Exploring Identity part 2-Chasing the Wind

By Elizabeth Prata

SYNOPSIS: Raised amid the cultural upheavals of second-wave feminism, I pursued both traditional and modern ideals—marriage, career success, education, travel, and achievement—yet found them empty. After years of searching for identity and purpose, I discovered lasting peace, joy, and fulfillment when Christ saved me.

In Part 1 of this 3-part exploration of personal identity, I gave an overview of the beginning second wave feminism, the impact Betty Friedan had made in starting it, and the shockwaves the 1970 Newsweek female employees caused when lodging their sex discrimination suit.

Today I am bringing the academic down to the personal. I was saved at around age 42. Some days I mourn the lost time I could have spent serving Jesus, but on the other hand of course, His timing is always impeccable. So I focus on the blessing that since I spent so much of my adult life unsaved, I do remember with sterling clarity what it was like to be lost. I remember the feelings of pursuing vanity, of always feeling empty. The fleeting nature of joy. In this way I can have better compassion on the lost, I think.

I was born in 1960 and raised in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. My first memory was February 9, 1964- when The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. TV was black and white then. Rabbit ears antenna brought the signal in, and the Beatles episode was watched by nearly 40% of the American population at the time.

We were one of those families.

At the time divorce was legal in the US, but highly regulated and societally stigmatized. No one got divorced due to ‘irreconcilable differences.’ There had to be a listed fault. The norm was two-parent homes of opposite sex spouses married to each other, and homosexuality was a dark secret no one talked about. Such things were hidden from societal view.

The prevailing attitude of our upper middle class society was that you did well in school, went to college- which was a given – and graduated into a professional employment. We were encouraged to obtain further degrees, usually medicine, law, or PhDs. If you were a woman you were expected at some point to get married and quietly keep the home.

Until feminism hit and expectations changed rapidly. Suddenly a ‘woman needed a man like a fish needed a bicycle’. Women were told to be self-sufficient and wary of men. Chivalry was dead. Women were about power, voice, and hitting ‘the glass ceiling’ with a hammer. There was no more ‘quietly at home…’

Source. credit: Eugene Gordon/The New York Historical | Bob Parent | Fred W. McDarrah/The New York Historical via Getty Images | Baird Bryant | Bob Parent

I never wanted feminist worldview, I wanted the former, the quiet at home part, with husband. I wanted to teach, sure, in academia as a preference. My thought was, I’d enjoy the intellectual challenges such a profession brings but also enjoy the relaxed schedule so I could also be a homemaker. Strangely, I never wanted children, though.

In my teen years I had thought that feminism was supposed to give women options. I was all for women in the workforce, since it was obvious that single women and widows had to make a living somehow. Equal pay for equal work made sense to me as well. I was perplexed as to how a mother could balance work at home and work at an outside job, too. But that was left to better minds to figure out.

So I launched into the world with a college-marriage-work-house-American Dream-possibly feminist mindset. And I achieved that. I met my goal of marriage at 22. We saved for a house and put 18% down, thus meeting my goal of obtaining a home. The next goal was to find a job teaching, and I did. I was teaching in elementary school and he was an engineer. I met the goal of buying a new car.

So by 1986 the 3-bedroom raised ranch was filled with new furniture and decorated with the largest TV at the time and a new stereo also. Two cars in the garage. Job obtained and recognition for it too- I was nominated for Teacher of the Year. Marriage, check. Consumerism, check. Professional recognition, check.

All the world’s goals met. But I thought, ‘what next?’ What is the next goal? Neither of us wanted children. So…what now? Just keep teaching and working forever?

I began to feel a lack of something I could not understand. Husband must have also, because he started an affair and left me for the other woman.

Crushed beyond belief. Disillusioned. Is THIS the American Dream? I did everything ‘they’ said to do and it still turned out this way!

Now I had new goals. New pursuits. I had an ‘I’ll show them!’ attitude. Show who exactly I wasn’t sure. Show what, not sure either. I limped along for a while, trying dating, which is awful. Owning a home may be an American Dream, but on a single teacher salary it was a nightmare. I took on a second job at night and weekends. Then a 3rd. I was approaching age 30 but exhausted like I was 70. I was also shedding my formative years’ notions of how to live. I thought there must be another way besides the traditional! Because this way stinks.

