Empowerment

We often say that women should support one another. We celebrate the idea that every woman has the right to live life on her own terms. Marriage or not. Children or not. Career or not. City or country. Gray hair or hair dye. Hormone replacement therapy or not. It sounds wonderful. The reality, however, is often quite different…

I heard a simple line in a movie the other night: “What doesn’t bend, breaks.” It wasn’t meant to be profound. It was just a passing remark before the story moved on. But it stayed with me. As I was getting ready for bed that night, another image appeared in my mind. I could see an entire riverbank covered with smooth river rocks…

I grew up being told not to judge. Maybe you did too. In my house it came with a Bible verse attached – the way we heard it, judge not, lest ye be judged – and somewhere along the way I turned that into a simple instruction: the judging itself was the sin. A good person doesn’t size people up. A good person gives everyone the benefit of the doubt…

Somewhere around my late 50s, I noticed a pattern in nearly every woman I knew, including myself: we were remarkably good at giving other people permission to live boldly, and remarkably bad at extending that same permission to ourselves. We’d tell our friends, “Go ahead and take that trip, you’ve earned it.” We’d tell our daughters…

If you have reached the stage of life where the world expects you to settle into a predictable routine, fade into the background, and stop making waves, may I introduce you to a small, unbothered chaos agent? This creature is currently maintaining two incompatible lifestyles, refusing to be pigeonholed by age, expectations, or geography…

Have you ever met women whose scowls look so malevolent that rottweilers suddenly remember they had somewhere else to be? Even a rattlesnake would say, “Nope, not today,” and quietly slither away. What about that confident woman…

Somewhere along the way, I realized I had spent much of my life listening to everyone except myself. Parents. Teachers. Friends. Husbands. Society. Everyone seemed to have an opinion about how life should be lived and how I should fit in. What surprised…

Let me ask you something. When you think about menopause, what words come to mind? Hot flashes. Brain fog. The end of fertility. Decline. Oh – and possibly the mysterious urge to stand in front of the open freezer at 2 a.m. and call it self-care. Now let me ask you something else. What if every single one of those associations was wrong – or at least, wildly incomplete?

If you asked most women over 60 to describe how they feel, somewhere in the answer – underneath the gratitude and the carefully maintained perspective – you would find some version of the word tired. Not sick-tired. Not age-tired. Something harder to name than either of those things. I know this tiredness…

We all have one friend like Patrice who is prone to accidents. A misstep causes a fractured hip and a torn shoulder. Weeks of pain-filled rehabilitation follow then her husband dies of sudden cardiac arrest. She discovers, through his private letters, he has carried on with another man for decades…