We continue to get reborn in this life, sometimes shoved out of the womb, if we are open to the experience, painful as it may be.
After all, the sun comes up out of darkness. A rosebud bursts into a blaze of red petals surrounded by thorns. Even the “d” word divorce leads to another “d” word, discovery, self-discovery.
Baseball great Babe Ruth struck out more than any other major-leaguer on his way to the title of home-run king. Death and defeat contain the seeds of hope and eventual rebirth if we move to the light and choose life.
Women are especially aware of these points, as they are the ones who bring babies into this world. Today’s women have been waking up from a Rip Van Winkle sleep: being reborn in school, in careers, and as mothers on life’s journey.
Poet Marge Pierce described my generation of women as the “Marry or die!” generation. It was a B.A. and Mrs. Degree. The thought of rebirth was saved for Judgment Day. For many of us, our goals were to make good gravy and good babies. However, looking at Nancy Pelosi as a role model, she was reborn in a political career that culminated in being elected Speaker of the House recently.
Today, the average coed isn’t average. She may be out of marriage rather than out of high school when she attends college. She is quite familiar with child abuse, sexual harassment and drugs not found in her medicine cabinet. The “curse” comes to her more than once a month because being sexually liberated is a myth. She still bears the burden and joy of having to carry a child nine months to birth. Nature has not changed the rules the way the government has. Joint custody is not equal to an understanding that you get pregnant this time and I’ll get pregnant next time.
In conversations with young coeds in college right out of high school, the topic still comes up. “I’m worried,” each one says, “that I must find the right job, find someone I can really live with the rest of my life, work on my career, have a child, care for this child without losing the career war.”
Do guys ever worry about when they’re going to have children and how they will take care of them? Who can imagine six fraternity brothers on a Friday afternoon, sipping beer and lamenting the fact that they don’t know how they’ll take time out to become fathers?
No doubt the pressure cooker of career choice is shared by both genders in this country, but it was a young woman named Nancy who taught me about rebirth, sacrifice. While many of my generation literally watched every minute of the first 18 years of our children growing up, it didn’t seem a luxury during the process. It was what mothers did unless divorce or the death of a spouse occurred.
The theme was Prefer to Defer. Kids need 100 percent attention when you’re a mom, the experts said, especially the first 40 years! That is why many moms didn’t take an outside job, didn’t schedule too many social activities during the day, and surely didn’t go back to college. Being mom and married was the identity that eventually suffered its crisis.
Nancy, a mother of four with a husband, works an 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift as a 911 operator so that she can go to college during the day to become a teacher. Janice is a single, young mother with a legally blind 4-year old. Fifty-five-year-old Martha found herself alone when her husband opted for his rebirth in a younger woman. Martha struggled with depression and financial debt. She lives for her classes. “I couldn’t live without this,” she confesses.
After the kidnapping and death of her baby boy, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in her powerful book, “Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead”: “Undoubtedly, the long road of suffering, insight, healing, or rebirth, is best illustrated in the Christian religion by the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ. It is also illustrated by the story of Buddha’s answer to a mother who had lost her child. According to the legend, he said that to be healed she needed only a mustard seed from a household that had never known sorrow. The woman journeyed from home to home over the world but never found a family ignorant of grief. Instead, in the paradoxical manner of myths and oracles, she found truth, understanding, compassion, and eventually, one feels sure, rebirth.”
Today, Oprah Winfrey is probably the most powerful woman in America, a woman who has been reborn over and over in her career. Her philosophy is to use the gift of life in service to others, no matter what career a person chooses. Even in little University City, there are opportunities to follow Oprah’s advice. In January of 2007, let’s look at rebirth with service as a resolution. Well, I just broke my first resolution of not giving advice in the new year!