Eighty: Age of Fulfillment

When I was asked not long ago to blow out the candles on my birthday cake—fortunately only eight, one for each decade of my life—I was quite unexpectedly rendered speechless. The tradition, of course, is to make a wish as the candles are extinguished, but after successfully blowing them out, it suddenly dawned on me that I had nothing to say. I could think of nothing to wish for! The realization struck me that I had everything I needed or wanted, was, in fact, completely satisfied.

The strangeness of that feeling of absence of want seeped into me slowly over the next few days and weeks, prompting me to examine its source and its meaning. For most of my life I have been governed, sometimes overwhelmed, by a vast array of needs. Even after I had an ample supply of material goods and plenty of loving support, I frequently pictured myself as one who continued to suffer from extreme deprivation. For a very long time, my sense of “not enough” seemed unshakable.

In my earliest years, the need was for the love and attention of a mother who was too depressed, too needy herself, to give me the kind of emotional nourishment that I so desperately craved. Having lost her mother at an early age, and not receiving any nurturance from step mothers, my mother had no capacity for offering that which she had never experienced herself. So I grew up feeling an emptiness which gave rise to an incessant hunger, for what? Love, acceptance, approval, recognition, reassurance—you name it, I needed it.

Though the dearth of maternal love was certainly central to my neediness, that was not the only thing I was missing. I also lacked intellectual stimulation. I lived in a household in which educational values—reading, learning, discussion—were not encouraged or respected. The neighbors and friends in the Southern rural community in which I grew up were unfailingly kind and generous, but they had little or no curiosity about the workings of the world. They had settled comfortably into a kind of all-knowing state of mind, so it never occurred to them to seek information or to ask questions. As a result of living in that kind of anti-intellectual atmosphere, it was not until much later that I became fully aware of how intensely I hungered for opportunities to express my inquisitiveness, to explore my intellectual capabilities, and to further develop my mind and my spirit.

I also desired beautiful things. Like most young girls, I wanted pretty clothes and I certainly hoped to attract the boys with my appearance. In addition I longed for beauty in my surroundings. I seemed to have an acute visual sense in that I noticed my environment and was sensitive to its esthetic qualities. I envied those of my friends in whose homes the furniture was color coordinated and the walls hung with art. My own home, which had no sense of order or harmony, seemed always bleak and cold, for it was lacking any semblance of coziness or casual comfort. Though I was conscious of the natural splendor displayed in the woods and fields that surrounded our country home, I wished for more beauty—and warmth—inside our house.

There were, of course, other needs, but in retrospect I can see that these three—an insufficiency of mother love, a lack of intellectual stimulation, and the absence of an appreciation for esthetics—were perhaps the most powerful underlying motivational forces of my life. The effort to overcome what appeared to me to be crippling deficiencies in my upbringing determined many of my subsequent decisions and much of my behavior. Paradoxically, it was these very voids that gave shape to my future.

In order to compensate for the absence of mother love that wounded me so deeply, I vowed to be the very best mother I could possibly be for my two daughters. It was not always easy, and I admit to many mistakes and failings along the way, but I did manage to improve considerably on my own mother’s style of mothering. I did not succumb to fits of rage, as my mother frequently did, causing her to wield a nasty switch against my tender flesh. I tried never to diminish my daughters’ accomplishments but to offer encouragement and praise, whereas my own mother could not, out of envy or spite, find it in her heart to support me in my endeavors. I made every effort to champion my daughters in their choices in life whereas my mother refused for many years to acknowledge or accept my marriage to the man I loved, treating him with undeserved hostility and contempt. I am deeply proud of my daughters’ worldly achievements, but it is their own outstanding mothering skills that are most significant in what I view as the healing of our motherline.

Though I was a conscientious and loving mother, it is as a grandmother that I have most fully come to appreciate the kind of unconditional love that we long for and strive to embrace. I did not have a living grandmother, so I have tried to become the kind of grandmother I would have wanted. Being a generation removed from these young people has made it easier for me to be less judgmental, more accepting, more capable of the kind of detachment that is sometimes called for in order to see more clearly. I can watch with greater objectivity the paths my grandchildren choose to follow, can observe with absolute fascination as their lives unfold, and can offer unqualified support as long as they are not harming themselves or others. My love for these four young women and one young man is truly without reservations or conditions. They are a blessing in my life.

My yearning for learning has been another persistent presence in my long life. Even though we were married as undergraduates, my husband and I graduated together and then received our master’s degrees at the same time, for I insisted on equal educational opportunity. Following a brief time working, I became a stay-at-home mother and attended to domestic responsibilities as my daughters grew up. Though I read widely, took some non-credit classes, and worked part time in my profession, my need for something more challenging became increasingly insistent. I had a series of dreams in which I was going back to school, which led to my recognition of that long-suppressed desire for intellectual stimulation. So, following the unmistakable message being given me, at the age of sixty-nine I enrolled in a PhD program, truly the fulfillment of a dream. In 2002, at age seventy-three, exactly fifty years after my previous graduate degree, I received my doctorate in Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. It was a deeply rewarding moment.

As for the desire for beauty in my life, I have found numerous modes of expression for satisfying that particular need. The first major item my husband and I purchased after our marriage was a sewing machine. When we finally found ourselves in a proper apartment (not a single room, not a trailer), I used it to make curtains—unbleached muslin trimmed with a figured fabric. I fashioned other household accessories, made all my own clothes, and as our daughters grew, I sewed their pretty little dresses as well. Later on, as our income grew, I purchased paintings and sculptures—largely from local artists whose work I admired—for our home and garden.

But my greatest esthetic accomplishment was in becoming a fine art photographer when I was in my fifties. I collected dried flowers, bones, feathers, old photographs—anything that caught my eye—and arranged the objects into still life compositions, made the exposures, then developed the negatives and processed the prints. My black and white photographs were well received at a number of exhibitions. The images often reflected the sorrows and losses of my life, giving them a haunting and evocative appearance. I had become an artist, capable of creating beautiful pictures, thus helping assuage my thirst for things that please the eye.

Now that I look back on all those wistful wants and nettling needs, I can see that, though they often caused me great anguish, they were at the same time formidable forces, pushing me relentlessly forward as I pursued my life’s goals. I can see now that those feelings of emptiness and barrenness instilled in me an intense, unyielding desire to fill up those huge holes in my psyche with something more caring, more meaningful, and more beautiful than I had known in my early years. The sense of deprivation that caused me so much suffering was also the fuel that fired my creativity, fed my ambition, and furthered my search for knowledge.

I am, therefore, beginning to see the value in those needs which I formerly feared and scorned, for without a hunger for mother-love I might not have sought nourishment in my own mothering and grandmothering; without a desire for knowledge I might never have had the courage to enter a graduate program at age sixty-nine; and without an awareness of the lack of beauty in my surroundings, I might never have known the delight found in providing an attractive living space for my family and in creating beautiful photographs. In other words, without the demands of deficiencies, I might never have known the pleasures of prevailing.

I am overcome with awe and gratitude in that I have—most amazingly—fulfilled my life-long wishes, satisfied my heart-wrenching hungers, and sated my most fervent desires. But perhaps the most important realization is that it was, in fact, my needs that made that fulfillment possible. My needs were the empty vessel that I have spent my life filling up. So, as I enter my ninth decade, I can say, with humility and pride: My cup runneth over.