By: Linda Sapadin
A few weeks ago Anne Morrow Lindbergh died at the age of 94. Though many only knew her as the wife of aviator Charles Lindbergh or the mother of the kidnapped-murdered baby, others knew her as a wonderful literary talent. My favorite book of hers, Gift from the Sea, was written in 1955. I believe her lyrical words are just as meaningful to women today as they were 46 years ago. And balancing roles still seems to be a woman's number one struggle.
"To be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel. The patterns of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass: husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider's web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes. How difficult for us, then to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives.
"With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions.
"The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children: the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls -- woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman and Career, Woman and the Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.
"What is the answer? There's no easy answer, no complete answer. I have only clues, shells from the sea. The bare beauty of the channeled whelk tells me that one answer, and perhaps a first step, is in simplification of life, in cutting out some of the distractions. But how? Total retirement is not possible, I cannot shed my responsibilities. I cannot permanently inhabit a desert island. I cannot be a nun in the midst of family life. I would not want to be.
"The solution for me, surely, is neither in total renunciation of the world, nor in total acceptance of it. I must find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between these two extremes; a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return. In my period of retreat, perhaps I can learn something to carry back into my worldly life. I can at least practice for these two weeks the simplification of outward life, as a beginning."
Linda Sapadin, Ph.D. is a psychologist in private practice who specializes in individual and family therapy as well as personal coaching.
