There are too many mornings when I wake up with a heaviness. Sometimes it’s the weight of the world. Sometimes it’s the accumulation of years, recognizing there is less time ahead of me than behind me. I have been an activist [...]
Pat Taub
My grandmothers and mother lived well into their 80’s, transitioning into old age with only minimal complaints. While they followed healthy diets and exercised moderately, they didn’t obsess over their daily routines, or fret about their extra pounds or wrinkles. They simply didn’t stress about aging. Granted they lived at a time [...]
Pat Taub
Women give away their power when they accommodate in a way that stifles their voices, where they don’t honor themselves, but silence themselves because they fear upsetting the other and putting the relationship in jeopardy. It’s a hard pattern to break because, since the beginning of time, women have been conditioned to please others, [...]
Pat Taub
GUEST POST by MARY LOU SMITH* When I was young, I would hear my elders say, “My circle of friends is getting smaller,” The words passed right over me, without listening or understanding. Now that I am eighty-three, I am in the midst of living those words. The recent death of my soulmate, friend, and “sister” Lucille, of fifty-three [...]
Pat Taub
GUEST POST by JANET WEIL “Barbie” is the Talk of Summer 2023. I saw this hyped movie as a break from move-in housework, as I’ve just transitioned to the Barbie heartland of Southern California. Some laughs and a mild satire of the iconic doll were all I expected. Instead, my mind was blown by this ambitious dive into the representation [...]
Pat Taub
GUEST POST by JACOB WATSON At first and for many months after my wife died, I felt brutalized. Grief is brutal, a word I used often when my grief was fresh. Then slowly, way too slowly for inpatient me, a transformation began to happen. I remembered a class I took in my doctoral program taught by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, the feminist author [...]
Pat Taub