My Buddha Wears Bifocals: Reflections at Midlife and Beyond

By Kathleen Mary Sands

what we know is that it is not the outcome that determines how or why we come to love our story. We do so not because of the blessings and joys we have known, nor in spite of the misfortune and hardships we have endured. We come to love our story, if we are lucky, precisely because it is our own.

- form My Buddha Wears Bifocals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9780595889976

Kathleen Mary Sands

Kathleen Sands received her Ed.D. in Adult Education from the University of Toronto, specializing in creativity at midlife. Former Arts Alive Project Manager for the City of St. Petersburg, Kathy has contributed to numerous publications including Senior Connections magazine, Fairfield County Woman, and St. Petersburg Times. Most recently, Kathy taught at Eckerd College and Ryerson University’s Lifelong Learning Institutes. She divides her time between St. Pete Beach and Toronto.

Book preview

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

We have lost our way, said Dorothy. Can you tell us where the Emerald City is? Certainly, answered the Queen, but it is a great way off, for you have had it at your backs all this time.

L. Frank Baum

Where’s home? the Canadian Customs Officer inquires as I hand him my American passport. Deftly sidestepping the issue, I reply that I have lived in Canada for the last thirty years. Not satisfied with my response, he presses on. To tell the truth, he is not the only one unhappy with my answer. Queries as to my current place of residence I can handle. Home, however, is another story.

Minutes later we take our place in line as a caravan of vehicles makes its way across the Peace Bridge. Upon approaching the midpoint, I crane my neck, tilting my head back so as to catch the exact moment when one flag gives way to the other. Even after all these years, it is still a thrilling sight. Side by side, the world’s most powerful country and the second largest nation meet at the 49th parallel – the longest, undefended border in the world. While the line between my mother country and adopted homeland remains clear and well defined, the borders of my own life have been dissolving for some time.

It was thirty years ago this fall, when as a young bride following my new husband, I first crossed the American-Canadian border. Leaving unhappy families and a country at war behind, we felt like pioneers in a new land. As I look back now, I am grateful. It was a good place and a good time to have been young. While the marriage did not last, our stay in Canada did.

It was not until fifteen years later that political circumstances precipitated my departure from Montreal. I followed a long line of unhappy Anglophones on their way to Toronto. The national newspaper referred to us as Canada’s Boat People. A schism threatened to divide the country and remains an issue to this day. It was by far the most painful move of my life. One that truly left me in a state of exile.

Much has happened since then – old friends lost, new ones made, a graduate degree earned, a car accident, a new love, the loss of both my parents, a book manuscript in the making. As I look back on my life from this vantage point, I find myself once again at a crossroads. Only this time I am alone and no longer young.

Like Alice in Wonderland, I long to turn to the Cheshire Cats of this world for answers. But like it or not, when I look in the mirror, the only face grinning back at me, is my own.

Of all the essays I have written over the last several years, only this one has remained unfinished. Many directions were possible, but none so clear or compelling as to finish it. The untaken road metaphor has been apt after all. Until now.

WALKING AWAY FROM THE SCRIPT

Nobody cool ever had a happy mother.

Gene Barreca

That girl is dead! my mother proclaimed as she pointed to an 8 x 10 photograph of me that sat atop the piano. Beaming out from within its silver-framed borders, I looked every bit the pure, wholesome, all-American girl. A cross between Doris Day and Tricia Nixon, with just a touch of Gidget. A mother’s dream. My nightmare.

As an adolescent, I often felt torn between two radically different worlds. Turning fifteen in 1960 meant that I had been a child of the 1950s, but it was in the 1960s that I grew into a young woman. Two drastically different eras, and I felt as though I had one foot in each. On the day my mother pronounced her little girl dead, the 1960s had won.

Although grounded in a quieter, conservative and more predictable time, many of my peers and I soon found ourselves catapulted into a whole new world. Infused with a heady sense of camaraderie, idealism and self-importance, we took on The Establishment. Cynical and smug, we vowed not to trust anyone over thirty. With all the fired-up enthusiasm of the very young, we sought to change the world! Not exactly a realistic agenda. But perhaps that was just the tonic we needed in order to break free of the suffocating propriety, silent expectations, unquestioned prejudices and mindless conformism of the previous decade. In order to pull this off, a big reaction was called for. No small firecracker would do. We needed a giant explosion. And that’s what the 1960s were – an explosion. It was also a ground-breaking time for women.

Certainly, I would not presume to speak for all women who came of age at this particular time. Not even for those of my color, education or economic class. In fact, many of my contemporaries followed the traditional path of early marriage and stay-at-home housewife. But many, like myself, did not. To challenge convention, particularly for a young woman, was both exhilarating and problematic. Boys were expected to think for themselves, seek adventure and for a time at least, sow their wild oats. Such behavior, if not overtly condoned, was at least tacitly encouraged. For girls, however, the same behavior would have been considered unseemly, uppity, unladylike, immoral or subversive.

In this sense I was like the other women of my generation; women who had grown up with mothers we could no longer use as models for the lives we were living. And so we stumbled ahead and invented ourselves.

Julia Alvarez

Collectively, the late 1950s and early 1960s was a time when we reveled in the antics of television characters like Lucy and Desi, married couples who slept in separate beds. Of course, back then it was not even permissible to utter the word pregnant on national television. Meanwhile, the progeny of these ascetic couples romped and played together, only occasionally getting into good-natured mischief. Dads cheerily went off to work. Moms wore big aprons and bright smiles. Black people were rarely seen on television, and I had never met one in person. Nor did I know any children of divorced parents. White-bread, middle-class America grinned at us from inside our new magic box. And we smiled right back.

