Lengthy Quote - A Country Year

Sometimes I wonder where we older women fit into the social scheme of things once nest building has lost its charm... We are past our reproductive years. Men don't want us; they prefer younger women. It makes good biological sense for males to be attracted to females who are at an earlier point in their breeding years and who still want to build nests, and if that leaves us no longer able to lose ourselves in the pleasures and closeness of pairing, well we have gained our Selves. We have another valuable thing too. We have Time, or at least, the awareness of it. We have lived long enough and seen enough to understand in a more intellectual way that we will die, and so we have learned to live as though we are mortal. Because our culture has assigned us no real role, we can make up our own. It is a good time to be a grown up woman with individuality, strength, and crochets. We are wonderfully free. We live long. Our children are the independent adults we helped them to become, and though they may still want our love, they do not need our care. Social rules are so flexible today that nothing we do is shocking. There are no political barriers to us anymore. Provided we stay healthy and can support ourselves, we can do anything, have anything and spend our talents any way that we please. Sue Hubbell - The Country Year

This quote, among others like it, was acquired when I was going through a particularly dark time emotionally, and I needed to hear these things from other women, about the power we each have in ourselves. Knowing I would one day be a woman "of a certain age" myself, I read it often, and it never failed to confirm my own positive feelings about life and how it could be lived on one's own if it ended up that love never found me again. I believed in the quotes back then, because I needed to, and I believe in them now, because over time they wove themselves inextricably into my daily choices for happiness.