by Flora Sussely
The Biology of Absence
We don’t realize how much we keep track in our cells.
How we note the absence and the quiet that swells
Hollow is a word I think when I walk in the door
It’s hard not to expect him and just put on the chain
I wash my hair and all the while his DNA strands
weave a basket in which my heart lies wet at my own feet. […]
5 Steps to Living Your Bliss:
1) Smile often
2) Follow your inner wisdom
3) Slow down your breathing
4) Reconnect your Heart & Sex
5) Let go of Do-ing; enjoy Be-ing
by Rachel Snyder
(Dear Reader, the poetry and words of Rachel Snyder resonate so deeply that I felt it important to include her on our site. This is another one of “Cyma’s Picks.” Each week, we’ll read sample pages from her 2003 book, “365 Words of Wisdom for Women,” now out-of-print, with all rights reverted to the author, but still available in used copies on Amazon, etc. Here is the first of many meditations we will read together.)
Dare to do it differently! Dare to be the first mother to boycott standardized testing. Dare to be the last to give your okay to ear piercing. Dare to just say no to circumcision (Double dare if you’re Jewish!) Dare to say yes to nursing your three-year-old, no matter what anyone else says. Read all you can, ponder your decision long and hard, then dare to question the safety of childhood immunizations. When your mother recites her Ten Commandments of Child Discipline, dare to hug her and say, “Thanks, Mom, but I’d like to try out my own ideas.” Dare to look and feel and act ten years younger than your age. Dare to ask your grandfather to step outside with his cigar. Dare to tell the truth to first-time mothers and dare them to ignore you and rely on their own experience. Dare to create a model of mothering that you’ve never seen or heard of before. Then dare to ignore anybody who questions the rightness of that model for you.
Dr. Barb DePree
(Dear Reader, as you may notice, we now have advertisers on our site! Although I am in some way connected to all these entities, I have found such sympatico with MiddlesexMD.com – a site dedicated to providing women with information and resources for navigating the sometimes treacherous waters of peri- and menopause. This is another “Cyma’s Picks.” With this in mind, I bring you the following post by founder Dr. Barb Depree. We hope to offer more posts like this in the future. For now, read on…)
You may not be able to leap up from a lotus position in a single bound. (Heck, you may not even be able to get into a lotus position.) You may find your back a little cranky when your two-year-old demands to be carried. Most disappointing of all (to your love life, anyway), you may find yourself falling into an exhausted stupor every night at the same time as your kindergartner.
For all the delights of motherhood, it’s a different ballgame at midlife. […]
by Cyma Shapiro
I have two sets of kids – a common occurrence for many Midlife Mothers. I have two generations, in two differing decades, with two differing experiences. (The total count of this is four children). One is Gen Y; the other is yet to be named (soon to be called Z or M). One is pre-9/11; the other is post 9/11. One is all about the advent of social media and the importance of the Internet; the other has never lived without all of it. One is the MTV generation, the other is all about the digital age, cell phones (only) and the world of texting. More importantly, one sees the world as basically benign and good, the other as being scary and dangerous and all about the horrors seemingly right outside our front door. These aren’t just man-made horrors; these now include tornados, hurricanes, flash floods, power outages, unhappy out-of-work people, and less money to live as we’d like. […]
by Peg O'Neill, M.D.
I am the queen of making lists. Like many busy working moms, I use lists to help me juggle the myriad of balls that I need to keep in the air on a regular basis: the grocery list, the list of school events, sports and music lessons, not to mention the lists I make at work to remind me to follow up on patients and to take care of the other responsibilities that come with being a partner in a busy pediatric practice. Though they sometimes drive me crazy, lists actually help keep me sane by keeping me at least a little bit organized and by helping to prevent important stuff from falling through the cracks. With the holidays approaching and the myriad of extra things to do, I find myself making even more lists. […]
by Loretta Tayar
I am a verb. I am all action. I make homemade soup for my daughters when they are sick. I jump out of bed in the middle of the night to lend a sympathetic ear to a frightened child and reassure her it was just a bad dream — their mother, father, brother, sister or friend did not get shot to death in their apartment. I write checks for tuition, tutors, cheerleading uniforms, school supplies, clothes (some functionally necessary and some to avert the fashion death that they believe will occur if said clothing wasn’t purchased), food, cell phone charges, doctor visits, gym memberships, family vacations. When my daughters were younger I went to parent-teacher conferences, graduations and plays. I did not go to PTA functions at one daughter’s high school because she didn’t think she could explain having a white parent when she’s black. […]
by Andrea Lynn
In my life, there are many mothers I respect and admire. Friends, family, colleagues, even strangers. Mothers I see in the world doing the right thing with children, showing small kindnesses, endless patience, needed discipline. Moms who have faced huge obstacles, small tragedies, who started their journeys late or in roundabout ways. But heroic mothers? I only know one, and I don’t know her well. She is a midlife mother, in her 50s, and attends the same church as I do. I know her because our congregation has adopted her cause as ours — emergency foster care of the youngest children in our city. […]
by Jane Samuel
Years ago as I held my new daughter in my arms, feeding her in the dark of our bedroom in the hopes that her fretful, busy body would settle into sleep, my heart welled with emotions and my mind turned to the woman who birthed this child. Tears streaming down my cheeks, I thought about the pain a woman must face in the giving away of her offspring. […]
by Karen Hug-Nagy
When I was in my twenties and thirties, the thought never crossed my mind that by the time I reached my mid-forties, I would be hauling kids around in a Honda Odyssey. While I never owned any sleek sports cars, my Ford Explorer was dedicated to weekend road trips in the country and taking the dogs for a ride. […]