If you still have a teen in the nest like I do, you will agree that life after fifty still entails nagging your teen. You are not alone. There is comfort in company and there are ways for you to look at these last few years of nagging your teen with a positive perspective. At the tail end of the blurry years of parenting, we’re in the home stretch! With a few tweaks to our perspective, we can survive it without giving up or jumping off the roof. My fifteen year…
Maybe it’s part of a midlife crisis, but I am hell-bent on less clutter, more joy in my life these days! I have never been happy about the clutter, but recently it’s been bothering me more than ever. It’s kind of like the polar opposite of the “nesting” instinct many of us felt when we were preparing for the arrival of a baby. Maybe this is an instinctual cleaning out of the soon-to-be-empty nest? I don’t think that I am de-cluttering for “the end” of life (I’m not that dramatic!),…
From the first day of his senior year in high school, it felt like a balloon was inside my chest and it was slowly inflating. That entire school year before my oldest left for college was so emotional and felt like one very long ramp leading up to D.O.D. (drop off day). It was exciting and also scary watching him apply for colleges in the fall. We listened as he expressed more and more of what he wanted to do and what his plans were for college. As the marking…
That’s the hashtag that came to mind when I snapped a picture of my mother on her 83rd birthday last week. It can be tough to watch the decline of your aging parents. My mom has a good deal of age-related hearing loss. It doesn’t bother her at all. What bothers her is that it bothers us. She has refused to even entertain the idea that she has had significant hearing loss for well for over a year now. My brother and I have been gently (and lately, not so…
I’m waking up and it’s Chapter Two. In my “life after fifty”, I now occasionally catch sight of daylight and realize there is a shift happening in my life. But what do I do about these questions I’m searching for the answers to? I feel like the first 25 years of my life happened to me, rather than by me. I guess there were choices, but looking back now, it feels like the choices were made for me. I never really felt like I was making decisions for myself. I…