Thirty hit me like 40 or 50 hits other people. Struggling under a mortgage, which thankfully due to the 18% down wasn’t excessive, but still, it was hard. I’d been moved a few times from my classroom, and from grade to grade, and school to school because I was ‘last in’ and lacked seniority. Starting over again and again professionally added to the stress of having to start over personally.

Is this life? Is this all there is? I was bewildered and working hard to manage my worldviews. I finally decided that if the old worldview wasn’t working for me, then I’d have to create a new one.

This began the period where I quit my teaching job and launched into my searching phase. I call it my Ecclesiastes decade. I tried to fill the increasingly exasperating hole in my life, heart, and mind with attempts at different lifestyles. My thinking was, if the white picket fence in front of a 3 bedroom home wasn’t the American Dream, maybe I’d find it ‘out there’.

I made traveling my goal, thinking that seeing the world would satisfy. I traveled to Italy by myself for a month, joining an archaeological expedition for 2 weeks of it and lived in a castle. Eating the finest of the world’s food…sampling its wine would do it. (BTW, Italy has the best food in the world).

I obtained an advanced degree, earning scholarships and a 4.0 GPA, thinking that would satisfy. I lived on a sailboat for 2 years, trying the off-grid life.

Becoming a business woman, I started a newspaper and earned New England Press Association awards for writing, thinking that accolades and public celebrity would satisfy.

I got married again, thinking I’d try marriage since it’d been around since the dawn of time so there must be something to it. Maybe I did it wrong the first time…

Nothing helped! Sometimes I’d climb out of my sailboat berth, my new husband slumbering beside me, and sit in the cockpit under a clear, full moon in a lovely anchorage, and sob. Why? I had no money problems, and I had or had tried everything else that the world told me would satisfy me, and yet…sobs.

The lack of satisfaction, joy, and peace was really starting to irk me.

Ecclesiastes says that pursuing these things- wealth and money (Ecc 5)…physical appetites and pleasures like food & wine, or living an outdoor life (Ecc 6)…knowledge and wisdom… work and achievement… status, power, and self-reliance…brings only vanity. Vain pursuits. How well I know! I pursued all those, and nothing satisfied.

During this period I also crafted a lot. I let my thinking mind rest and activated my creative mind. And it produced things that the Bible says, but I didn’t know it at the time. I never pursued religion. Not THAT! Anything but that!

I made a little booklet and in it I asked the question, why was I always thirsty? Why, after drinking in the world, was I thirsty again right away?

Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never be thirsty; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.” (John 4:13-14)

I was a woman who “had it all.” I’d been married, had all the things that traditional worldviews said would make me happy, but they didn’t. Then I had all the things that feminism said would make me happy, but they didn’t.

And I was still asking the eternal questions that bothered me so- why were people so bad? Why were there wars all the time? Why do we live for such a short time and then die, what was the point of it all? Who am I? What is my place in the world? What was my identity? Where could I metaphorically put down permanent roots and settle?

Much more happened during that 10-15 year range, but to cut to the point, I well knew by age 42 that there had to be more to life. I never sought Jesus. My sin nature would not allow that. I did feel like I was in an Star Trek episode, inside a tractor beam dragging me (kicking and screaming) me unwillingly to the place where I’d meet Him. This is irresistible Grace, and finally after digging in my heels and resisting, the Lord made Himself known to me and by contrast, my depravity. I repented finally.

Now I know peace. Joy that is solid and not fleeting. I have a secure knowledge that the world is beautiful because He created it, but that the world itself doesn’t have anything for me that is better than or more solid that Jesus Himself.

I had free will and I used that free will to try everything I wanted to try, listed above. But He had appointed me to salvation, unbeknownst to me. What that means is, at His appointed time whatever God decrees to will inevitably come to pass, including the salvation of individual people He has set apart for such a blessing. The Holy Spirit had been working in my life whether I wanted Him to or not. I could not resist or overcome His propelling movement of me toward the cross.

Thank God.

I finally had an identity.