I spent a lot of years in the Beauty/Fashion industry… I starved myself like everyone else did. Looking beautiful and sexy was a different kind of nourishment, and I made the tradeoff gleefully. But looking back, I’ve had lots of second thoughts about the unrealistic dream of beauty we’ve left our daughters. Real women don’t [ Read More ]
Have you ever looked in the mirror and just wanted to cry? I did that one recent morning, having had too little sleep and far too little coffee to cope with revelation. My body wasn’t any of the things I’d wanted it to be… that was clear from the get to. Not tall as Julia [ Read More ]
“Show me your friends, and I’ll tell you who you are.” Russian Proverb “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry with your girlfriends.” —Laurie Kuslansky Thick, thin, life, death, moments, decades, loves, losses. Hearts blood or chicken soup, it’s the women friends who’ve been there. Advice or a boot in the [ Read More ]
“How would you like to do a sacred ceremony to free you from whatever you choose not to carry with you, anymore?” my Medicine Woman friend asked me earnestly. “In tribal custom,” she continued, “when the time comes for you to become a Wise Elder it’s necessary to become whole again for the good of [ Read More ]
I wanted to love and be loved forever. I wanted to grow old with the man I loved. Like Yeats with Maude Gonne, we’d love the sorrows of each others’ changing faces, and it wouldn’t matter one whit if we weren’t young and beautiful anymore, because we’d laugh together at the losses and infirmities, and [ Read More ]
Losing a child is a special kind of grief, irrevocably out of sync with nature. We’re not supposed to bury our children — the mind and heart rebel and struggle to find a place to contain the unbearable and unthinkable. We give birth to infinite love when we give birth to our children. Joy, hope, [ Read More ]
Because she didn’t understand that love was meant to be soft and warm, but she intended to be loving, nonetheless, my mother gave from her brain, instead of her heart. I believe her heart had been battered shut in childhood by a tyrannical father and ineffectual mother, but her mind was limitless and her teaching [ Read More ]
Some things you never forget. Like the comfort of your father’s hand in yours when you’re small and afraid, or the final ember of light in the eyes of your dying child. Other threads are inextricably woven into the softer fabric of soul. The sensuous, cold satin of summer’s first ice cream on your five [ Read More ]
By the grace of God and a fast outfield, I find myself the mother of a 21 year old, born so many years after my first two daughters, it might as well be considered a separate lifetime Dakota is perched on the precarious edge of womanhood now, and she’s a deep one, never precipitous in [ Read More ]
Women have always rocked the cradle, supported their partners, striven to make the planet a habitable place. These days, they also head families, earn their own keep, watchdog the environment, fight the lies society abounds with, “earn the bacon and fry it up in a pan,” raise their children, often alone, and struggle to prevail [ Read More ]