Lately I have been thinking about the meaning of home. Not the wonderful Victorian space I have lived in for almost 14 years; my neighborhood of tree-lined streets; the welcoming market; the Maine coastline that still takes my breath [...]
Pat Taub
Lately I have been thinking about the meaning of home. Not the wonderful Victorian space I have lived in for almost 14 years; my neighborhood of tree-lined streets; the welcoming market; the Maine coastline that still takes my breath away. These places remain. What has changed is the country I thought I knew. I no longer feel at home here. [...]
Pat Taub
Barbara Rainville died last week; we’d known each other for 50 years. What I will miss most is not just Barbara’s steady friendship but sharing life’s big moments: the birth of our youngest child; dinner parties filled with laughter in one another’s homes; family picnics; our growing children; the excitement of new, meaningful jobs; [...]
Pat Taub
We have core stories we tell ourselves that trap us in a negative narrative: “If I speak up, my feelings might be hurt; I’m too shy to make new friends; I’m too old to take on a new project.” Esther Perel, the popular relationship therapist, contends the stories we tell ourselves are adaptive responses to childhood trauma, when [...]
Pat Taub
Like many women I’ve spent endless hours analyzing my relationship with my mother, giving only a passing nod to my father-daughter relationship, which impacted my independent strivings and my relationships with men. As Father’s Day approaches, it’s an opportune time to reflect on my relationship with my father. I grew up in [...]
Pat Taub
Contemporary beauty standards celebrate the older woman whose aging lines have been erased by cosmetic surgery, making her look years younger. Stretched out faces have become ubiquitous, no longer confined to film stars and celebrities; middle-income women are lining up for procedures from Botox to full face lifts, or traveling overseas [...]
Pat Taub
Several years ago, I participated in a National Geographic “people to people” tour to Cuba. Now that Trump’s oil embargo is threatening Cuba’s very survival, I’m sharing my memories of Cuba for those unacquainted with its amazing people. Everywhere I went Cubans were open and warm, eager to share their impressions of daily [...]
Pat Taub
I’m in a dream where I’m trapped. I’m running through a long hall, looking for an escape from the perpetual bombings that leveled Gaza and now aim for the same carnage in Lebanon and Iran, where 170 school girls were murdered by US bombs. For a brief moment the bombs let up, when my attention is diverted to ICE thugs kidnapping my brown-skinned [...]
Pat Taub
During Women’s History Month, the tendency is to celebrate famous women in the arts and politics, often ignoring those less famous women who have made an indelible impression on our lives. This year I’m celebrating Women’s History Month by sending love notes to family members, neighbors, teachers and others to whom I owe a debt [...]
Pat Taub
“The great challenge . . . is to keep awake the part of you that knows . . . what it means to be alive.” The Marginalian, February, 22, 2026 Trump’s devastating takeover of the federal government has awakened many here and abroad to the perils the U S faces. Authoritarianism merges with fascism at home. Injustice and inequality grow. [...]
Pat Taub
Ageism is discrimination against elders because of their age, targeting women more than men. Ageism is a ubiquitous force in a woman’s life, first surfacing in childhood when little girls listen to fairy tales about a mean old witch, personified in Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, setting the stage for a lifetime of disparaging older [...]
Pat Taub