I find myself moving from blog to blog. Every time I consider combining them, I realize that each one captures a particular part of me. So, I will continue along using each of my blogs to talk about various aspects of life. To catch up, read on.

I recently took a trip to Dublin, Ireland. It was an amazing trip to spite the rain and gale force winds (I really do know now what gale force winds are). I was so looking forward to taking photos. I carried all my camera equipment, even though it was a bit of a pain to take it with me on International travel. I was going to get some really cool shots. Well, maybe or maybe not.

I spend a great deal of time somewhere other than where I am. Sounds confusing? Not if you happen to suffer from anxiety. Anxiety disorders affect your ability to stay in the moment. You can go to the NIMH site and learn all the technical stuff about anxiety disorders. But it can seem a little more intense than our conversation here.

On the other hand, you can also go to an EHow article that seems much more to the point from my perspective. The two are pretty much on the opposite ends of the spectrum, but in reality there are many of us who cope with mild or moderate anxiety and use a variety of tools to do it.

All of that said, I was spending time in Dublin on my own. My partner was in meetings, and I was site seeing alone for a couple of days. I did all the things the article and my previous therapist suggest. I got out my tool box. I made maps on my computer before we left. I bought books to help me learn my way around. I studies my location in relationship to all these other places. I was ready.

The first day I really went out to site see was the first day we didn’t have pouring rain. I took my camera and had all my “stuff” in various pockets, etc. I only exhibited a slight amount of OCD when I checked for my room key the third time. Not too bad. The night before one of our new friends in Dublin drew me a map on a piece of paper, showing me all the places I could go. I had studied my own maps enough that all of her directions actually made sense to me. So I put her map in my pocket and off I went.

I walked and watched people and looked at buildings. I went in and out of shops and looked at merchandise. I listened to people talking as they walked by me. I watched the sun against the building and was sorry I didn’t pick up my sunglasses. I never took out my camera.

Each time I turned to another street or went to another location, I marveled in the fact that I knew exactly where I was. I know this sounds really trivial and perhaps a bit crazy to most of the world. But for me, to be able to be in a place and not feel anxious about finding my way was extraordinarily liberating. I didn’t have to worry about being lost or getting lost or looking stupid or asking stupid directions. I could just be where I was. I didn’t need to take photos of it for another day because I was just enjoying that moment at that time. It’s rare for me and I will tell you I loved it.

Don’t worry, I did get some photos the next day (including a wonderful rainbow). If you go to Photos By Peggy you can see them in the gallery or in the story post. So I guess you can say I got the best of both worlds!

It’s been awhile since I have posted on this blog. I spent the last four months helping my mother close out her life in western New York State and move to Atlanta. I spoke about this in my last post. My mother will be 80 in a couple weeks, and while her health is relatively good, she has some developing health problems and has slowed considerably. She needed to move away from the responsibility of a three bedroom home with a full basement and an acre of yard. And we are talking western NY after all. She was damn sick of snow and ice.

I was pleased my mother decided for herself to change her life situation and that it was not forced upon her. Even with that, it was an emotional and complicated process. My Dad died four years ago of cancer, and I watched my Mom make the transition to this stage of her life. As an older women alone trying to decide how to mange her support needs and her support networks, she looked at both her children to decide her next steps. My brother, and only sibling, lives in Delaware, and is an active sports enthusiast. Me and my partner live in Atlanta, GA, are home bodies who love to cook. It seemed like a logical choice that she move warmer and our way (no offense meant to my brother). We spent a long time talking about it, and I know she thought long and hard about her options. Care-taking does seem to be a daughter thing, partly because we assume it and partly because it is assumed of us. I am too tired at the moment to debate which is the greater influence.

