Archive for May, 2009
Cindy on May 30th, 2009
“I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.” — Maya Angelou
Home. It’s my favorite word in the English language. As much as I love to travel, after a long trip there’s nothing that warms my heart more than the sight of the path leading to our front door. If I’m happy at home, everything feels right. There’s nothing I can’t do if the walls around me are sturdy, secure, and beautiful. And when I’m feeling adrift or lonely or empty, home is the only place that can fill the nameless ache in my soul.
Looking back on an eventful Memorial Day weekend vacation, I see that “home” was also the theme for my time away. At the start of our holiday, my husband and I drove to the west side of the state to continue working on the Frank Lloyd Wright home we purchased last year for our future retirement. We spent a couple of days cleaning up the gardens and transplanting perennials before heading out to Chicago to help our 23-year-old son move into the urban condo he bought recently.
It’s hard to describe the feeling you get when you watch your kid create the first real home of his own. It’s not quite the same as watching him move into that first crowded room in a college dorm. I suppose you could call it a crazy mix of pride, awe, disbelief, and excitement.
And yet … as deeply satisfying as it is to know that your child can function and thrive independently, it’s something else to realize that his definition of “home” now extends miles beyond the cozy, tree-lined neighborhood where you raised him. He’s choosing his own furniture and installing his own light fixtures. He’s got cookware in the oven drawer and beer glasses in his own kitchen cupboards. He’s planting fresh roots.
Taking after his folks, our son chose a condo with character in an historic building that boasts a variety of gorgeous (and quirky) architectural details — bay windows, mosaic floors, wrought-iron stair rails. (Fun fact: Child’s Play, a cult-classic horror film, was shot in this awesome building.) My husband and I were impressed with the choice our son made — and we left feeling confident that he’ll be very happy there. Still, we felt a faint little tug on our hearts as we waved good-bye and headed back toward the highway.
After arriving home in Royal Oak, we faced yet another midlife turning point. My mother-in-law decided that she was finally ready to look into a home for my father-in-law, whose dementia has clearly worsened in recent months. And so, my husband and his sister drove out to tour the new place with their mother, agreeing that this decision is the right one for both Mom and Dad — though it’s hardly an easy one. “Home” will soon change for my husband’s father in more ways than we can predict right now.
So there you have it. A retirement home in the making for my husband and me. A first home for our only son. A different place for my father-in-law. Our roots are pushing past old boundaries, reaching beyond familiar fences, reshaping home and family for us all. — Cindy La Ferle
Cindy on May 28th, 2009
“The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.” — Gertrude Jekyll
Longtime friends of mine know that the garden — almost any garden — is my “happy place.” I’ll spend hours sorting through problems or pushing past writer’s block while working the soil with my hands. It’s my way of making sense of my world while making it a wee bit more beautiful. In this month’s issue of Michigan Women’s Forum, you can read a short essay I wrote about gardening and midlife lessons. The essay is reprinted from my book, Writing Home, and was I surprised (and thrilled) earlier this year when it was selected for inclusion in an upcoming anthology titled At Home in the Garden (Guideposts Publications).
And speaking of Writing Home, a brand-new, signed copy is up for grabs in a special blog book giveaway this week on Pam Stout’s Beyond Just Mom. You can enter Pam’s giveaway by leaving a comment on the BJM site through May 31. –CL
– Garden photo by Cindy La Ferle –
Cindy on May 23rd, 2009
âThis is what 40 looks like. We’ve been lying so long, who would know?â â Gloria Steinem
Several years ago, the Olay company sent me a T-shirt that reads: âLove the skin you’re in.â The promotion works, like a sticky song on the radio, because I never did get that catchphrase out of my mind.
Most of my girlfriends and I have decided that drugstore creams — including Olay products — work just about as well as the hundred dollar anti-aging potions sold in better department stores. And we should know. We’ve tried them all.
None of us are superficial women. We have college degrees and graduate degrees, sturdy families, and careers we enjoy. But we’re still not sure what to make of the changing faces in our mirrors, so we keep on searching for the elixir that guarantees its promise of eternal youth. No matter how far we’ve traveled, we still regard aging as our final frontier. A cruel adversary to be conquered at any cost.
Which is odd, really, since advertising copywriters keep telling us that “we’re not getting older; we’re getting better.”
So why can’t we visit a drug store or cosmetic counter without being reminded that our faces and bodies need to be altered, repaired, firmed, smoothed, exfoliated, or lifted entirely? En route to a bottle of aspirin or shampoo, we pass beauty aisles stocked with retinoids, beta hydroxy acid peels, and other chemical formulas designed to dissolve our encroaching wrinkles and tell-tale age spots.
Women’s magazines only serve to support the notion that we’re seriously damaged and need to be fixed. (Of course, magazines are all about selling products, so who’s surprised?) Look at all those “mature” fashion models whose careers have been resuscitated to appease our aging demographic:Â They barely look a day over thirty-five. The message to middle-aged women is that it really doesn’t matter what we’ve achieved through education, experience, or sheer perseverance. If we don’t look years younger than we are, well, we don’t look good enough.
My husband tells me that men have aging angst too — although cosmetic issues don’t boggle them quite so much. He’s cool about losing his hair and leaving what’s left in its striking shade of gray. I think he looks terrific and, yes, dignified.
