I'm Back!

To all the wonderful readers who have been following my posts, both here and on MORE.com, I'm still alive and well! The early part of this year started out with a family health crisis and then my father unexpectedly passed away. I'm working my way back to writing and just finished a week in a personal essay writing workshop with the wonderful Ann Hood (The Red Thread, The Knitting Circle) at the Chautauqua Institution, just an hour and a half from where I live in western New York.  I was additionally blessed by being given the honor of reading one of my essays prior to her Friday brown bag lunch presentation (see photo). Life is beginning to bloom again! I hope to be adding more wit and wisdom to MORE.com soon!

PS--I apologize if your comments go unpublished. Sometimes when I receive them, there is nothing but a series of numbers. I have no idea what this means. If someone can explain it to me, I'd be thrilled!

Revising Happily Ever After - MORE Magazine - For Women 40 Plus

Revising Happily Ever After - MORE Magazine - For Women 40 Plus

Fun new tool on Google Toolbar lets you share any website -- like on your blog! Here is the whole version of my essay, "Revising Happily Ever After," on MORE.com. Would love to hear your own versions of happily ever after or just what you thought of the post. ~EH

MidLife Reality: The One Body Part You Can’t Get “Fixed.” | MidLifeBloggers

MidLife Reality: The One Body Part You Can’t Get “Fixed.” | MidLifeBloggers

Happy to share my post: Older. Grayer. Wiser. on MidLifeBloggers. Great comments! ~EH

 All these stories of women and their straying husbands made me start wondering: What ever happened to "happily ever after?" I wrote about it for MORE.COM....read the whole essay, "Revising Happily Ever After."

Here's a teaser:
We all know how the story goes: The beautiful princess, who is suffering mercilessly at the hands of some witch of a stepmother, a pissed off fairy or spinsterly step-sisters, meets Handsome Prince who immediately falls head over heels in love, and they live happily ever after. Every little girl of my generation grew up knowing these damsels and their perfect outcomes, then we dutifully introduced the same scenario to our daughters through Belle, Ariel and Jasmine. Stronger, more independent women, sure, but the story always ended the same way. And they lived happily ever after.

Then—oops!—we come to find out that our handsome princes missed a few chapters, or added some variations of their own, turning happily ever after into media frenzies as their infidelities reached greater and greater levels of unprincely behavior. Continue reading....

Older.Grayer. Slower.

There's nothing like sitting in a technology workshop with a room full of Gen X-ers to make you realize that old is not just a state of mind. This was the scary realization I came to this past week.

Forget all the attempts to persuade myself, otherwise: the hair color that hides my tell-tale grey roots; the anti-aging regimen that keeps my face from collapsing like California along an earthquake fault line; the chrome-colored trenchcoat that makes me feel youthful and more or less hip.

Outwardly, I can convince myself--and pretty often the general public in the right light--that I have stalled the biological clock. And then it happens. I'm asked a question that forces me to prove that no matter how young I may feel or even look on a good day, my brain is functioning on decreased capacity. I’ve begun to understand there’s a new meaning for the term “gray matter.”

The workshop was a two-day, twelve hour intensive on how to use a program called Joomla to create websites. Piece of cake, I thought--I can do HTML code in my sleep; I should be able to manage this without staring blankly at the computer screen when asked to download and unzip a file. Everything was going fine until our instructor decided it was time for a "quick review.” To my mind, this is the equivalent of playing "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" buck naked in front of your colleagues, and without the big money prize as motivation. Personally, I've never been good at group Q&A's, even with all my brain cells intact. Same thing with brainstorming sessions at work. Fire questions at me in a group setting and I go completely Anna Nicole. Call it "oops anxiety." I'm sure I'm not the only one who goes mind-numb under stress.

This time, though, it wasn’t anxiety keeping my tongue still. It felt more like my brain was a vast jar of peanut butter and whatever I was trying to get at was stuck all the way down at the bottom.

Okay, I thought, maybe it’s just info overload, which was my lame attempt to salve my growing inferiority complex. But the thick-brain symptoms continued for the rest of day and into day number two. It’s not that I didn’t know the answers; it’s just that I seemed to need a few nano seconds more than everyone else in the room for the information to leap across my synapses and form intelligent language. I decided it was more prudent to stay mute rather than embarrass myself by answering “eggplant” to a question about top menus versus main menus simply because eggplant was the first thing that popped into my head while the actual answer was lolly-gagging around my neural network.

Then came the moment-of-truth event I’d been avoiding—I asked a question.

“What if I don’t want a module to show up on all my sub-pages?”

Our instructor Brett who, enviously, has all of his brain cells in perfect working order said: “Where would you go to manage your modules?”

My notes is what I wanted to say. But since he was standing right behind me, expecting me to brilliantly maneuver my pointy arrow over to the correct tab that would prove I knew the answer, I could hardly be blithe. It took a few moments of anxious lip-biting, but I finally and insecurely said: “The module manager?”

That’s when it hit me: inside my fifty-four-year-old head was an octogenarian brain. Age may have made me wiser, but it had also made me feel like a conspicuous idiot in a world of rapid-fire data access. For me, it wasn’t just an intellectual awareness, it was also an emotional one. I grabbed my lunch and went out to my car where I sat crying into a handful of napkins. Even worse was that I resented feeling distraught about it. So I couldn’t grasp complex information as quickly as I used to. What was the big deal?

Well, the big deal was this: a lot of things about aging sneak up on us gradually: wrinkles don’t suddenly appear on perfectly smooth faces; our bodies don’t speed along one day and tremble on shaky legs the next. Aging gives us time to adjust to the changes that take us from one stage of life to the next. Aging tends to be, thankfully, slow.