My Mom stayed with us for the first couple months she was in Atlanta, something both my partner and I enjoyed immensely. We helped her learn her way around, fought with the health insurance companies, let her drive us places so she could find her own way, took her to see apartments, watched TV shows, followed the NY Yankees, tried to keep up with the Buffalo Bills, and helped her sew her way into the tapestry that is our lives. I have occasionally wondered under my breath where my father was, but for the most part, the picture has been pretty good.

Mom found an apartment she loves only a couple of blocks from us – her own “diggs” but almost like still being with us. We can walk over with our dog for a drink in the afternoon and all of us can feel comfortable going our own way. Can’t ask for a better outcome. She is nesting at the moment, but also starting to think about ways to reach out to develop her own life tapestry. She is one tough broad.

In this experience, however, I have learned about another stage of life that, up to this point, was not familiar to me. As adults we build a life pace that fits our needs when we are expected to get things done and be productive. I am sure none of this is earth shattering, but when you are experiencing it for the first time, it is different than in the books. Anyway, you are focused on the next thing, the list in your head. When my mother moved in and I realized her life pace was totally different than mine, I had to shift. I was left with two choices. I could push against her pace with my own and be frustrated, or I could learn to stand in the moment. I decided, most of the time, to choose the later.

I take more time to do things, walking slower so she can keep up. I listen, usually patiently, while she tells me in some detail about an issue or problem or missing item from the move and I don’t immediately feel that I should “do something.” I enjoy the hugs when we are able to just be together for simple, small things that seem quite extraordinary under these new circumstances. None of this means I have stopped my desire to be productive and pursue my goals and ideals. I just feel that I have more times “in the moment” than I can ever remember.

I am not going to tell you I enjoyed all of them with the same degree of delight. I will tell you that there is something instructive about standing in that space. I don’t totally understand all of this yet, and I continue to sort it out for myself. But at the moment, I feel truly blessed and grateful. And life comes full circle.

I am learning to relinquish the scheduled pace of my life in favor of standing in the moment.

I spent the last week with my mother, helping her pack up her home of 40 years. The house has been sold and my mother is moving in with my partner and I, at least temporarily. She is looking forward to leaving the responsibilities of home ownership behind her and renting an apartment where she calls the landlord if something is broken. But this move from Lockport, NY to Atlanta, GA means a new city and surroundings, with many changes and adjustments.

My dad died about 4 years ago, and my mom has moved emotionally closer to this moment ever since. At almost 80 years old, she continues to enjoy relatively good health, although a recent diagnosis of pulminary fibrosis has caused her to think differently about this last stage of her life. I am pleased that her present decisions are her decisions, making her path one of her choosing, not than the choices of poor health or lack of resources. (With our recent financial issues in this recession, she will be a help to us for awhile). But, as most of us know, even choosing our own path doesn’t remove the emotional aspects of major life changes.

I sat at our moving sale last weekend and wondered at all the “stuff” that makes up a life. I am very lucky in that my parents were married young, had me relatively early in their marriage, and yet still managed to make their way through 56 years together. We moved into the house on Fiegle Road when I was 16 years old, almost 43 years ago (yes, now you know my age). My parents had taken a difficult financial road to get there, with my father starting as an industrial chemist after college, getting laid off, selling Wearever pots and pans door to door, losing his home to foreclosure and stumbling his way into teaching. He spent 30 years teaching high school mathematics after that, but the lost of financial stability and the foreclosure of their first home means the house at 5390 Fiegle Road is filled with much more than furniture and miscellaneous household items. The process of its sale and the emptying of its contents has been a lesson in building a life.

My mother was present when people came to see the house. I told her it sold because she would answer people’s questions with stories. She would tell them about the parties we had in the finished basement and the fact that my father wasn’t the handiest man in the world but he put in the drop ceiling. (I suggested she might not want to admit my father’s “Mr. Fixit” failings, but the potential buyer of the moment reassured her that my dad really did a great job). She teared up when touring buyers would suggest that it looked like a happy house, and she secretly advocated for the young couple that reminded her so much of she and my father.

