Commentary Archives - Page 60 of 72 - Mothering in the Middle

Acupuncture: When East Meets West

by Beverley Golden

[Editor’s Note: This will be the first in a series of articles addressing the efficacy of acupuncture for ailments ranging from general health to infertility to peri- and menopause]

Sitting across a small desk like table, I extend my arms toward her. She places her index, middle and ring fingers on each of my wrists. Like a skilled piano player, she moves her fingers, first lightly, then with a bit more force and finally with an even deeper touch, shifting these alternating pressures from one wrist to the other on three specific points on my radial artery, nine pulses in total. […]

A Voice for the Voiceless: At the Intersection of Child Abuse and Volunteerism

by Jane Samuel

(In Honor of National Child Abuse Prevention Month)

– Every 35 seconds a child is abused or neglected in the US.

– Every hour a child is displaced due to abuse or neglect in the US.

– An estimated 1,740 children nationally died from abuse or neglect in one year’s time; the majority was 0-4 years old. […]

Midlife Media Interest Hits Portly Zoologist (43)

by David Bainbridge

Everyone seems to have an opinion about middle age.

I’d hoped many people would feel like that – not least when I was bashing out the 80,000 hard-won words of ‘Middle Age: A Natural History‘ – yet I didn’t realise until the book came out how almost everyone seems to want to express their opinion about the topic. […]

On Failure, Forgiveness and Cutting Ourselves Some Slack

by Peg O'Neill, M.D.

We forgot about “Gotcha Day.” In the world of adoptive families, this is a significant faux-pas. “Gotcha Day” is the celebration of bringing a non-biologic child into the family. For us, it commemorates the day our family became whole; the day that my husband and I were given the gift of our precious child and entered the challenging world of raising multiple boys, with all the craziness, motion, joy and exhaustion. For my older son, it was the day he became a sibling and began his journey as a big brother. For my adoptive son, though he was just six months old when he joined our family forever, it is akin to a birthday – a momentous event, a beginning, a symbol of who he is, at least in part. Over the past six years, we have commemorated “Gotcha Day” with story-telling about how we prayed for him to become part of our family, how we came to know him, and the details of how he joined our family, including how good he was on the plane coming back from Guatemala. We look at pictures, ooh and aah over how cute and funny he was. We go out to dinner at his favorite restaurant, a mediocre pasta joint near our house. […]

Baba

Andrea Lynn

This weekend, my family is throwing a surprise birthday party for my grandmother. A surprise 90^th birthday party. Setting aside the question of whether one should surprise a 90 year old with anything, least of all a room full of people yelling “surprise”, the party has got me thinking. A lot. The first question is whether I should drive 250 miles, each way, with my small children in the backseat, and then drive back the next day, so that we can attend the party. It’s a long way to drive, at an inopportune time of the year, and we’ve all been sick for the last few weeks. We’ve been feeling better, but the very idea of a trip right now – and that long winding drive — exhausts me. But 90^th birthday parties don’t come around that often, and everyone else will be there – Baba’s children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, dozens in all. […]

Let’s Give Older Mothers a Break

by Mariella Frostrup

(There’s no ‘right time’ to give birth, but later motherhood has advantages – its growth shouldn’t be greeted with wrist-slapping)

According to new statistics the female population of England and Wales are giving birth at rates not seen since the baby boom at the end of the second world war, and while the number of teenage pregnancies is declining, an increasing proportion of new babies are being born to older mothers. How should we greet such news? Pop the champagne corks, roll the red carpet out in front of your nearest maternity ward … or bemoan the 20 wasted years when these women were “failing” to make babies? Read more on:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/01/give-older-mothers-a-break

Mariella Frostrup, 50, is a Norwegian-born journalist and television presenter, well known on British TV and radio, mainly for arts programmes. She writes for The Guardian/uk. She is a new older mother of two children.

Older Mothers At Far Greater Risk Of Depression, Reveals Study

New mothers in their early forties are five times more likely to suffer from depression after giving birth than their younger counterparts, new research has revealed.

Researcher Giulia Muraca, a Phd student at the University of British Columbia, believes this could be due to higher stress levels among older mothers fuelled by anxieties about their pregnancy and birth. Read more on the Huffington Post UK:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/02/22/older-mothers-depression-risk_n_1293980.html?just_reloaded=1

Aging Gracefully In A Culture That Idolizes Youth

by Beverley Golden

My mother Lillian Golden is turning 96 this year. She is vivacious and vital; has an impeccable memory, is beautiful, gracious and an inspiration to everyone who meets her. An inspiration of what aging gracefully can look like, in a culture that is obsessed with and idolizes youth.

She still lives in her own condo and is an active and integral part of the social scene in her building. She is strong, tenacious and stubborn and has never been in the hospital overnight, other than to have her children. She was well into her thirties when she had my brother Niel and I, which in those days, was considered old. […]

Is Midlife the New Teenage Years?

by Vivian Diller, Ph.D

As someone well into my fifties, the popular aphorism “50 is the new 15” makes me laugh. As a therapist who writes about the psychology of aging, it baffles me. Who are we kidding? Sure, being 50 today means something different than it did for our parents or grandparents — more of us are fit, active and expect to remain that way well into our 80s and 90s — but 50 to me, well, is simply the “new 50!” […]

Women Born to Older Mothers Have a Higher Risk of Developing Breast Cancer

A new study analyses the influence that certain birth and infancy characteristics have on mammographic density – an important indicator of breast cancer risk. The results reveal that women born to mothers aged over 39 years and women who were taller and thinner than the average girl prior to puberty have a higher breast density. This brings with it an increased risk of developing breast cancer. Read more about the Carlos III Health Institute’s findings (published in the Breast Cancer Research and Treatment Journal) on: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-women-born-older-mothers-higher.html.