Stolen Paragraph #12

I was trying to describe to someone how in only a few years Tank will be in school and I will have to decide what to do with my time, with my life.  One young mother of a toddler said, "Oh, I know how I'd fill my time!"  And I just said, "Yeah, but it's not quite just knowing how to fill my time.  I have a thousand things I want to do..."  And I couldn't explain it past that.  Fortunately, Anne Morrow Lindbergh did a great job of explaining it in the afterward to her book Gift from the Sea.  The paragraph follows.

The world has totally changed in twenty years and so, of course, have the lives of every one of us, including my own.  When I wrote Gift from the Sea, I was still in the stage of life I called "the oyster bed," symbol of a spreading family and growing children.  The oyster bed, as the tide of life ebbed and the children went away to school, college, marriage, or careers, was left high and dry.  A most uncomfortable stage followed, not sufficiently anticipated and barely hinted at in my book.  In bleak honesty it can only be called "the abandoned shell."  Plenty of solitude, and a sudden panic at how to fill it, characterize this period.  With me, it was not a question of simply filling up the space or the time.  I had many activities and even a well-established vocation to pursue.  But when a mother is left, the lone hub of a wheel, with no other lives revolving about her, she faces a total re-orientation.  It takes time to re-find the center of gravity.