more projects, studies, or work that she enjoys. Usually her relation-
ships with her adult children are amiable. Because she has encour-
aged them to be independent and self-sufficient, and has neither
been intrusive nor encouraged dependency, most of her children
and grandchildren do not have problems with her. They usually
respect her and often like her. Although she often lacks demonstrat-
iveness and does not express much feeling, she maintains family
contact and communication about events, as well as keeping up
family holidays and traditions.
In their later years, many Athena women become respectable
pillars of the community. A few turn out to be “little old ladies in
tennis shoes,” business-minded women who have been ridiculed
for asking pertinent questions at stockholder meetings. They won’t
be put off by other people’s nonsense or muddled thinking, and
their persistence is especially annoying to men in authority.
When widowhood comes, an Athena woman has usually anticip-
ated it. An Athena woman knows her life expectancy is longer than
a man’s and, because she may have married a man older than herself,
she is not caught unaware or unprepared by widowhood. She is a
widow who manages her own money, who invests in the stock
market, or continues the family business or one of her own.
A widowed or spinster Athena woman often lives alone while
maintaining an active and busy life. Her one-in-herself virgin god-
dess quality serves her well in her last years when she is self-suffi-
cient and active, as it did when she was young.
PSYCHOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES
Rational Athena never lost her head, her heart, or her self-control.
She lived within the Golden Mean, and was not overwhelmed by
emotion or irrational feelings. Most of the other goddesses (except
Hestia) either unleashed their emotions on others and caused suffer-
ing, or were victimized and suffered themselves. The women who
are like them likewise have the potential to either cause suffering or
to suffer. Athena differed: she was invulnerable, unmoved by irra-
tional or overwhelming emotion, and her actions were deliberate
rather
Athena: Goddess of Wisdom Growing beyond the confining