Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life - Softcover

Sheehy, Gail

 
9780553271065: Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0553271067 ISBN 13: 9780553271065
Verlag: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

At last, this is your story. You'll recognize yourself, your friends, and your loves. You'll see how to use each life crisis as an opportunity for creative change -- to grow to your full potential. Gail Sheehy's brilliant road map of adult life shows the inevitable personality and sexual changes we go through in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond. The Trying 20s -- The safety of home left behind, we begin trying on life's uniforms and possible partners in search of the perfect fit. The Catch 30s -- illusions shaken, it's time to make, break, or deepen life commitments. The Forlorn 40s -- Dangerous years when the dreams of youth demand reassessment, men and women switch characteristics, sexual panic is common, but the greatest opportunity for self-discovery awaits. The Refreshed (or Resigned) 50s -- Best of life for those who let go old roles and find a renewal of purpose.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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From the Trade Paperback edition.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1.

MADNESS AND METHOD

without warning, in the middle of my thirties, i had a breakdown of nerve. It never occurred to me that while winging along in my happiest and most productive stage, all of a sudden simply staying afloat would require a massive exertion of will. Or of some power greater than will.

I was talking to a young boy in Northern Ireland where I was on assignment for a magazine when a bullet blew his face off. That was how fast it all changed. We were standing side by side in the sun, relaxed and triumphant after a civil rights march by the Catholics of Derry. We had been met by soldiers at the barricade; we had vomited tear gas and dragged those dented by rubber bullets back to safety. Now we were surveying the crowd from a balcony.

“How do the paratroopers fire those gas canisters so far?” I asked.

“See them jammin’ their rifle butts against the ground?” the boy was saying when the steel slug tore into his mouth and ripped up the bridge of his nose and left of his face nothing but ground bone meal.

“My God,” I said dumbly, “they’re real bullets.” I tried to think how to put his face back together again. Up to that moment in my life I thought everything could be mended.

Below the balcony, British armored cars began to plow into the crowd. Paratroopers jackknifed out of them with high-velocity rifles. They sprayed us with steel.

The boy without a face fell on top of me. An older man, walloped on the back of the neck with a rifle butt, stumbled up the stairs and collapsed upon us. More dazed bodies pressed in until we were like a human caterpillar, inching on our bellies up the steps of the exposed outdoor staircase.

“Can’t we get into somebody’s house!” I shouted. We crawled up eight floors but all the doors to the flats were bolted. Someone would have to crawl out on the balcony in open fire to bang on the nearest door. Another boy howled from below: “Jesus, I’m hit!” His voice propelled me across the balcony, trembling but still insulated by some soft-walled childhood sac that I thought provided for my own indestructibility. A moment later, a bullet passed a few feet in front of my nose. I hurled myself against the nearest door and we were all taken in.

The closets of the flat were already filled with mothers and their clinging children. For nearly an hour the bullets kept coming. From the window I saw three boys rise from behind a barricade to make a run for it. They were cut down like dummies in a shooting gallery. So was the priest who followed them, waving a white handkerchief, and the old man who bent to say a prayer over them. A wounded man we had dragged upstairs asked if anyone had seen his younger brother. “Shot dead,” was the report.

Something like this had happened to my own brother in Vietnam. But the funeral took place in the bland Connecticut country- side, and I was a few years younger. So neatly had the honor guard tricornered the victim’s flag, it looked like a souvenir sofa pillow. People had patted my hands and said, “We know how you must feel.” It made me think of the strangers who were always confiding in me that they were scheduled for surgery or “taking it easy” after a heart attack. All I had for their pain were the same words: “I know how you must feel.” I had known nothing of the sort.

After the surprise massacre, I was one among trapped thousands cringing in the paper-walled bungalows of the Catholic ghetto. All exits from the city were sealed. Waiting was the only occupation. Waiting for the British army to perform a house-to-house search.

“What will you do if the soldiers come in here firing?” I asked the old woman who was harboring me.

“Lie on me stomach!” she said.

Another woman was using the telephone to confirm the names of the dead. Once upon a time I was a Protestant of strong faith; I tried to pray. But that silly game of childhood kept running through my mind . . . if you had one wish in the whole world . . . I decided to call my love. He would say the magic words to make the danger go away.

“Hi! How are you?” His voice was absurdly breezy; he was in bed in New York.

“I’m alive.”

“Good, how’s the story coming?”

“I almost wasn’t alive. Thirteen people were murdered here today.”

“Hold on. CBS News is talking about Londonderry right now—”

“It’s called Bloody Sunday.”

“Can you speak up?”

“It’s not over. A mother of fourteen children was just run down by an armored car.”

“Now look, you don’t have to get in the front lines. You’re doing a story on Irish women, remember that. Just stick with the women and stay out of trouble. Okay, honey?”

From the moment I hung up on that nonconversation, my head went numb. My scalp shrank. Some dark switch was thrown, and a series of weights began to roll across my brain like steel balls. I had squandered my one wish to be saved. The world was negligent. Thirteen could perish, or thirteen thousand, I could perish, and tomorrow it would all be beside the point.

As I joined the people lying on their stomachs, a powerful idea took hold: No one is with me. No one can keep me safe. There is no one who won’t ever leave me alone.

I had a headache for a year.

When I flew home from Ireland, I couldn’t write the story, could not confront the fact of my own mortality. In the end, I dragged out some words and made the deadline but at an ugly price. My short temper lengthened into diatribes against the people closest to me, driving away the only sources of support who might have helped me fight my demons. I broke off with the man who had been sharing my life for four years, fired my secretary, lost my housekeeper, and found myself alone with my daughter Maura, marking time.

As spring came, I hardly knew myself. The rootlessness that had been such a joy in my early thirties, allowing me to burst the ropes of old roles, to be reckless and selfish and focused on stretching my newfound dream, to roam the world on assignments and then to stay up all night typing on caffeine and nicotine—all at once that didn’t work anymore.

Some intruder shook me by the psyche and shouted: Take stock! Half your life has been spent. What about the part of you that wants a home and talks about a second child? Before I could answer, the intruder pointed to something else I had postponed: What about the side of you that wants to contribute to the world? Words, books, demonstrations, donations—is this enough? You have been a performer, not a full participant. And now you are 35.

To be confronted for the first time with the arithmetic of life was, quite simply, terrifying.



It is unusual to find yourself in the middle of a shooting war, but many of life’s accidents can have a similar effect. You play tennis twice a week with a dynamic 38-year-old businessman. In the locker room a silent clot throttles an artery and before he can call for help, a large part of his heart muscle has been strangled. His attack touches his wife, his business associates, and all his friends of a similar age, including you.

Or a distant phone call notifies you that your father or mother has been hospitalized. You carry with you to the bedside a picture of the dynamo you last saw, clearing land or dashing off to the...

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Verlag
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
1997
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553271067
ISBN 13 
9780553271065
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
625
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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