Five things to do for your child:
“no one is going to love you if you don’t love yourself”
You’ve probably seen the words above countless times before. It’s one of those things that gets thrown around, usually when someone is in a down-and-out state and struggling to understand why he or she doesn’t feel loved. If they’re being said to you they can be painful, but the pain underlines a telling fact: those words are true. Whether or not you want to believe it, if you don’t love yourself, no one else can truly love you. Certainly you can be in relationships and experience varieties of emotions similar to love, but if you don’t love yourself, if you don’t respect yourself, I can guarantee you that no one else can really, truly love or respect you either. […]
by Cyma Shapiro
Valentine’s Day is my most favorite day of the year. I love hearts, I love red, I love love. I have various types of hearts all over my house; in my car, at my office. I keep hearts around to remind me of what’s most important in this life: to love and be loved.
This month, we’ll focus on the many facets of love leading up to and following Valentine’s Day, February 14. I hope this month’s posts inspire you, provide you with ideas and allow you to imagine what bringing more love – whether it be to yourself, your partner, your child or children, and/or community/world – would create for you…and for others. For now, love on.
by Patricia Cohen
For the first time, middle-aged men and women are the largest, most influential, and richest segment in the country. Floating somewhere between 40 and 64, they constitute one-third of the population and control nearly seventy percent of its net worth. In booms and recessions, a trillion-dollar economy feeds and fuels their needs, whims, and desires. Better-educated and healthier than their predecessors, these early and late midlifers are happier, more productive, and more involved than any other age group. Women are part of the first generation to enter their 40s and 50s after the feminist movement, and they have options that their mothers and grandmothers could barely imagine. […]
by Karen Hug-Nagy
The Winter of 2011-2012 has been what us Midwesterners would call tolerable, to date. Our weather has been mild and the kids haven’t had any snow days, yet! My kids are beginning to show some signs of maturity, yes, even at eleven years old, therefore our family activities have changed, too. […]
by Phyllis Goldberg and Rosemary Lichtman
You probably don’t need proof that the emotional support you get from friends is vital, but here it is. A UCLA study shows that the cascade of brain chemicals released when we’re stressed causes us to seek out other women. This ‘tend and befriend’ notion, developed by social psychologists Drs. Shelley Taylor and Laura Klein, may explain why social ties reduce our risk of disease and help us live longer. Friends also help us live better. Research about coping after the loss of a partner indicates that women who have a close confidante more often survive without permanent loss of vitality. And that’s not all. Both the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study and the MacArthur Foundation Study confirm that friendship is one of the keys to a long and satisfying life. […]
by Jamie Walters
Many of us have experienced, or are experiencing, a sort of radical rebirth, a reincarnation within this incarnation.
We’re living in uber-transformative times, so perhaps it comes as no surprise that transformation around us happens through transformation within us, even as circumstances seem to conspire to nudge us into that change. […]
by Andrea Lynn
I pretty much read any article I come across about older motherhood, so this one in my local paper of course caught my eye:
It all hit home to me. It is the story mom Julie Morris (a new mom at 41) and daughter Maggie Fisher, fast-forwarded to 18 years later. Maggie’s father, 71 when Maggie was born, died when she was still a little girl. The writer says:
“It made Morris consider her own mortality, too, and raise it with Maggie. “When she was 10, I had to sit down with her and ask, ‘If anything happens to me, what would you like to happen to you,’ It was a pretty hard moment for her.” Oh, my death fears. Don’t get me started. […]
by Valerie Gillies
“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future – the timelessness of the rocks and the hills – all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”
― Andrew Wyeth 
I hate the cold, with a passion. Spring, summer, and early autumn, with their warmth and lushness and never-ending sounds, are my times. No matter how hard I try to reframe it, I loathe winter for its dark, bitter bleakness. […]
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. […]