(2 of 3)
We overwhelmingly chose a few vocations: physician, attorney, academic and shrink. There's a '60s mentality at work here, looking for jobs that do good. Yes, we thought then and continue to think that even lawyers are in the business of changing the world for the better, which is why so many of us specialize in public policy, criminal defense and pro bono work. Ingrid Olsen-Tjensvold, counsel to the Cortland County, N.Y., department of social services, is deeply rewarded by "having a hand in keeping children safe from harm." Margaret Brown White works with the worst of the mentally ill and finds it "rather extraordinary work," a compelling witness to "the effort, against such obstacles, that people make every day to stay connected to life." Connected is a word we use a lot.
All that opportunity earned us considerable satisfaction, yet there were big stumbles too--a classmate was briefly a welfare mother, and a summa cum laude grad with a Ph.D. is doing "odd jobs"--and the searing realization that we could fall short of our high expectations. Psychologist Susan King Brown admitted in the 25th-reunion book the secret in many of our 50-year-old hearts: how hard it is to come to terms with the fact that "I'm not at the top of my field ... that I will probably never do any significant or well-known intellectual work." Vivien Weir Russe says she was asked recently if she had fulfilled her life's ambition. "The irony is I have no memory of having any concept of my future." We were too busy chasing it.
A few of us came up against discrimination and were beaten down. Linda McVeigh Mathews, a distinguished journalist, resigned from a newspaper when her editors would not allow her to cover the same foreign beat as her journalist husband, and has just left another paper after being "emotionally battered" by her boss. In a variety of corporations Marilyn Wilt "encountered the glass ceiling again and again" and quit the business world to "empower" herself.
At this late date, there are no second families for women. A startling number of men in the class remarried in the '90s and had a fresh batch of children. Meimei Chang, who married for the first time in 1992 and thereby acquired grownup stepchildren, rightly considers herself to be "defying the odds that a woman over 45 could do so!" Far more numerous are the divorced women who never remarried. Or the surprising number who, sometimes without intending to, never married at all. "Marriage has continued to elude me," says Cynthia McClintock, who adopted a daughter anyway. Sharon Jean O'Brien said in her 25th-reunion note that she "felt like the fortysomething woman in the joke--Oops, I forgot to get married! I forgot to have children!" Sometimes, she adds, "these things just happen to you. I never consciously chose." But among the never marrieds may be other Susana Rossbergs, who flatly declare, "I'm allergic to marriage."