Breaking Free: Women of Spirit at Midlife and Beyond

Pour yourself a cup of tea, put your feet up and relax into this well-written honest book---you'll be delighted and enlightened. Pamela D. Blair, Author, The Next Fifty Years: A Guide for Women at Midlife and Beyond

Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container, or else there would be no fruition." This is a quote written by Florida Scott Maxwell, from the book Breaking Free: Women of Spirit at Midlife and Beyond. This line most struck me as truly encapsulating the experience that reading it brings. Breaking Free is edited (and contributed to) by Marilyn Sewell and consists of a compilation of twenty-seven women's personal narratives about the process of growing older. The women come from diverse backgrounds - religious, cultural, ethnic - and are all eloquent wordsmiths. This collection is separated into two parts: "Necessary Losses" and "Breaking Free," where each part weaves together stories that together link up the experiences of loss, grief and pain with those of freedom, joy and beauty. In reading this book I felt very deeply the writers' experience of the world as beauty and pain, as beauty in pain. For me, this book was less about being a middle-aged woman as it was about simply being a human being and growing from any phase in one's life to another. As I continue to maneuver my way from youth into adulthood, I become increasingly aware of the way that the natural, seemingly innate process of growth enables me to let go of the drama, the indecision and the everyday heartbreaks that plagued me in my younger years. In the stories of these women, I saw an acknowledgement of and gratitude for what they were able to leave behind from their youth, but also a sort of weary peace from finally resolving the paradoxes and making up their minds. It was as if life did not seem to be as much of a mystery for them anymore. When initially beginning this book, I was expecting to be told about how great it is to be "old"; that old age would be idealized and presented through rose-coloured lenses. Instead, I found intentional contradictions to that discourse: Baba Cooper's rebellion against the stereotype of "grandmother-hood"; Annick Smith's disappointment and humility upon realizing she could now no longer take the same chances as could her younger self; Erica Jong's struggle with the difficulties of dating and sex after the age of fifty. Breaking Free is a contemplative, thought-provoking work about the transformative experience of being human, and it delves into the visceral, intangible, infinitesimal and earth-shattering events that shape our lives. This book showed me, in its intimately personal and uplifting style, that it's okay to be young, that it's wonderful even, but that it isn't everything.

The editor says that she has chosen writers who can help women move gracefully and courageously through the second half of their lives. This book does that and more. The excellent writers give us a good read. Many of the essays are beautifully written as well as being inspiring, thought provoking and instructive. As one of the writers reports, "We grow neither better nor worse as we get old, but more like ourselves." Topics covered in the book include dealing with aging parents, mature children, our own mortality, looking older, self appreciation, self acceptance, being alone without being lonely, and celebrating our own choices. My favorite was a selection by Isabel Allende from "Aphrodite: A Memoit of the Senses". I think this book would be a marvelous selection for a women's book group - although men could learn a lot from reading it too.

I am a woman who had to abruptly retire from public school administration after twenty-five years.My whole life had been spent trying to service urban settings with no hope of ever finishing the job.I was out of touch with the spirit within me as it had withered beyond recognition. I wasn't sure I wanted to live.I have picked up several of Marilyn Sewell's anthologies over the years. This latest one is special.It speaks to that part of me that has hope of breaking free of the past and appreciate all the children I have loved without so much sentimentality.Maybe, just maybe,there can be a different life just as satisfying. I'm not real sure yet, but this book gives me that hope. Donna F. Orchard