Eldering; winding down....
First I want to thank all of you for your useful and interesting responses to my previous eldering post; your comments are providing me with much food for thought, and I will be posting responses as promptly as I can. I also want to say "thank you" separately to all of you who suggested alternatives to having to fuss with a wig, because I would never have thought of any of those things on my own.

And then I want to turn to something that hilleviw wrote:

"I don't -- at all -- get the sense from you that the doing is done. On the contrary, your occasional lists of projects pending simply astonish me. If you were confining yourself to a chair, settling down to your crochet projects and an occasional gossip about the neighborhood, I might find it easier to accept that you perceive yourself as winding things down."

That sequence -- "winding things down" -- got my attention; it has a special significance for me, because I keep trying unsuccessfully to find some way to get to it.

I have spent my entire life, from my earliest childhood, setting up a hurdle to jump over, jumping over it, and then setting up another hurdle to jump over. I remember fretting, at age four, because although I had attended Miss Hungate's Kindergarten twice, and had distinguished myself on the triangle in rhythm band, I still hadn't finished real kindergarten -- a kindergarten that took place inside a school instead of inside a house -- and they wouldn't let me enroll in one until September. And here I am, at almost 71, still fretting. Scolding myself with stuff like this...


"Okay, so you got your Ph.D. in linguistics at UCSD and you published some linguistics textbooks -- but you've never had an article published in Language, and you're not a linguistics professor with a fancy salary and perks!"

"Okay, so you've published twelve science fiction novels, one of them a Science Fiction Book Club alternate selection, and you've had a story in Analog and a story at Scifi.com -- but you've never won a Nebula or a Hugo or a Tiptree or a [vamp till ready]!"

"Okay, so you've had a successful nonfiction self-help book series, and the major book clubs have taken quite a few of those books, but you've never won a nonfiction book award of any kind whatsoever!"

"Okay, so you had a Saxton Fellowship once and you've had a few National Science Foundation grants, but you've never had a Guggenheim!"

"Okay, so there are strangers who have considerable respect for you, but some of your own children are still waiting for you to publish what they refer to as a Real Book, and you still haven't made peace with the feminist community!"


And so on and so on and so on, in the same nonsensical fashion, through all the things I do, and always ending with the coda: "Get busy, lazybones! Time's a-wasting!" And of course the older I get, the less of that time there is left to waste.

I do know intellectually that this is just ridiculous. I have not spent my life lying around the pool searching through the box for the chocolates with the soft centers; I have worked very hard, always. I know, intellectually, that I really have done enough. But emotionally I don't feel that way. I continue to feel as though I've fallen short and am going to get a final grade of D-minus -- or worse, a grade of Incomplete! -- in Life.

Some of my offspring label this pathology of mine as "excessive ambition" and/or "excessive competitiveness." But I think they're wrong; I don't think that's what it is. I think it comes from just two things: the inflexible Ozark ethic of duty that my grandmother instilled in me when I was tiny; and the fact that all my life long people have constantly told me that I couldn't do things. As in...

"Oh, you'll never finish college!"
"Oh, you'll never be anything but a file clerk!"
"Oh, you'll never get a Ph.D.! You're not Ph.D. material!"
"Oh, you'll never publish a book! What makes you think anybody would want to read anything you wrote?"
"Oh, you'll never be able to live a normal life!" [This one from the doctors who insisted that I was going to be a helpless invalid if I didn't have the surgery they wanted me to have.]

And so on and so on and so on. Just looking at me, they could all tell that I wasn't going to be able to accomplish anything. Not once did anybody ever say to me: "You can be anything you want to be!" And every time I had to listen to one of these rants I had the same reaction: I gritted my teeth, and I swore to myself that I for sure would do whatever it was they said I would never be able to do. And once I'd done it, I could check it off my list.

Now I have to learn, somehow, to give up this habit. I have to come to the realization that it's no longer necessary for me to prove anything. But it's like any other bad habit .... hard to give up, especially after indulging in it for a lifetime. I'm working on it. Well... I'm trying hard to convince myself to start working on it.

I was so pleased the other day, listening to NPR, to hear Annie Dillard -- who has won all the awards, including a Pulitzer -- say she probably won't write another book, and to hear her say that that's because she is simply tired. Now that's a healthy attitude; that's sanity. And it was a comfort to hear her say it.