After the Academy.

Abstract

Having elderly parents is a common condition of middle age, and so is the compulsion to examine your life so far and see how you feel about the shape of it. And for women, middle age means adjusting once and for all to the fact that you either have children or do not have them, and either way it will affect the choices you make, the way you are perceived in the workplace, the way that you relate to whatever other family you have, and the quality of your own old age. Asked now to write about this mid-life shift and its aftermath, I can see for the first time that, if I hadn’t already come home, my mother’s death would probably have brought me back.