When I am an Old Woman I Shall Dye My Hair Purple
When I am an Old Woman I Shall Dye My Hair Purple In early 2000 I flew to San Francisco with my newly adopted baby. At 46 and still jet lagged, I pushed her stroller through our Oakland neighborhood. “Your granddaughter is beautiful,” said a woman on a park bench. Granddaughter. Right. I went home […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
