A letter to every woman holding someone else’s world together I have been watching the women in my life lately. Not in a casual way. In the way you watch someone when you realize they have stopped sitting down. My mother is caring for my stepfather. My sister is caring for her husband, who has…
On Midlife, Contentment, and the Permission to Love the Life You Actually Have Last week a friend and I were sitting on the front porch taking in the flowers blooming in the circle, watching the bees and birds flit from one to the other. And she said, “I keep waiting to feel like I’ve arrived,…
Twelve books worth clearing your calendar for — new favorites, old friends, and everything in between Every June I make myself a small promise: this summer I will read slowly. I will savor. I will not stay up until midnight turning pages under the covers the way I did as a child during summer break….
Making friends has never come easily to me. But somewhere in my fifties I stopped apologizing for a small circle and started celebrating what I actually have. Making friends has never come easily to me. Maybe it is because I am shy. Maybe it is because we moved every two years until I was thirteen…
What I heard in your comments, and what I want to say back I did not expect what happened in the comments on Tuesday. I wrote about words. About the boy who called me Waddles the Duck when I was thirteen, and about the nail and the fence, and about how the holes stay even…
Nails, Labels, and the Ones That Stayed I have been thinking a lot about words lately. Not big, important words. Not speeches or headlines. The small ones. The ones someone says to you on a Tuesday afternoon when you are thirteen years old, and you are still carrying them around in your body at fifty-nine….
I told my doctor this is not so bad. She laughed. A year later, I understood why. When I turned fifty, my doctor suggested I go off birth control. I said no. I said no because I did not feel like I was in perimenopause. I had had some mild symptoms over the years, a…
For the woman who has spent her whole life making everyone else feel like a guest. Many years ago, after I had moved away from home, I flew back to visit my mother. I waited at the airport longer than I should have. She had forgotten what time I was arriving. When I finally called,…
New research says the curiosity that matters most grows with age. Here is why midlife is exactly the right time to follow it. I once seriously considered becoming an Egyptologist. Graduate-level seriously. Like half the country, I became fascinated when the Treasures of Tutankhamun toured the States in the late 1970s. I never saw the…
There is a difference between a morning ritual and a morning habit. Here are the seven habits that support your body and mind specifically after 50, and why they work differently now. I have written about my morning ritual (the drinking chocolate, the birds at the feeder, the gratitude journal open on the kitchen table…
I was a girl who actually got the information. And it still was not enough. Because nobody ever continued the conversation. I have been thinking about a manual. Not a medical textbook. Not a wellness program. A manual. The kind that comes in the box when you buy something complicated, written by someone who actually…
On paddle boards and pool days, short trips, the tomatoes, and the magnificent knowledge that fall is coming I am going to be honest with you right from the start, which is the only way I know how to do things. Summer is not my favorite season. There. I said it. On a lifestyle blog….