Then again, guys are comfortable with looking âdignified,â and I suspect it’s because we give them full permission to ripen. We don’t marginalize older men the way we marginalize older women. Most guys get on with the natural process of aging — and some of them actually seize the real privileges of maturity.
Not long before Paul Newman died, his weathered face graced the cover of a national business magazine. The photo stopped me in my tracks at a local newsstand. I was immediately struck by the depth and wisdom reflected in those famous blue eyes. And it occurred to me that aging is elegance when it’s allowed to tell its own truth.
Years ago, as a college student, I worked at the cosmetics counter of an upscale department store in suburban Detroit. I’ll never forget a customer in her late fifties (I’ll call her Mrs. Smith) who haunted our counters twice weekly for the ultimate anti-aging cream. She remains an eerie icon of the woman I don’t want to become.
Married to a wealthy businessman, Mrs. Smith was terrified of aging. She’d had several facelifts and other surgical procedures, yet she looked like a sad marionette, a caricature of her younger self. Chronically disappointed, she often came back to the store to return the creams that âdidn’t work.â
Ever so tactfully, we all tried to explain that cosmetics could enhance maturing beauty — but they couldn’t totally reverse the handiwork of Mother Time. But Mrs. Smith didn’t love the skin she was in, and I swear she kept our whole department in business that year. — Cindy La Ferle
– For more columns of special interest to women at midlife, please visit the “MIDPOINT columns” archives at right, under Categories.–
Cindy on May 21st, 2009
“Marriage is not just spiritual communion, it is also remembering to take out the trash.” — Dr. Joyce Brothers
Here comes the bride — and there goes the family’s life savings. Over the years, I’ve watched newly engaged couples spend months selecting elaborate floral arrangements, inspecting menus from caterers, auditioning professional musicians, and outfitting enough bridal attendants to cast a chorus line on Broadway. How much is too much? Is there such a thing as “over the top” when it comes to weddings and receptions? Click here to read more in today’s Midpoint column in The Oakland Press. –CL
Cindy on May 17th, 2009
I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.” — Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions
If you could go back and relive your early years of motherhood, what would you do differently? Do you wish you’d used cloth diapers instead of disposables? Made your own baby food? Or stayed home from work a year or two longer? If I had to do it over again, I’d wipe out the myth of The Perfect Mom.
Like June Cleaver’s apron strings, the myth of The Perfect Mom won’t unravel easily. But as a woman with more than two decades of maternal experience, I’m here to tell you that we need to stuff this exhausted fairy tale in the place where all the dirty disposal diapers go.
I only wish I’d realized it sooner.
My husband and I were married five years when my ob-gyn’s office called with the happy news: I was pregnant with our first and only child. While I knew from the getgo that I wasn’t perfect-mom material, I wanted to get everything right. Which is another way of saying I worried too much.
I worried about my Lamaze breathing techniques. I worried about the quality of my prenatal vitamins. And while waiting in my ob-gyn’s office, I’d manage to find every magazine article listing the awful things that could happen to your unborn baby if, say, you accidentally swallowed your eye shadow, consumed bacon fat, or picked up a weird rash at the community pool.
Of course, the pursuit of mommy perfection got even more intense after my son was born. And so did the worrying. Was my baby sleeping too much or too little? Was his relentless wiggling a symptom of hyperactivity or something more sinister? Had I stopped breastfeeding too soon? Worse yet, by the time the kid was in kindergarten, I’d already started berating myself for providing store-bought cupcakes in lieu of homemade treats.
Seriously, I did loosen up by the time my son was in Cub Scouts, and realized my parenting skills were no worse (or better) than the other moms I’d met. Regardless, it shouldn’t have taken a vast library of childcare guides to get me through the early years — but there you have it. What I needed more than anything was a permission slip to be human.
I also wish Anne Lamott had written her memoir, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, eight years sooner. Her candid recollections of early parenthood have relieved thousands of nervous first-time mothers.
âOne of the worst things about being a parent, for me,â Lamott wrote, âis the self-discovery, the being face to face with one’s secret insanity and brokenness.â Finishing Lamott’s book, I sobbed with the realization that I hadn’t been alone in my fear of being an imperfect mom â or being a mom, period.
Even today, the cultural pressures on women never seem to let up. Whether we stay home with our kids or work in an office across town, we’re expected to perform flawless balancing acts in the circus of family living.
Instead we ought to be reminded that there is no foolproof, one-size-fits-all method of parenting. Motherhood is something we learn as we go along, and we’re bound to fall short from time to time. Meanwhile, I wish we’d all stop comparing ourselves to other moms, including the fictional Donna Reed “role models” embedded in our collective psyche. Parenthood is no place for card-carrying perfectionists.
Ever since the first family set up housekeeping in a fire-lit cave, moms have been devising ways to protect their kids from real or imaginary monsters. That’s not such a bad thing. Still, it helps to temper our worries with common sense — and a little humor. We need to lighten up on ourselves.
Things have a way of working out, after all. My son, the once-wiggly toddler, graduated college and moved into his own place last year. Despite my inevitable parenting slips, he grew up to be a sturdy, independent guy who loves his imperfect mom — and often reminds her not to worry so much.
