer than allowed by the forms of our society, shorter than the customs that expect widows to mourn forever. I heard that estimate from a friend who was given it by a psychiatrist after his father’s death. He found it immensely