But there are climatic moments—like scenes in a movie where everything changes when a shower curtain is drawn back and the knife blade comes into view—that leave you gasping and clutching at the arms of your seat. Fear, anxiety, distress, all come exploding to the surface.

Ultimately, the fact that my cognitive abilities are slightly more sluggish isn’t a major crisis. It’s not even enough of a crisis to make me tear into the Reese’s peanut butter cups that are stashed in my carry bag to sell for a fundraiser. Although I’m tempted. It’s just one of those “getting older” things I’m still trying to accept semi-gracefully like all the other changes this time of life brings.

Women Mobilizing for Peace

A wonderful story I read about in the April issue of Family Circle featured Patricia Smith Melton and the website/organization she launched called Peace X Peace (pronounced peace by peace). The mission of Peace X Peace is to act as "an inclusive global network of women-focused e-media, with interactive commentary, fresh analysis, and from-the-frontlines perspectives. We engage, connect, inform, and inspire individuals and amplify women's voices as the most direct and powerful ways to create cultures of peace around the world." Do something that makes a difference....join! Go to their website at Peace X Peace.

Weekend in Kitchen Rehab

Yesterday, which was a beautiful, sun-filled Saturday and perfect for washing the salt and muck of winter off my car, (which I didn't do, by the way), I decided not to switch on the TV as I usually do every Saturday morning. The recent cable rate hike has me so infuriated that I've finally decided I'm ditching the cable and will rely on my high speed internet, DVD's, and maybe even that antique of news and information...the daily paper.

Saying and doing, however, are two different things. Breaking myself of the automatic habit of bringing the world into my home with just the press of a button is not unlike choosing to forsake material life and enter a monastery. There's a moment of fear that you've been entirely cut off from the world and somehow you're going to go crazy crackers from the silence. What brought me back from the brink was reminding myself of the 72 bucks I spend every month on a service that basically provides me with background noise.

I further vowed to refrain from turning on the tube until I really wanted to watch something. Instead, I would focus intently on one project, and not the laundry list of "should do's" I try to accomplish in the 48 precious hours I have away from the weekly grind of tasks and projects of my job. I decided to focus on the kitchen.

The thing about cleaning anything with focused attention, is that the more you clean, the more dirt you seem to find. I rarely, for instance, get down on my knees to see what's going on at the base of the cabinets. I don't partly because there is yellowed plastic baseboard molding that runs around the entire perimeter of my kitchen which I'd like to just rip up and can't afford to do at the moment because that would entail doing something about the mismatched self-stick tiles on the floor. So I normally don't look below cabinet level unless it's absolutely necessary.

Yesterday I looked. For a second I thought, "Where is Extreme Makeover when you really need them?" Not in my kitchen, that was for sure. So I hunkered down with the dust pan and brush, a sponge and three different cleansers--one just didn't seem to do the trick--and had at it. Now I have really clean, but still ugly yellowish-beige baseboards. I'm not sure what I accomplished except to feel the smallest bit of satisfaction in having paid attention to this gross and neglected place that seems to be the dumpsite for all the refuse I don't want to look at. Like a lot of areas of my life. Emotional, mental and psychological junk that I prefer to be ignorant about because if I recognize it, I'd have to clean it up.

But, like I said, you clean one thing and then you notice there's a greasy, grimy drip pan that is glaring out from a pristine white stovetop. Spattered ketchup on the refrigerator door. Kitty litter in the corners. You open the cabinets and piles of plastic storage tubs come spilling out. Somehow or another, the entire kitchen has gone from being a quick sweep of the broom and wiping the down the counters to a full-scale fumigation.

Out came the rubber gloves, the Goo Off, the scrubby sponges, the bleach cleaner. I even tackled the tower of containers, stacking them in neat rows, the mish mash of lids all collected in a little storage bin. I purged the spice cabinet of colored sugars, empty bottles, cupcake liners I wouldn't likely use, and anything I hadn't opened in six months. It's amazing the junk we accumulate, I thought. Even more perplexing is the stuff we don't even recognize or can't remember why we bought in the first place. Like why did I have a bottle of Gravy Master? I never make gravy.

None of this was made easier by the fact that my cat, Misha, was underfoot the entire time. I mopped the floor; he walked on it. I sanitized the counter, he jumped up and started parading back and forth. I filled the garbage bag to the verge of exploding, and he started gnawing on it.

After about two hours of guerrilla cleaning, I felt somehow....lighter. Evacuated. I wondered if that's how people feel  after they perform the prescribed colon cleansing prior to a colonoscopy. Something else I have been ambivalent about from a cleaning perspective, but will, one of these days, have to accept as a necessity.

The only problem now is that my more focused attention has discovered a half dozen new eyesores that I need to fix. Like the horribly greasy drip pan that's beyond scrubbing which means a trip to Loew's to buy a replacement. And the tiny crack I discovered near a doorway that needed to be spackled.  And then there's the molding I've been meaning to install to hide the small gap between the cabinets and the new subway tiles I put up last fall. What started as a way to focus my attention away from the lack of cable TV has become a weekend of rehab.

Not long after I put away the bucket and broom, dumped the garbage, and stashed the rubber gloves, the cat hopped in his litter box and did what all felines do--sent litter flying everywhere. He looked at me in his totally imperious way, and I looked back at him looking equally imperious, and said, "Really?"

It seemed like a good time to retreat to the couch and turn on a Grey's Anatomy rerun.