Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

The Arts Section of yesterday’s Sunday Chicago Tribune features an article about four aging female singer/artists who have all released albums in what some would call the sunset of their recording careers.

Annie Lennox is 49, Patti Scialfa 50, Patti Smith 57, and Loretta Lynn 69. Each dropped out somewhere along the straight trajectory of stardom to raise children and be homemakers. And each is back.

I’m not enough of a music critic to judge if their new albums are worthy; what I like about the whole scene is that I am smack dab, age-wise, in the middle of these singers. They give me hope.

We are all of the generation where women chose between career and family. Some of us might have thought otherwise back when we were in choice-making mode, but the truth was you couldn’t do justice to both worlds. And you didn’t get much help from the male side either.

So now, other women besides Lennox and Company are coming of age again too. Now they are at the end of their child rearing years for which they sacrificed their careers. Why can’t they – no, we — pick up those careers? Not in full bloom, maybe never in full bloom, but certainly in emerging blossom. Why can’t we record our own symbolic albums in whatever arenas we choose?

Some might assert that Lennox and Company has certain benefits the rest of us don’t. Maybe they banked the monies they made prior to dropping from the spotlight. Maybe they had famous husbands or lengthy careers early on or whatever. It doesn’t matter. If we don’t light our own candles now, the world will never know what cursing-in-the-dark we prevented.