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Circle of friends

At midlife, one woman seeks a new, more expansive definition of success.

Today my son begins school. I tossed all night, unable to sleep. Will he be held within the same kind of loving community he has known until now? Will this enlargement of his universe feel as graceful as the unfurling of the garden's late poppies? Will his friends be as sweet and funny and bright as he is? How much have they learned of levels and degrees of association, of the ties between self and other, of love in its many forms?

After breakfast, we make the drive to the little red farmhouse less than a mile away, through whose silo door he will enter the world of school with his new red backpack and his pencil case, his little boy's sunny eagerness. In the classroom, I watch him disappear into the loft, once I've said goodbye, and take refuge in a book. With difficult resolve, I move past the miniature stove and hutch with their plastic milk cartons and baby bottles, soothing replicas of the world from which he is about to be schooled in this first of many separations.

I walk back through the barnyard, past the hens and goats, and retreat to the main road, heavy with ambivalence.

In my office, my notes and my journal await me and with them my efforts to make sense of women's lives today. I've wanted to believe that I could find the principles of a life in which the sightlines are clear, free of distraction within and without, so that women could recognize the seasons of their lives, hear what they need to of their inner voices, and determine whether their path remains a true one or should, in times of transition, be redrawn, brought into true.

This morning, I push my papers aside and shut my eyes. As I wonder how my 3-year-old will fare these three hours, I am aware that, like him, I cannot by my solitary efforts move or change anything. I can no longer think of myself as a self-sufficient professional, nor even as a working woman whose life revolves around the stimulating and challenging ideas of colleagues.

No, it is my friends and neighbors and my spiritual community that are the true guardian angels of all that is dearest in my days.

There are my neighbors Linda and Pam and Pam's husband, Mitchell, and the neighborhood mothers' group - all of us to some degree raising our children together, giving them the common and precious experience of being known and loved by the extended family of the street. Peer into our living room windows at 5:30 in the afternoon, and you'll find a few of us on the sofas while the children stack bright rings and pull little trucks on the rugs below. We listen to one another, make useful suggestions, seek advice, and ease for one another our often-solitary enterprise. Out of these gatherings have come all sorts of neighborhood ventures. When our schedules create child-care gaps, we pinch-hit for one another. We hold block parties, Christmas carol sings, and New Year's Eve parties, babies in tow.

When I was a childless full-time professional, I used to think of such "mother times" as a nullity, a few idle hours of contentless chat in lives unmoored from the safe harbor of a worldly identity.

I have been chastened for my arrogance. The mothers' group provides spiritual succor and mutual aid. It is one of the few places outside the family that reinforce a fragile identity. And at a stage in life when time is precious and scarce, it is one of the few venues in which I can sustain female friendships distinct from my writing career. As we travel from house to house, rotating the task of hostess, munching on bagels at Andrea's and fancy raisin rolls at Melissa's, we forge bonds of concern and mutual obligation that haven't failed us yet.

How can women everywhere build this kind of community? And how, through community, can we exert the leadership to express a new vision of the way life might be lived?

As I have lived with these questions these past three years, I have found more and more similarly engaged women who are orienting themselves around a new image of home. What is interesting is that this image of home is being reclaimed by women from many different walks and stations of life, including women who aren't mothers or even householders. My single women friends, for whom home had been the apartment they used to do the laundry and pay the bills, are reaching out to make new kinds of home. They are adopting children. They are moving in downstairs from married siblings. They are associating with religious orders or joining art groups, the church choir. Others are using the old-fashioned designation of neighborhood to reinvent the idea of home.

I know of continuing meditation groups, even knitting circles, made up of 30-somethings that serve similar purposes of spiritual support. These groups differ from earlier large-scale models of "liberation." They are intimate, face-to-face intentional communities. They are value-oriented, non-hierarchical, and voluntary. These are the primary places of meaning, today's hearths, usually hidden from public view and even from casual conversation, where women and some men are turning to find sanctuary as they try to lay the foundation for lives that are more deeply connected.

I glance at the clock. The morning has ended, and it is justifiably close enough to pickup time to fetch my son. More than anything else, my overlapping circles of community have held me through my sometimes difficult journey of change. I am so grateful for the seamlessness of it all - a seamlessness that I would never have imagined possible in this day and age from my desk in a cold professional season three years ago.

We sit on the rock that overlooks the farm stand on the other end of the property while he finishes a treat, a soft lemon sweet that he can reach by himself from inside a glass candy jar by the checkout counter. We have both survived the hours apart.

Tonight, Pam and Mitchell arrive with their young son for dinner. Some nights we go to their house: The evening meal now is often communal, as friends new and old come together to share daily burdens and bread. At least twice a week we open our doors to friends and neighbors, making what used to be a woman's solitary culinary task a celebration, and modeling for the children a more generous, capacious sense of family. In these days when one adult or another inevitably needs to work late, this sort of sharing makes all the difference between sterile, minimalist dinner hours and the events that dinners are meant to be, times of good conversation, laughter, and bountiful food.

It is an evening of apple tarts and boys with sticky fingers. The mothers hold colored storybooks in one hand and glasses of wine in the other. Spilling down from the crowded table, the children make small worlds with their napkins, crackers as rugs, a few nuts as themselves. Then they slip away to a corner to hit each other and reach up to mother, crying.

Afterward, I tuck a happy boy into bed and take a glass of wine out on the porch to watch the sunset. The night grows dark. I can see fireflies in the lower part of the yard. Above, I catch sight of a shooting star.

Among the many stories of success that we told ourselves at 20, a night like tonight wasn't among them. Its cares would have been literally unimaginable. But in my 40s, the terms have shifted. And I find that the realm of life to which I most want to attend is right here, right now. Only as I participate passionately in every aspect of my life - as wife, mother, writer, friend, homemaker - do I discover life itself. And at the center of it all, my true work.

This is an idea that as a young feminist I could never have understood. The personal, with its minutiae, had no serious place in the mind's passions, no hold to compete with the magnetism of social revolution, global change. But lofty global and social concerns have challenged me to uphold a worthy consistency in the present.

Becoming present to the very rooted, particular reality of my own life and that of my child has opened me to concerns I didn't have before, concerns about mutuality, responsibility, community. I find myself "in" the world more than I have ever been and discover in this a profound convergence between my deepest individual yearnings and those of the society in which I am challenged to live.

If women could stand firm in this quality of presentness and allow this to be the self we show to the world, I believe that we would claim our many purposes and a new way of working in their service. If the last great historic thrust of women's energy was to attain power, independence, and individual opportunity, then the next must be to reestablish meaningful connection, a paradigm of spiritual and physical health, of human wholeness. We need to swing the balance, pull ourselves back from the edge of radical individualism and isolation and the emptiness of arrogance.

This has been a season of learning where I belong, in the life of the particular. By tending to my soul, my loved ones, my real purpose - whether in the garden or at my desk or along the street - the work has begun to fit the time allotted, a wholeness rises from out of the clay and benedictions of real days.

Isn't this another way of answering the question: What do I mean, today, by success?