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
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
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
Joining Hands Across Generations – Your Fabulous Sixties In Part One of our series on Joining Hands Across Generations, forty-something Tera Johnson-Swartz (founder of Midlife_It) posed this question to sixty-something Stella: If there were something you wish you could have told a younger, more naive you, or even a woman approaching or just entering midlife, what would that be? What’s the best part of it – the sweetest, most savory piece you wouldn’t trade for
Joining Hands Across Generations – Newly Minted Crones Cronedom is not just one generation. It begins in our forties and extends to the end of life, which for some of us happens in our nineties or more. At each stage we have much to learn from one another: Newly menopausal women can learn from sisters who were there twenty years ago, and the oldest wisest sisters can learn from women still working and raising children even
Falling In Love With Characters I understand now why authors write sequels: Because it’s tough to walk away from your characters at the end of your novel. The lead women characters in Brilliant Charming Bastard—Rose, Joyce and Maxine—have been my companions for almost two years. Rose Bingham spent her career as a professor of Biology at UC Berkeley. When I first “met” Rose, she was dating Brendan Burns, who claimed to be a physician and
