I managed to avoid being swallowed up by the Caltech abyss, but nevertheless it caused me to question my own situation. One weekend in Santa Barbara, while Stephen was engaged in endless discussions with his colleague Jim Hartle, I sat on the beach, wrapped up against the icy wind, gazing out to sea while the children played. As I ran the loose sand through my fingers, I asked myself where my life was going. What did I have to show for my thirty years? I had the children, “my blessings” as dear Thelma Thatcher would say, and Stephen.
Certainly proud of his extraordinary achievements, I didn’t really feel that I shared in his success – yet everything that happened to him was crucial to me, whether an honour, sparkling with fame and glory, or one of those life-threatening choking fits seizing him unawares. I loved him for his courage, his wit, his sense of the ridiculous and the absurd, and that wicked charisma which enabled him – and still enables him – to twist most people, including me, round his little finger. So I was achieving what I set out to do – to devote myself to Stephen, giving him the chance of fulfilling his genius. But in the process I was beginning to lose my own identity. I could no longer count myself a Hispanist or even a linguist, and I felt that I did not command respect anywhere, in California or in Cambridge. Perhaps all the frenzied socializing and entertaining was really just my Freudian way of saying, “Please notice me too!”
— Travelling to Infinity (Jane Hawking), Loc. 3359–69