Encouraging and equipping women over 60 to live their best life!
You never really know how you will react, especially after years and years of trying to prepare yourself. My first reaction privately, Thank you God! Immediately, tears streamed down my face. Then I thought, Wait a minute! My mother was no longer suffering and confined to a bed, needing help for every basic need. I knew she was in heaven, so why the tears?
As I asked other mothers what their ideal Mother’s Day looks like, it unanimously came down to one thing: TIME. We just want to spend time with our children. It may not even be on the specific day, but we want time to be with them. We’d like a day that is stress free, and relaxing.
During the height of the global pandemic, I celebrated my 60th birthday. This was indeed a major milestone. In New Mexico, Salons were shut down, then reopened, then shut down again, and later reopened. All around me I saw women panicking about their beauty. How would they handle the grow out of gray hair, lack of perms and haircuts, and, worse, they so desperately needed their nails done. It was a crazy time for everyone. As I blew out my birthday candles, I realized that I had been coloring my hair for 32 years!!! OMG! For more than half my life, I had been applying toxic hair dye to my scalp every three weeks.
Emptying the house of its contents involved going through countless papers, knickknacks, boxes, closets, cabinets, and cubbyholes. Some decisions were easy; many others were not. How do you dispose of years of living, the lives of loved ones, and the mementos thereof?
When I’m eighty-five I want to look back at the way I was when I was sixty-five and think, hey I wasn’t bad, I did my best. I didn’t give up.’
I’m a grief counselor. I work in hospice care, reaching out to the loved ones after the patient dies. I call them a couple of weeks after the death and ask them how they’re doing. Then I listen. Like many of us, one woman had just lost her elderly mother. “I’m better than I was,”…
We may leave our things but the real essence of ourselves is contained in our memories, and the memories of others. As you think about what to write, consider taking a class to guide you. I am only on lesson three but was eager to share what I’ve done, in hopes it can inspire others to write.
Life pivots produce personal growth and spur forward motion. When hardship, grief, difficult decisions, and other life events require a significant pivot, faith is the guiding light in the darkness.
Life is filled with transitions. If you lean into them, your life will be enriched if you embrace the adventure and move through the transitions. On the other hand, if you fail to embrace the changes and transitions, you might become bitter and feel useless.
My teacher kept telling me, “Stop thinking; just paint,” so I did. What came out of it was a very powerful painting that is still one of my favorites to this day. I titled it, Emerging/Disappearing?.
This was the beginning of a new direction in painting for me as I found that it gave me an outlet for all the emotions I had buried all my life. I have since sold many pieces and done commissions.
