Join the Relationship conversation! BA50s are dealing with all kinds of relationships: we are married after 50, divorced after 50, puzzling over sexless marriage or rekindling our love lives at midlife; sandwiched in between our aging parents and our adult kids, becoming grandparents and so much more. Not to mention how we are relating to ourselves in this unique stage of life.
If there ever was a time for random acts of kindness and seeking ways to cheer up friends and family, it's now. The announcement of the third national lockdown ...
Since our separation, my soon-to-be ex-husband of thirty years and I have spent the holidays together with our young adult children. I rationalized that handling a little discomfort for a couple of days of celebrating together was far better than the heartache of feeling left out. Normally, it’s been fine for a day or two with all the extended family around, but this Christmas, due to Covid, there would be no big gatherings, just the five of us—me, my ex, my daughter, my son and his wife.
And this year, it wasn’t just two days, unexpectedly it turned into ten....
I had such a fantastic time getting into the big issues of divorce, loss, grief and finding one's way back into feeling whole again in this talk with Holly Par...
At the conclusion of the first night of our beautifully sensual life together, the man who became my second husband, breathlessly rolled over onto his side of the bed and exclaimed, “If I have a heart attack, don’t call the EMTs until I am cold and blue!” I could hear his smile in the dark and I knew exactly what he meant....
I have a confession to make. Perhaps a couple. First, like Bernadette, in Where’d You Go Bernadette?, I have dreamed about disappearing on my family. This fantasy has occurred more frequently in the past nine months, as there have been long stretches where everyone is inhabiting our home and the space that was mostly mine is gone; taken over by home offices and school workspaces....
The many hours spent in a woman only hothouse of female style exercise has released endorphinal rushes of intimate stories told in whispers that lead to roars of laughter. We’ve become experts at distracting each other from the hard work of stabilizing our bodies on a moving platform by talking female. ...
I knew things were about to change when I went shopping for CBD cream and came home with a vibrator. This was before hemp became legal in Massachusetts and you had to buy CBD at questionable places, like the “adult shop'' about five miles north of Boston. Since my sex life had been evicerated by my husband’s illness, medication and sheer exhaustion, buying a vibrator suddenly seemed like the easiest way to save the one thing I might be able to control in my life....
And so Thanksgiving 2020 came to pass with a whimper, a nod and a sigh. It started out with big plans, then those plans got whittled and whittled til they were so little that after months of conversation, there were none. There were No Plans.
And this was echoed across the land....
Dad asked for a Zoom call on Thanksgiving this year. I was surprised as this was an unusual request for two reasons. One, getting Dad up and running on Zoom was...
Imagine three years ago, the effort of fake joy I had to project while we opened gifts around the Christmas tree with our young-adult children and only my husba...
"Mom, you're living in fear," My son texted in all caps.
"No, I am cautious and protective. Two qualities you love about me."
"Mom, you turned the garage into...
The curse of the organized is that you are called upon to help those less fortunate. When you have a kid who is organizational challenged that means years of backpack cleaning, camp trunk excavating, and end of the year college room packing up.
Freddy had a rough first year in college.......
If you missed this New York Times piece, it's a must read for kids coming home from college.
"Plan out the trip home and set ground rules for safe socializing. And remember that they’ve had a tough year, too, so give them the space to talk about it.
“Rates of anxiety, depression and general malaise among my college patients have never been this bad, even compared to after 9/11,” said Dr. Julia Turovsky, a clinical psychologist in Chatham, N.J....
My twenty-four year-old son stood in front of me and said, “I’m going to propose to Sara.”
Of course I was excited for him. I loved Sara and they loved each other. But in my head I yelled, “nooooooo. I’m not ready!” I was okay with my son getting married, but I wasn’t ready to witness the beginning of his marriage so close to the end of my own. It was just six weeks earlier that his dad and I had agreed to divorce....
I never wanted to be on Starship Enterprise when Captain Kirk looked over to Spock and said, "We are going into lockdown." The magical sliding doors would seal and the Captain's Deck would be contained. And we would spend the next 30 minutes watching anxiously what was going to happen during this containment.
I'm not sure who is playing Captain Kirk, I think we tend to switch off, on our Starship America 2020, my husband may not agree with that assessment. He and I are refining our skills in the cockpit of our lives. And we are creating daily routines on our Starship America 2020 during our containment....
What steps will you take for yourself this year? In your journey to get confident and feel better about yourself, you cannot be afraid to step on toes. In other words...
Don’t be afraid to piss people off.
Strong women will end up pissing people off. And that’s okay....
I don’t set an alarm. I jump out of bed, put on my soft sweatpants and my cozy sweatshirt – it actually says cozy on the front. I sleep with my hair in a ponyta...
I find myself sighing a lot lately. Big heavy sighs that can’t seem to expunge the helplessness and hopelessness that seem to envelope me more than any other time in my life. I love Autumn. I love the cooler days and nights. I even love the change of time and the early darkness. But everything is so different this year that the things I’ve always embraced I find myself dreading....