In the baby boomer world into which I was born everything had its place. Dad came home and I was created. Aunt Alice stopped being Rosie the Riveter and went back to being Mom. My mom worked outside the home, but she was one of the few moms I knew who did. Then came the fifties and the Cold War and the Sixties and all kinds of upheavals.

Girls like me were taught two totally conflicting sets of values. We were to be attractive, go to college, get husbands and raise kids. We were to be ourselves, go to college and have careers, marry or not, have kids or not, stay home and raise them, or not. We struggled through the Seventies and Eighties and on through the Nineties feeling all kinds of guilt with whatever choice or choices we made.

When we were kids we were taught you chose a life and lived it. The world is not that way anymore and all of us, female and male, have found that lifelong careers, job security and pensions are rapidly becoming anachronisms. We have all learned we must look ahead, retrain, have two, three, five or six careers in our lives and our children's lives.

Pastiche is written in a journal style tracing accumulated memories of all those decades through the device of a woman looking into an oval mirror and using it as a time machine to examine the events that have been registered in all the different parts of her body and how they can be combined to create a new, experienced her to go onto to the next phase of her life adventure.

I have called this bodily tour guide Serena. She begins her examination with visual remembrances and then moves on through the senses of smell and hearing. During the course of the nine chapters of this small work, Serena captures the essence of the decades through which she has lived through her senses, her hands and arms, belly and womb, legs and feet. She draws all her experiences together through prose and poems and ends up feeling she is being born anew through her own life experiences which she has sorted out and recombined through the heart of herself to find out who she is at fifty and where she wants to go.

The remembrances are things of a universal nature that will trigger like remembrances in other readers and hopefully assist them in finding out through self-examination what future they can built for themselves.

All contents copyright Remy Benoit or their respective authors. The advice on this site should not be construed as professional advice. If you are in a state of crisis, you should seek professional aid in your area.