Pat Taub is a family therapist, writer and activist and life-long feminist. She hopes that WOW will start a conversation among other older women who are fed up with the ageism and sexism in our culture and are looking for cohorts to affirm their value as an older woman.
In our war-torn universe I long for the world to embrace John Lennon’s famous lyrics, “Give peace a chance.” But peace is off the table when it comes to Gaza, whose homes, hospitals, and schools are being bombed around the clock, drawing comparisons to the fire-bombing of Dresden during WW ll. On top of this, water, food, fuel, and electricity [...]
Pat Taub
GUEST POST BY SALLY BOWDEN-SCHAIBLE Dr. Jehad Hasanain is a friend and has been for nearly five years. Jehad is an emergency room physician with a young family and has lived in Gaza all his life. For a week now, he has been sending messages whenever he can, describing the horrors of death, injuries, displacement. Providing humanitarian [...]
Pat Taub
Global warming delivered a protracted summer that lasted until this weekend when the temperatures dropped into the autumn range, reminding me it was time to compose the WOW fall reading list. For me, fall reading has to be accompanied by a fire in the fireplace, a cup of Earl Gray and an oversized comfy sweater. Here are my picks for [...]
Pat Taub
Currently I’m teaching the course, “Women and Aging” at Portland, Maine’s senior college. The first day, as we went around the room introducing ourselves, one woman defiantly exclaimed, “I hate being old. I hate my lined face. I hate not being able to move as well as I once did. I hate being too old to date because men my age [...]
Pat Taub
While New Year’s Eve is the traditional time for making resolutions, autumn is my new year. Autumn’s entry into the darkness of winter beckons me to soul-search and reset my compass for the coming year. This call is reinforced by having a fall birthday–one I proudly share with Jimmy Carter. This year I decided to do more than [...]
Pat Taub
I have friends who insist the women in their families didn’t provide examples of independence and/or positive aging. This observation can be skewed by the fact that our mothers and grandmothers didn’t live in our enlightened era where women are consciously aging with an awareness of ageism and sexism, and where the anti-aging industry [...]
Pat Taub
All things considered I’m managing my old age fairly well. I can check off most of the boxes for health, family, etc., but when it comes to handling my regrets, I’m often stalled. To this day I’m haunted over screaming matches with my teenage sons, impatience with my mother when she was dying, love affairs I allowed to go on way [...]
Pat Taub
I spent the Labor Day weekend at my country retreat in midcoast Maine where I own a cottage on a quiet country road sprinkled with modest homes. I make a practice of taking daily walks on this road, which I like to think of as my walking meditations. On Saturday I stopped in my tracks after noticing a flag at a home’s entrance. The words [...]
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