Peripheral Visions

continuity? Each of us can tell his or her story with alternative emphases.
    At some deep level of the personality, perhaps, all change evokes the terrors of abandonment and dissolution, loss of those others who define self, or confrontation with a self become a stranger. During states of high vulnerability, panic is sometimes triggered by minute changes, so we arm ourselves with tokens of continuity. The wanderer or adventurer learns to finger a “lucky piece” along the way, and parents are sometimes advised to encourage an infant facing travel or multiple caretakers to cling to a blanket or a teddy bear, so the same tattered reassurance of the familiar can be carried from place to place. Immigrants and pioneers have always carried with them at least a few objects that provide a link with the past: Grandmother’s photograph, a Bible, a pair of Sabbath candlesticks, a small blue china jug that, moved from mantel to mantel, converts a new house into a home. Devout Shiite Muslims carry a little molded block of clay from the site of the great martyrdoms, so that when they prostrate themselves for prayer their foreheads will touch the soil of Qarbala. The mementos I brought with me, reminders of multiple homes, converted an unfamiliar table at the MacDowell Colony into a desk where I could resume the task of composition: recalled in the text, the ammonite and the blue-green globe, the carpet and the Passover plate connect the chapters and lines of reflection.
    If I recognize my situation today as comparable to but not the same as my situation yesterday, I can translate yesterday’s skills and benefit from yesterday’s learning. I will make the mistake neither of trying to start from scratch nor of simply replicating previous patterns. Reinterpretation and translation, so useful in moving from one culture to another, turn out to be essential skills in moving from year to year even in the same setting. But if a situation is construed as totally new and different, earlier learning may be seen as irrelevant. The transfer of learning relies on some recognizable element of continuity—a woman describing her patchwork of careers for me recently remarked wryly on a continuity between work as a kindergarten teacher, a teacher of the deaf, and dean for “Greek life” (fraternities) on a university campus!
    Gender stereotypes often suggest that females emphasize continuity (this is called “keeping the home fires burning”), while males venture forth on the new. Yet traditional female roles involve a high degree of unacknowledged adaptation to change, while many men have plied the same trade for a lifetime with little new learning. Women often use labels to construe adaptation as continuity. When farmers lose their farms or men their jobs, their wives may be quicker to adapt, for while the men mourn their homes, their livelihoods, and their identities, the women, equally homeless and impoverished, hold on to their identities as wives, looking for new ways of caring for and supporting their husbands. Men sometimes use labels to assert continuity as well, as when sudden military adventures are justified as defense. The Vietnam War, which triggered profound change both in the United States and in Southeast Asia, was rationalized as a way of maintaining balance.
    Along with the odd distortion, now much commented on, of women who used to say, “I don’t work, I’m just a housewife,” there is a second, usually unremarked distortion when women say, “I’ve been doing the same thing for the last fifteen years, just looking after the kids and keeping house.” If a corporate assignment changes, involving new skills and increased responsibility, the title often changes as well, and the discontinuity (and success in bridging it) is noted. But you rarely hear someone say, “I was getting pretty good at being the mother of an infant, but my new assignment, caring for a toddler, is still really challenging.” Mother of one becomes mother of two? Mother of an adolescent? Mother-in-law? My suspicion is that although women may have been less likely to initiate significant change than men, they are highly resilient in finding ways to respond and adapt when change is thrust upon them.
    The recognition and celebration of developmental change, season by season and year by year, underline the continuity of family life. Part of the agony of caring for a severely retarded child is the lack of change, the lack of milestones. The