Warrior Maiden

At 56, I am more the Maiden Warrior than I was at 26, when I was a young married, supporting my first husband who had lost his job. Then I thought my new career as a high school English teacher would last all my life, along with my marriage.

 I came to Witchcraft, as many do, in midlife crisis at the death of my second husband. At 45, I was alone: widowed, bankrupt, clinically depressed, and desperate. I looked for love or sex in the personals, and discovered that like attracts like. I didn't like what I attracted!

I found a crone-teacher who took me as a student and showed me how to take responsibility for myself. Now I am buying my own home, which I share with my daughter (26). I have finished graduate school, and I am working in a steady, though not "full time with benefits" job which does not involve teaching high school students or English. I am on the board of a writer's association, doing their website and newsletter, and I am helping to plan the local pagan pride day. I belong to no one but myself, and I am creating my own life, much as my Maiden Warrior daughter is doing.

Now my daughter and I share similar challenges. She is developing a business as a freelance illustrator, (http://cafepress.darkgothdragons ) and I am working on my first novel. We work together: brainstorming, critiquing and encouraging each other's work. We have to manage our energy for both our day jobs and our creative projects, to keep the house maintenance done, and in my case, manage homework and papers—she graduated from college last year. We schedule time to be together, often over a weekend breakfast; otherwise, we might not exchange more than morning greetings for weeks at a time.  She has the same frustrations of setting goals and priorities for what to work on next, and how much time to spend on promoting herself vs. developing more art. Neither of us is a marketing genius, so we are learning together, networking and researching markets.

We are not joined at the hip, however. She has her friends who like the Renfaire and Dungeons & Dragons, and I have mine who like discussing our new insights as we walk our paths and plan for the next phase. She plays video games while I dig in the garden. She designs t-shirts and I do web pages.

I want to speak to a larger audience, to teach other women that we do not disappear at 50. My fiction concerns older women, especially the elder maidens, the budding crones who have 30 or more years of vibrant life to live. I want to be a role model, the poster-crone for continuing education, for taking stock and changing lanes on the life path.

 Those of us born in the 50s are already older than our grandparents expected to be, many of us still have our parents, many of whom are independent and thriving. My role model is my mother, who at 54 went back to school to be a real estate agent when the company where she worked for 28 years moved to a smaller town. At 73, she has just bought a new home, and goes out dancing every Friday night. She is one of the younger members of her dance clubs.

So how shall I live the rest of my life, how shall I approach my new horizons? There are many of us flowing through the change, not just of menopause, but of new freedoms, new ideas and a new need to make sense of our lives and a difference in the world.

If I have learned nothing else, it is that you grow and learn, or you stop and die. I am not through learning yet. How about you? What would Xena do?