Lori S. Marks asks, “How do you learn to love your body when your mother hated her own? How do you gain a clear perception of yourself when your very thin mother studied herself in the hall mirror sideways several times a day?”
And perhaps even more important: “How do you value yourself outside of a number on the scale when your mother routinely weighed you, starting in early childhood, and that number dictated whether she was pleased with you? Or in my young mind, whether she loved me?”
Read how Marks has broken this pattern in raising her three daughters.
Four professors of political science and one of social science report on their research: “Our research suggests that reminding Americans of where they came from . . . creates empathy for immigrants, generating more favorable attitudes toward immigration.”
It seems so obvious.
“To take myself seriously as a writer, I had to embrace my age”
When she was younger, poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist Stephanie Gangi thought of her writing as a hobby. Now she’s in her 60s and has embraced writing: “First novel at 60, forthcoming novel at 65, third in the works.” She now accepts that writing is no longer a hobby: “It is what I do and who I am.”
The result is that “In my work, my women think a lot about how to age gracefully even as they learn to recognize themselves in their new old faces.”
Family relationships are important for everyone. But casual relationships are also important.
These relationships with people we hardly know or know only superficially are called “weak ties” — a broad and amorphous group that can include your neighbors, your pharmacist, members of your book group or fellow volunteers at a nearby school.
This CNN article reports that “Multiple studies have found that older adults with a broad array of “weak” as well as “close” ties enjoy better physical and psychological well-being and live longer than people with narrower, less diverse social networks.”
“The shift signifies something larger than just a beauty trend.”
The pandemic kept us from visiting the hair salon. The result was that a lot of women, including us older ones, ended up with hair a lot longer than it had been in many years. Ann Zimmerman reports that many women who rediscovered the long hair of their youth and young adulthood “liked what they saw, [and] they decided to keep it that way.”
Zimmerman writes, “the pandemic and a burgeoning new take on what aging means to a generation of women who have been pioneers in everything they have done has given them license to experiment.” Although she focuses on hair length here, I’ve talked with many women (I live in a retirement community) who stopped coloring their hair during the pandemic and have decided to continue to wear their gray hair proudly.
© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown
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