My friend Kathy Baggot Stilwell turned me on to this video, and it reminds me that we can make so many happy by doing so little. I am happy that CNN featured this man as a Hero. He certainly is. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_3BEwpv0dM
Give Me Laughter, Stat!
Boomer Women – Our Best and Worst of Times
I’m reading “Inventing the Rest of our Lives” by Suzanne Braun Levine, and this part resonated with me:
“We know what ‘middle age’ used to be about: cutting back, scaling down, giving up. And we know that isn’t for us. At the same time, we sense that doors are closing, that a chapter is over. We are no longer fertile; we are no longer the trend-setting generation; and we are now less likely to make a major mark. So we are torn between those ‘facts of life’ and what we fear are ‘unrealistic expectations.’ Can I really learn a new language? Can I really start my own business? Can I fall in love? Get a divorce? Close up the house? Do I have what it takes to make changes in my life?
“We are restless and curious and ready to get to work. The doubts and the ‘zest’ create crosscurrents that can cancel each other out and leave us stymied by a sense of aimlessness.”
I can’t tell you how much that speaks to me. Here I am, on the verge of marketing my debut novel to agents, at a time when the publishing industry is being nuked and our society still very much values youth over maturity (and I have more to say now than ever!) – and yet, there are times when I think I am foolish for racing around with my hair on fire in pursuit of this passion, because I am 56 and my sweet husband is 63, and we are in our prime of midlife, and I should spend every vibrant moment I can enjoying his company…the actuarials are not kind. I expect I’ll have fifteen years of widowhood; time enough, solitude enough for writing. So I race, and then I stop, and wonder, and I go back and hold him and ask him to reassure me that I’m not leaving him behind, and then I hurry back to my office.
I Love More Magazine, but…(Part 2)
Last month I wrote about my frustration with More.com, which I love but which seems to be trending away from “isn’t it cool being middle aged?” to “what else can you do to frantically pursue youth?” And it reminded me that when I was young, supple and thin, I was so obsessed with being even thinner and prettier that I MISSED IT! Now when I look at those old photos, I think, God, I was a beauty queen. I had the BEST legs, the BEST skin! But I thought I was fat and ugly.
So that’s why I LOVED this essay, Fat Chance, by Susan Carol Hauser. Susan wrote the excellent collection of essays, “Full Moon: Reflections on Turning Fifty.”
Fat Chance
When I was twenty I was a slender woman. At five feet six and one-half inches tall, I weighed one-thirty, give or take five pounds. When I was about thirty, I took some of my clothes to a rummage sale. A friend and I were straightening the tables and she picked up a mini-dress, a slim hank of white cloth with spaghetti straps. “Who do you suppose wore this tiny thing?” she mused. I looked at it. It was tiny. Straight lined, no flares, no pleats, no elastic waist.
“I did,” I said. She looked at me, and we both looked at the gown she had draped admiringly over her arm. I weighed one fifty or sixty by then and had given up dresses in favor of slacks, and waistlines in favor of flowing tops.
“You were thin,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” I answered. “I’ve never been thin.”
“Look at it,” she said, holding it up. I looked at it, then she put the dress back on the table. We continued silently at our task, but I kept thinking about that wisp of a garment. I really was thin once, and I didn’t know it. I weighed a scant one hundred and thirty pounds, and I thought I was fat. I worried about eating my eating. I felt guilty when I ate jelly donuts. I once ate half a dozen so I could throw away the package and no one would know I had eaten three.
As I sorted through other people’s clothes, I tried to blame my self-deception on everyone, anyone else. Twiggy. Family who said “You’re having another?” My parents’ friends who said “You’re just large boned” when I weighed one-thirty but was not yet five-six and a half feet tall. But I was the one who listened, and didn’t listen. I remembered store clerks who said “You look wonderful,” and my obstetrician who tried to tell me I was not fat.
I had an epiphany at that rummage sale: I had been thin once, and I missed it. I began to wonder what else I had missed, and then to wonder what I was currently missing. I could hear myself saying, in response to a compliment, “Oh, you’re just saying that,” or thinking to myself, “Oh, yeah, fat chance.”
Fat chance. I decided then to not miss another minute of my own life. Gradually I learned to say “thank you” when someone complimented me and, when I doubted them, to stop and consider that they might be right.
And this year I am offering myself a special challenge: to enjoy my body the way it is; to let go of the way it could be, or should be, and to revel in this ship that carries my soul so ably about the earth.
I weigh one hundred and seventy-eight pounds. I work out, and have discovered classy clothes catalogs for “large boned women,” so some people don’t believe it. “You don’t look it,” they say, the way they say “You don’t look fifty years old.” And they mean it. But I want to say to them and to myself, “Yes, I do look it. This is what one-seventy-eight looks like. And this is what fifty years old looks like.”
Recently I have taken to standing nude in front of the mirror. “Look at that belly,” I say to myself. “That is the belly of a woman who has borne two children and who loves good bread. Look at the curves of those hips, and the heft of those breasts. That is the flesh of a woman who has lived for half of a century.”
The woman in the mirror straightens her shoulders, not missing a thing.
(You can read Carol’s blog here.)
Boomer Women Read LOTS of Books!
Have you been wondering about the future of book publishing? Are you thinking you might publish your book in digital format? Is your market primarily women age 40 and above? Have I got good news for you!
According to a blog about marketing to baby boomers:
Few things remain the same in book publishing , consumer electronics, and media these days. But a few things are likely to remain the same for many years:
• Boomer women will remain the most reliable and profitable consumers of books in any format.
• Boomer women will end up reading more of their books on e-readers (many of which will probably be $99 devices that aren’t branded Kindles).
• Amazon and Kindle will sell more of those books than anyone else.
You can read more in this post called Editorial: How Amazon Will Retain Boomers – even if they buy Apple’s iPads.
Women Earn 80 Cents to Men’s Dollar but Aren’t Afraid to be Feminine, Gosh Darn it!
Recently I was arguing with Patricia Handschiegel about her column at the Huffington Post where she asserts that women have made huge progress in the work world, and the proof of it is that women today aren’t afraid to be feminine in the workplace. I argued that primal issues like power, equal pay for equal work, and visibility in the C-suite (CEO, CFO, CBO, etc) sort of crush femininity as an issue. Also, I kept my mouth shut about her subtext that younger people are so much more advanced now, and that if only those earlier women had done X and Y, they would have been better treated. (Poor stupid old women!)
And yet, vindication! Today I was gratified to see this article by Chrystia Freeland: Why Aren’t There More Women at Capitalism’s Heights? Freeland, who is the global editor at large for Thomson Reuters, agrees with me, although maybe gratified isn’t the word. More like depressed.
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