For a long time, I resisted aging. I dyed my hair, refused help, put off updating my will, and held my head upright to smooth out my wrinkled neck and sagging jaw lines. I relished being told that I looked much younger. Then Covid hit, forcing me into a prolonged isolation with hours and hours of long days alone. Without access to my hairdresser, [...]
Pat Taub
I have a friend who’s been telling me for years that she’s going to take Italian lessons. Another friend has a long-standing dream to visit Japan. For just as long, every time I pass an art supply store I revisit my dream of taking up watercolors. We’re members of the late-in-life dream club whose engine is stalled. But it doesn’t [...]
Pat Taub
Over a recent Sunday brunch with two single women friends both, like me, in their ‘70’s, the conversation turned to sex, but not in the same way it did when we were decades younger, sharing juicy tidbits about our sex lives. This time the conversation centered on how sex had lost its appeal. One friend, B confessed to having lost interest [...]
Pat Taub
80 years have gone by and now it seems I’m not here at all. Here comes the invisible woman. I can’t recall when it first happened. Don’t know how I became so unseen. My tangible self was put on the shelf. Why do I feel so much less then I am? There’s so much more of me now. We might not have a choice, but we still have a voice. [...]
Pat Taub
“My mission is to create a radical empathy for the older body. I want to expand our understanding of beauty and sensuality, which is not confined to the young.” Jocelyn Lee’s new photography book, Sovereign, is the book older women have been waiting for: a book filled with photographs of nude aging women, proudly facing the camera [...]
Pat Taub
With Halloween right around the corner, it’s an appropriate time to reflect on the origin of witches, and to understand how the village wise woman was turned into a representation of evil, becoming a “witch.” We have to travel back to the 1500’s in Western Europe, when women healers and midwives played a central role in village after [...]
Pat Taub
GUEST POST by CAROLE LESKIN One of my favorite songs is the 1954 Nat King Cole rendition of “Smile.” As a little girl, I remember my father playing it, smiling, and softly singing along. He was melancholy and rarely smiled. I had discovered his secret side! I inherited my father’s temperament with one distinct difference: [...]
Pat Taub
Agitated Over the Post Office Scandal I’m filled with fury over Herr Orange’s blatant attempts to steal the election by defunding the post office to limit their services in an attempt to curtail mail-in ballots. If it weren’t enough to cut back on post office funds, now our Fascist Post Master General is removing sorting machines from [...]
Pat Taub
GUEST POST by JUDITH NILAN When people join me on pilgrimage in Ireland, it’s a choice to step away from the rhythms of a busy life and slow down to a rhythm of deep listening and meditation. With the pandemic, we have been gifted that opportunity not by our own choosing. But here we are. And in this slowing down, within these new rhythms, [...]
Pat Taub
Whenever I visit Western Europe I can’t help but notice how much kinder it is to the aging woman than the States are. We are bombarded by media images that equate beauty almost exclusively with a young body. By contrast, women in Western Europe, while aware of their aging forms, don’t seem to experience body shaming to the same degree. [...]
Pat Taub