To be someone else’s only purpose...



"I couldn’t help thinking of my own mother, a high school graduate who worked for forty-three years but never had a job that fully utilized her sharp mind. At eighty-two, as lung disease sapped her strength, she came to our redbrick home for Easter dinner. At the end of the evening, I walked her out to her gold Chevy Cavalier, mindful of her cautious steps and aware of a shared but unspoken intuition that this would be her last holiday at our home. She paused at the car door, turned to me, and said wistfully, 'I guess if I hadn’t had you, my life wouldn’t have been worth anything.'

I loved my children, but I never wanted to lay that kind of trip on them. It was too great a burden to be someone else’s only purpose. I’d wanted to stay home to nurse my babies when they were little. I’d wanted to read to them and sled with them on snow days. I believed that nurturing other human beings was important, undervalued work, which I didn’t want to undervalue myself just because it didn’t count on my Social Security statements. I wanted to honor the work of parenting, but I didn’t want to disappear in it, especially now that my children were becoming increasingly independent. More to the point, it was partly my love for my children that was motivating a deep, churning desire to prevent my generation from screwing up their futures irreparably.

At forty-nine, I began taking small steps toward a renewal I couldn’t yet name. . . ."
Read full excerpt here.

The author uses midlife crisis to change her life.

Eileen Flanagan realized she was not living the life she wanted to be living, she turned her life upside down. She left her job, joined a Quaker activist group, handcuffed herself to the White House and pursued her passion for the environment.

The book that came out of that journey is called Renewable: One Woman’s Search for Simplicity, Faithfulness, and Hope.

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