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The Musings & Ponderings of Stella (And Friends)

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The Active Grandmother Theory montage
Stella Fosse

The Active Grandmother Theory

The Active Grandmother Theory We women, unique among female primates, live long past our childbearing years. There are good reasons why. I’ve written before about the Grandmother Hypothesis, the brainchild of Kristin Hawkes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah. Hawkes and her colleagues published the seminal article on grandmother theory in 1998.  They showed that in modern-day hunter-gatherer societies, healthy grandmothers support their grandchildren by foraging for food (or by providing childcare

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Haeder for Baby Boomers Explode Paradigms
Isabel Alexander

Baby Boomers Explode Paradigms

The Big Boom Theory – Baby Boomers Explode Paradigms A guest post from the audacious and extraordinary Isabel Alexander I’m not a physicist but I enjoyed high school chemistry. However, I was more intrigued by biology, and specifically, anatomy. Ultimately my independent research and extra-curricular experimentation proved another theory: that hormones + heat – caution = pregnancy. BOOM! I was a teen mother and that set off a Big Bang reaction that rocked my personal universe.

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Isabel Alexander 1 Comment
Influencers In The Elder Ecosystem Montage Header
Stella Fosse

Influencers In The Elder Ecosystem

Influencers In The Elder Ecosystem Word pairs are powerful; remember “outside agitators?”  If the agitators are from outside, that implies people in the community are fine with the status quo.  But are they, really?  Or take my current least favorite pair: “young influencers.”  If influencers are automatically young, that implies the old lack influence.  But do we, really? Who are the influencers in the elder ecosystem? It’s the job of badass women to question social expectations. 

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Retirement till the end header
Stella Fosse

Retirement Till the End

Retirement Till the End Retirement is a lovely vacation that ends in death.  Our exhilaration when we first retire is tempered by how it will end. Back when I was working, if I had two weeks off, I reveled in the first week and spent the second week dreading the return to the office.  Even then I knew that was absurd.  Why not enjoy it all?  And I don’t want to do that again:  Dreading

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Into Your Eighties Joining Hands Across Generations header montage
Stella Fosse

Into Your Eighties Joining Hands Across Generations

 Into Your Eighties Joining Hands Across Generations In Part One of our series on Joining Hands Across Generations, forty-something Tera Johnson-Swartz (founder of Midlife_It) posed a question to sixty-something Stella, which Stella answered in Part Two. In this final part, Stella (the sixty-something) talks with Dr. Ruth Saxton, our eighty-something, about the importance of older women’s stories. Biography : In her long academic career, Dr. Ruth Saxton studied and taught about fiction by women, focusing

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The 32 Week Baby in the Jar - montage header for blog
Stella Fosse

The 32 Week Baby in the Jar

The 32 Week Baby in the Jar I was 34 when I returned to school for a Masters Degree in Biology.  It was 1987 and my twin sons were six years old.  I sat in the front row for the first day of Developmental Biology.  Directly in front of me was a table with jars that, from left to right, displayed embryos of increasing maturity.  Farthest to the right was a 32-week fetus, preserved in

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