And once, when I had returned to visit Lorraine in London, I discovered that her mother had borrowed a copy of the 1970s anti-feminist book "The Total Woman" from the library. I read it enthusiastically. The author, Marabel Morgan, advised women to dote on their husbands and, among other things, to keep the spark in their marriages by presenting themselves naked, wound in Saran wrap, to their husbands at the front door.

I returned home and suggested this tactic to my mother. My parents' marriage had failed and I was certain that the problem was simply that my mother hadn't tried hard enough. If Saran wrap doesn't work, I advised her expertly, try whipped cream.

As I wrote to Lorraine, I imagined that her parents' home, a bright matchbox bungalow, was, as always, a study of perfect order, every surface polished, clear waxed floors stretching in all directions. There wouldn't be a speck or streak on her kitchen windows, through which, in my mind, the sun still poured in like lemon oil.

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Lorraine wrote back. She told me that her mother's life, too, had taken an unexpected turn. When Lorraine was 21, and her sister just 16, her mother had not accompanied the family for the traditional holiday week at the summer cottage.

Holidays weren't really holidays for Lorraine's mother, as Lorraine now understood. Holidays simply meant more days of cooking, cleaning and sweeping sand off the floor. Instead, for the first time ever, her mother stayed home. She entertained a friend for dinner. The next morning she tidied up, went into the garage and quietly took her own life. She, too, must have felt she had no choice.

Later, Lorraine would tell me that she could no longer remember the sound of her mother's laugh. She herself had two children whom she loved; she had a good marriage and a position as a senior executive with a trust company. And yet, looking at her life -- its stability and its solid community roots, its commitment to family -- she still wondered, had she lived? Had she made choices that were too safe?

Our mothers, we realized, had each felt some unfathomable pressure, but had no role models for how to escape that pressure. Both were born in the '30s, were schooled in the '50s, were married in the '60s and raised families in the '70s that they would, each in their own way, leave in the '80s.

They were two women whose lives had teetered and slid off the edge of the women's movement, women for whom freedom of choice did not necessarily mean freedom to choose -- without dire consequences.

Our mothers were our rocks, our rivers, our constellations. They were the central mysteries of our lives, as bright and penetrating as stars, sometimes just as distant. There is no second chance for life, but perhaps in every life, even in a life that has ended, or a life rived by distance, there is a second chance for meaning. These were two women whose choices were circumscribed by many things -- upbringing, social expectation, conventions -- and it was the difficult lessons of their lives that somehow formed us.

We had been given, we recognized, more choices than they had been; they were perhaps the last generation to marry young, to start traditional families, and the first generation to try to break from that mold. We had every opportunity to become our own "persons" but grew up to realize that personhood is, like womanhood was for our mothers, a mixed blessing, the result of difficult journeys we may not want to celebrate but are forced to acknowledge.

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