Free Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh Page B

be read.
    Why should
Gift from the Sea
, after all we have undergone in these tumultuous twenty years, have any validity for a new generation of women? To look back on those years is a sobering experience. We have lived through the terms of four presidents and the assassination of one. We have wrestled with the tragedy of a long, divisive and conscience-searing war. We have witnessed shattering advances in science and technology. We have watched a man walk on the moon. We have been rocked by political and economic tremors that are still in force and worldwide. All of us have been swept forward by the ground swells of revolutionary social movements, most of them still in progress and not wholly defined by their popularlabels. Among those the most important seem to me to be the Civil Rights movement, the so-called Counterculture, Women’s Liberation and the Environmental Crisis. (It is interesting to note that woman has taken as influential a role in the three movements which do not bear her name as in the movement she calls her own.)
    The world has totally changed in twenty years and so, of course, have the lives of every one of us, including my own. When I wrote
Gift from the Sea
, I was still in the stage of life I called “the oyster bed,” symbol of a spreading family and growing children. The oyster bed, as the tide of life ebbed and the children went away to school, college, marriage or careers, was left high and dry. A most uncomfortable stage followed, not sufficiently anticipated and barely hinted at in my book. In bleak honesty it can only be called “the abandoned shell.” Plenty of solitude, and a sudden panic at how to fill it, characterize this period. With me, it was not a question of simply filling up the space or the time. I had many activities and even a well-established vocation to pursue. But when a mother isleft, the lone hub of a wheel, with no other lives revolving about her, she faces a total re-orientation. It takes time to re-find the center of gravity.
    All the inner and outer exploration a woman has done earlier in life pays off when she reaches the abandoned shell. One has to come to terms with oneself not only in a new stage of life but in a new role. Life without children, living for oneself—the words at first ring with a hollow sound.
    But with effort, patience and a sympathetic and supportive husband, one wins through to the adventure of an “Argonauta.” My husband and I even named our last home, on the island of Maui, “Argonauta.” For me, because of my husband’s death, the Argonauta stage was sadly of very brief duration. I am again faced with woman’s recurring lesson. To quote my own words, “woman must come of age by herself—she must find her true center alone.” The lesson seems to need re-learning about every twenty years in a woman’s life.
    What then has a grandmother and a widow to give the new generation of women in the oyster bed?Admiration, first of all. As I look at my daughters, my daughters-in-law, my nieces and my young friends, I am astounded at what they accomplish. They are better mothers than I was and they are the admitted equals of their husbands in intelligence and initiative. They have no domestic “help” in their homes and yet with vigilant planning, some skillful acrobatics and far more help from their husbands than any previous generation, they manage to lead enriching lives, including special interests of their own. They go out to work or they study; they write or they teach; they weave or paint or play in musical groups; they are often involved in civic activities. Sometimes they do several of those things at once.
    Are they happy—or shall I say, happier than my generation? This is a question I cannot answer. In a sense, I think it irrelevant. Without hesitation I can affirm that they are more honest, more courageous in facing themselves and their lives, more confident of what they want to do and more efficient in carrying through their