Hi everyone THANK YOU!
I've been digesting the first two responses while more seem to have arrived. Loved Healing4Me's account of having a "hippie dad" . Thought about SarahSweets volunteer work in prison with AA and about her question re my work - sigh - mentally listed the zillion jobs that I did between 16 yrs old and 29 when I started my degree... but realised that I was side-tracking because for me what I did at work was earn money for rent and food, and not really about me as a woman at all.

I grew up with a workaholic and became a workaholic is probably the sum of it. Now for the first time since I was 16, I'm not working so I need to face who I "really" am.

Do you think that having a family at the centre of you life makes you more secure as a woman? Or perhaps there are, like me, bits of security and edges of insecurity when you come up to them. I've been lonely since I stopped work: not alone but lonely for being valued in some alternative way to working!!!