Mothering in the Middle

The Magical Gift of Friendship

by Phyllis Goldberg and Rosemary Lichtman

You probably don’t need proof that the emotional support you get from friends is vital, but here it is. A UCLA study shows that the cascade of brain chemicals released when we’re stressed causes us to seek out other women. This ‘tend and befriend’ notion, developed by social psychologists Drs. Shelley Taylor and Laura Klein, may explain why social ties reduce our risk of disease and help us live longer. Friends also help us live better. Research about coping after the loss of a partner indicates that women who have a close confidante more often survive without permanent loss of vitality. And that’s not all. Both the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study and the MacArthur Foundation Study confirm that friendship is one of the keys to a long and satisfying life. […]

Kudos to the Toronto Star/Parentcentral.ca (Canada) for recently featuring a week-long series on the various aspects of midlife mothering. Here are two of the articles below:

http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/newsfeatures/article/1111287–celebrity-culture-puts-unrealistic-veneer-on-older-motherhood

http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/babiespregnancy/pregnancy/article/1111284–parent-groups-ward-off-isolation-for-older-moms

Mindful Meditations for Mothers

by Rachel Snyder

Soup

There comes a time when only soup will suffice. Your Nana’s homemade chicken soup. That tomato soup you always had with grilled cheese sandwiches when you were a kid. Thick, hearty minestrone that you get from the corner deli. Mulligatawny, zuppa di pesce, avoglomeno, menudo, borscht. Soup winds around your bones and finds its way into every nook and cranny of your soul and warms you from the inside out. Soup is as comfortable as a bear hug and twice as soothing. It quiets down cranky children and anxious adults and gets the thumbs-up when nothing else will do. When a sandwich is too much and a salad too little, soup hits the sweet spot. Steaming in bowls and mugs, tickling noses and warming hands, soup offers pure love in every spoonful and a meal in every can. For super-duper suppers, nothing satisfies like soup.

www.rachelsnyder.wordpress.com

Wise Women & Mid-life (Re)Blooming

by Jamie Walters

Many of us have experienced, or are experiencing, a sort of radical rebirth, a reincarnation within this incarnation.

We’re living in uber-transformative times, so perhaps it comes as no surprise that transformation around us happens through transformation within us, even as circumstances seem to conspire to nudge us into that change. […]

Midnight Math

by Andrea Lynn

I pretty much read any article I come across about older motherhood, so this one in my local paper of course caught my eye:

http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/babiespregnancy/pregnancy/article/1110529–the-costs-of-older-motherhood-what-a-four-decade-generation-gap-means

It all hit home to me. It is the story mom Julie Morris (a new mom at 41) and daughter Maggie Fisher, fast-forwarded to 18 years later. Maggie’s father, 71 when Maggie was born, died when she was still a little girl. The writer says:

“It made Morris consider her own mortality, too, and raise it with Maggie. “When she was 10, I had to sit down with her and ask, ‘If anything happens to me, what would you like to happen to you,’ It was a pretty hard moment for her.” Oh, my death fears. Don’t get me started. […]

The Bone Structure of the Landscape

by Valerie Gillies

“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future – the timelessness of the rocks and the hills – all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”
― Andrew Wyeth

I hate the cold, with a passion. Spring, summer, and early autumn, with their warmth and lushness and never-ending sounds, are my times. No matter how hard I try to reframe it, I loathe winter for its dark, bitter bleakness. […]

Becoming Our Parent’s Parents

by Maddisen Krown

At the beginning of this New Year, I’d like to share about my personal experience as a mid-lifer facing and caring for my physically declining elder parents.

The Journey Home

For Thanksgiving this year, I went home to Connecticut to be with my family. My focus and the main theme for this week-long trip went way beyond the one day of festivities. I was primarily there to assist my ailing elder parents. To do some serious cleaning and clearing inside their large home, and to realistically assess their states of health and next steps for their care. […]

Cyma’s Picks: the newly-released How We Love Now, by Suzanne Braun Levine

“You are not who you were, only older,” Suzanne Braun Levine

I haven’t written a book review for Mothering, yet, since I believe our readers are a widely diverse group of women representing many ages, interests and ideologies. So, when I received How We Love Now, I wasn’t sure what I would do with it, other than read it. […]

Mindful Meditations for Mothers

by Rachel Snyder

Soup

There comes a time when only soup will suffice. Your Nana’s homemade chicken soup. That tomato soup you always had with grilled cheese sandwiches when you were a kid. Thick, hearty minestrone that you get from the corner deli. Mulligatawny, zuppa di pesce, avoglomeno, menudo, borscht. Soup winds around your bones and finds its way into every nook and cranny of your soul and warms you from the inside out. Soup is as comfortable as a bear hug and twice as soothing. It quiets down cranky children and anxious adults and gets the thumbs-up when nothing else will do. When a sandwich is too much and a salad too little, soup hits the sweet spot. Steaming in bowls and mugs, tickling noses and warming hands, soup offers pure love in every spoonful and a meal in every can. For super-duper suppers, nothing satisfies like soup.

www.rachelsnyder.wordpress.com

Making The Most Of Our Time

by Deborah Swiss

There’s a new breed of activists on the rise. Mothers at mid-life are banding together around the rhetorical question: If we don’t help this planet, who will? It’s a different spin on the imperative to save Mother Earth but both share an urgency to roll up our sleeves and do something. With so many problems across the globe, our first inclination might be to walk away under the weight of the question “Where do I even begin?” […]