Family

The other morning, Buddy stood up from his bed, stretched, and let out a little grunt. A moment later, I stood up from my chair and made exactly the same sound. We looked at each other. Neither of us mentioned it. Buddy is my old black Lab, and apparently somewhere along the way we have reached the stage of life where neither one of us gets up without announcing it…

Old Grumble McMutter met Miss Fussy McFrown, Who polished each pebble and straightened each town. He huffed at her humming. She frowned at his shoes. They argued on Tuesdays… and most Wednesdays, too…

If setting a boundary with your adult child feels harder now than it did decades ago, you’re not imagining it. Boundaries at this stage of life come with a particular weight that they didn’t carry when your children were young. Logic might suggest boundaries get easier as you get older – more confidence, more life experience, less need for others’ approval. In practice, many women find the opposite…

The process of ending a marriage, especially a decades-long one, can definitely shake up your life in all aspects. From the financial to the emotional, there are many unexpected good lessons that divorce in later-life…

By the time we reach our 60s, most of us have quietly rewritten a lot of our life’s plans – careers that took different turns, health that doesn’t cooperate the way it used to, friendships that faded. Family is often the last picture we’re still holding onto exactly as we first imagined it.

I should have known my boys were nature smart long before I had a name for it. When they were little, our house looked a lot like the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. Their pockets were never empty. Rocks. Sticks. Acorns. Milkweed pods. Feathers. Pinecones. Eggshells. Seeds…

I recently found myself as the “loving” companion to my brother and husband for two separate medical procedures. I’m happy to say there has been a long hiatus for this kind of caretaking, because the first episode, about five years ago, was quite an eye opener. At that time, I was more focused on surviving the quirky US healthcare system and locating the best offerings in my local area…

When Leo arrived at my house, he wasn’t supposed to stay. He was a foster kitten. The plan was simple: to give him a safe place to land, help him get settled, and eventually find him a permanent home. Leo had other plans. From the beginning, he carried himslef with an unusual degree of confidence…

There once was a clan of the Flibberty Flocks, Who polished their smiles and synchronized clocks. They ironed their curtains, they color-matched stew, And claimed that perfection was simply “what’s due.”

It’s his life, not yours… Thattechnically true sentence is kind of useless emotionally. Parents of unhappy adults live with a silent grief and unlike in other distressing situations, there are no rituals or support for the heartbreak of watching an adult child struggle. Even though it remains difficult as well, we’re not talking here about an adult who’s going through a rough patch, a breakup, a job loss, a burnout…