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 […]
Awaken the Power of Older Women

Awaken the Power of Older Women. I am in several online groups for older women where the prevailing content is jokes at our expense. Incontinence is a recurring theme, along with making fun of older women’s looks and desires. Self-deprecating humor is great, up to a point. But too much of it degrades our self-image. […]
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 = […]
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 […]
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 […]