Becoming Our Parent’s Parents

by Maddisen Krown

At the beginning of this New Year, I’d like to share about my personal experience as a mid-lifer facing and caring for my physically declining elder parents.

The Journey Home

For Thanksgiving this year, I went home to Connecticut to be with my family. My focus and the main theme for this week-long trip went way beyond the one day of festivities. I was primarily there to assist my ailing elder parents. To do some serious cleaning and clearing inside their large home, and to realistically assess their states of health and next steps for their care. […]

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Making The Most Of Our Time

by Deborah Swiss

There’s a new breed of activists on the rise. Mothers at mid-life are banding together around the rhetorical question: If we don’t help this planet, who will? It’s a different spin on the imperative to save Mother Earth but both share an urgency to roll up our sleeves and do something. With so many problems across the globe, our first inclination might be to walk away under the weight of the question “Where do I even begin?” […]

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Much Older Mothers Having Babies…and Regretting It

by Carla Naumberg

Susan Tollefsen and daughter Freya The BBC recently ran an interview with Susan Tollefsen, a British woman who gave birth to her first daughter at age 57 in 2008. The baby was conceived with the help of in vitro fertilization, using a donor egg and her partner’s sperm (although the couple is now separated). Ms. Tollefsen was refused fertility treatment in the UK because of her age, and became pregnant with the help of a clinic in Russia. Two years later, a clinic in London agreed to assist her with a second pregnancy, but she ultimately decided not to follow through, citing potential health concerns. […]

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Better Full Than Empty

by Jane Samuel

We added our third child when I was forty and that’s when the skeptical stares started. You know the ones. You are just coming up to the counter at the local gym or squeezing through the candy-packed aisle at the grocery, baby on your hip, mask of exhaustion painted on your face where make-up should be when some bright-faced-twenty-something looks over in disbelief and says, “My! You have your hands full.” […]

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The Little White House (A Holiday Tale)

by Karen Hug-Nagy

Once upon a time there was a single girl who lived in a little white house.  She lived alone and was searching for just the right person to settle down with and start a family. The house was so small that she barely had room for even a tiny Christmas tree. […]

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Turn Down the Heat (A Holiday Primer)

by Valerie Gillies, LMFT

“Boiling point:  The point at which anger or excitement breaks out into violent expression” – Wikipedia

Halloween in Connecticut came on the heels of a snowstorm of epic proportions.  That is no exaggeration.  Trick or treating was cancelled; power was out for over a week.  Yes, people even lived (if you can call it that) without the Internet and cable, in unheated homes filled with ‘bored’ children.  It was not a pretty sight.  And that, my friend, was the start of the 2011 holiday season.  “Uh oh” is right.  In a flash we were through Thanksgiving, when the starting pistol was fired for the four-day marathon of Black Friday sales, followed by sensory overload, sleep deprivation and unlimited access to guilt. […]

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Toys

by Andrea Lynn

I know I’m not supposed to embrace the “more gifts” approach to Christmas. But all I want for Christmas this year is more toys for my kids. I do. I covet all sorts of shiny and colorful things that I know they will love. My budget is tight, and I am trying to be financially responsible, but I see things other kids have and I want my kids to have that too. It is absolutely politically, morally, ethically corrupt to admit that, at this time of year especially, but I am fearless. I want more toys for my kids. […]

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