Audrey Hepburn once said (or at least I think it was her) and if not many others have provided a variation on the theme that growing old is not for the faint of heart. This is truly a serious statement and I believe never more so than for my generation. As usual I am a dangling participle and so is my generation. We don’t fit. We don’t fit the way our parents aged and we don’t fit the younger generation. We are forging new paths and ways of being for both them and especially for us.

We are an aware generation. We have been forced to examine much about ourselves and the world around and within us. The generation right before us pretty much had their career paths laid out for them . My sister and brother, both more than ten years older than I, did what they were told and what was expected of them. My sister went to college, became a teacher, worked for two years and then married and then raised 3 sons. My brother went to college, then to medical school and then got married and raised three children.

Me, well, let us see. I started college, I quit or rather flunked out in my junior year. I worked as a recreational therapist in a state mental institution and that is another story and worked some more and then eventually went back to school. The mental institution provided some memorable experiences for a young impressionable girl. They were very different in those days. I remember looking into a room though a peephole and finding a bloodshot eye staring back at me. I am still impressed that I did not scream. It was a patient who was in solitary confinement, had been there for quite a while. He was brought in after he attempted to have sex with a corpse and it woke up. It kind of unhinged him.

I also remember being required to play the record player while patients had electro-shock therapy. It was supposed to calm them down but I am still unsure how anyone could be cal waiting for volts of electricity to be passed through your brain. I ended up assisting during the process. The patient had to be held while the voltage was administered and it was important that they be held carefully. While the current was passing through the brain the body tended to raise up from the waist up and from the waist down in a v-shape. If you weren’t careful the patient could jackknife bringing the knees to the chest and breaking the spine so we had to hole onto both ends. I lasted at that position for a year and then decided that this life was not for me.

I eventually returned to school and graduated going on eventually to earn an alphabetic arrangement of degrees that can make a resume look very impressive. Oh, and did I mention I never married, never had children and horror of horrors have never been in a serious relationship for any length of time with either a man or a woman. One day I woke up and realized I had forgotten to check the societal expectations of me and here I am doing it again.