In 1963 I began college. That same year Betty Friedan’s seminal work, The Feminine Mystique was published, in which she examined the problem that had no name. Evidently, trouble had been quietly simmering beneath our mothers’ gingham aprons, starched tablecloths and fluffed bedsheets. That our mothers might once have dreamed of doing something with their lives other than vacuum, prepare dinner, tuck away their allowances, and chauffeur children was simply not considered. Certainly not by us and quite possibly not by them. After all, what could be wrong? They were just following the script, and doing quite well at that. Successful husbands, lovely homes, healthy children, new appliances. With spouses off to work and children off to school, as each door shut leaving them alone in their tidy doll houses with whole days to ponder the source of their malaise. Or have a drink. Or follow doctor’s orders and get that prescription filled. As Carolyn Heilbrun notes in Writing a Woman’s Life, Forbidden anger, women could find no voice in which to complain: they took refuge in depression or madness.

So where did that leave us, the young women of the 1960s? Was it really all a bed of roses for spoiled flower children? Even for those sufficiently educated and affluent, breaking free was not all fun and games. For one thing, it was still very much a man’s world. The forces for radical social change, feminism and an end to the Vietnam War were gathering momentum. Still one recalls the voice of Eldridge Cleaver declaring that the best position for women in the movement was prone. Yet we continued to protest and march, put flowers in our hair, and dance barefoot out the front doors of our childhood homes, with only the briefest glance back.

For myself and countless others, the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the pivotal event of our still nascent lives. It was both touchstone and dividing line. One world before. Another after. Only a year earlier it seemed that our biggest concerns, apart from college applications, were learning the latest dance, buying the top single, and getting a date for the prom. Now we were only seventeen or eighteen, and just starting freshman classes. Our President had been assassinated. An increasingly controversial and unpopular war was dividing families and country, threatening to take away our brothers and boyfriends. Now date conversation was just as likely to revolve around draft dodging and fleeing to Canada as it was around school and movies.

According to UCLA sociologist Fernando Torres Gil,

Each generation in this country appears to have a defining moment… The defining moment for baby boomers, in my opinion, was the assassination of President Kennedy. That began our continual journey into scepticism, into frustration, into a lack of belief that government and society can do good and can be trusted. We’re still living with that legacy.

In the outer world a string of tumultuous and horrific events seemed to follow one on top of the other. Suddenly there were marches, protests, demonstrations, love-ins. Suddenly there was Selma, Birmingham, Bobby, Chicago, Martin, Kent State and Woodstock. Our innocence shattered, our trust in the natural order of things a quaint notion of the past, it seemed there was nothing left on which to depend. Challenge, chaos, and experimentation became the order of the day. Even in the Vatican, Pope John was shaking things up.

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem became the slogan of the young who were left with not much else to cling to apart from each other. As Susan Evans and Joan Avis observe in The Women Who Broke All the Rules, …the women born between 1945 and 1955 had to let go of almost all their childhood expectations and create a new reality…and had only each other to buffer what they encountered along the way.

Looking back I see it was very much a time of departures – from church, family, country and tradition. But I also recall feeling far more excited than anxious. Perhaps because I was young. And definitely not alone. Never have I felt such an instant sense of peer affiliation and alliance. Meeting other young people along the way gave rise to an almost immediate, assumed and perhaps somewhat naïve sense of kinship. And it certainly wasn’t all sturm und drang. There was fun too – outrageous clothes, far-out music, tie-dying, candle-making, as well as regular visits from Mary Jane. After all, this was also the era of Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll.

But most of all, it was a time of hope, dreams and new beginnings, fueled with an individual as well as collective vitality. Not just for a life cumulatively better than our parents, but for one qualitatively different. And not merely for a select few. It was about new options, freedom of choice, breaking out of the mould of a prescribed way of life. To marry or not, to date outside one’s age group, race or religion, to cohabit, to remain childless, to travel, to gain acceptance and equity in the workplace. In short, to have dominion over our lives.

However, whether or not one conformed or rebelled, life offers little in the way of guarantees. Women, now in middle years, who did not marry or raise a family, may fear a lonely old age. Yet many of their peers are already divorced or widowed and perhaps estranged from their offspring as well. For those women who did devote their young adulthood to home and hearth, the post-family years offer a unique opportunity to experiment, explore and travel new paths. In similar fashion, for those women whose youth was anything but tame or predictable, it may not be the lure of Katmandu that now holds appeal. But rather a sense of security and tranquility may be what is craved. From whatever angle it is approached, midlife can be a time of integration. Its gift is the opportunity to make more fully conscious choices in the years ahead.

Clearly, it would be impossible to escape the personal givens of one’s birth or the social context in which one was formed and continues to be shaped. But now, perhaps, we have the chance to write, or at least edit, polish and refine our scripts. A chance to reshuffle the cards we’ve been dealt. This task is possible, but not easy. Never easy. If we take that chance, however, we just might get to become the heroine of our own script.

THE CHANGE

It is sad to grow old but nice to ripen.

Brigitte Bardot

Women readers of a certain age have managed to survive, among other things, a decade or more of popular bestsellers telling us how to find a man, keep a man, while not loving the wrong one too much. All manner of recovery books advising us how to overcome addictive behavior while healing