Last weekend I was reminded of her fastidious nature and how well she took care of her “stuff.” She sold virtually all the furniture she wanted to sell (leaving behind the large, house furniture to secure the small, apartment versions), and we moved the remaining furniture around to give her a comfortable environment during these last couple weeks before closing. The teak dining room set – her pride and joy – left the house yesterday for exactly her asking price. She was so proud and relieved, and yet so sad and alone at the same time. This reality left me with a true sense of the paradox of change: looking forward brings excitement and joy, looking back brings melancholy and loss. It’s the nature of the beast. And the changes will not only be my mother’s, but my own.

I have a friend who refers to this paradox as moving to a new chapter. It’s his way of looking forward with anticipation. His wife, who is my longtime professional colleague and friend, reminds him that there is still going to be a longing for the chapter whose pages you just closed. It’s like finishing a really good book. Part of you will always regret that you finished it.

As we move forward, we are working to engage in activities to let folks know we are here. We realize that anyone can simply start talking and create a blog.  You don’t know us yet, so you can’t make a determination if we are worth your time.  In that spirit, it seemed appropriate to give you a better idea of what we are trying to accomplish.

We have intentionally kept the topics on this blog limitless. That is not conventional wisdom in blogging, so we may soon find that we should repent and take the road more traveled. I realize that a wide range of topics makes it difficult for our readers to test our veracity or our believability. If our topics were more focused, it would be simpler to apply the appropriate search engine optimization strategies and get the necessary links and track backs so you could see how others feel about our content. But this blog is about how women over fifty think and feel about the world around them. It just didn’t make sense to start off limiting that discussion.

I am enough of a social scientist to know that the topics of our conversations are limited by our personal experiences and our life history. So, it will be true that our initial directions here will be driven by our experiences. That’s why you have a post about tweezers. It certainly isn’t because tweezers are a intensely significant subject that all women over 50 should care about.

We hope that our life histories have been varied enough and interesting enough that they can drive our initial conversations. We hope that so many of you start to participate that we will have to organize all the information into categories and subjects in order for us to take advantage of all the wisdom contained in the blog. That would be a problem I would enjoy having.

We will have guest bloggers on occasion, particularly women who bring particular expertise to the discussion. Since our experiences are driving the topics, we will attempt to offer other opinions besides our to expand the discussions. We are professional women who respect our professions. We are products of our socio-economic status, our races, our families, our experience and our era. We social workers call the “person-in-environment.”   We are letting you know right up front that we know we bring ours. So, now let’s talk.

All of us Google!   We google everything we want to know about. I tell my friends that my present life is possible because the Internet allows me to connect with everything and anyone I need. (We’re not talking today about the impact of that connection on my personal interactions or interpersonal relationship skills. That’s fodder for another post.) The question for today is “How do you know what you really have after you get the Google search results?”

The problem about evaluating content on the Internet is discussed often. Debates about impartiality and veracity of the information you read are ongoing, from news reporters to medical advisers. The advice we offer here is simple and yet complex. It is really about due diligence.  Always ask the question “Who is talking?”

Evaluating Search Results

When you perform a Google search, you get search results. I’m sure most of you are already aware that the top items on the page are paid Google advertisements, as well as the items located down the right side. That doesn’t mean the information they provide isn’t useful, it is just a way to know that they are there to try and get you to buy something. In some respects, that gives you a clear idea of who they are, what they offer and what they want from you.

After that you have the items on the list that are searched by Google and come up in a particular order in that list because of their content and its relationship to the subject of your search. Everyone who has a website or writes a commercial blog wants to come up on page one.  How they do that is not as straight-forward as it sounds, and the ins and outs of search engine optimization (SEO) will be the topic of several posts on this blog.

For today, however, we care about who is talking. In looking at your search results, the one thing you need to remember is that just because something comes up in the search page list doesn’t say anything about it’s legitimacy or the veracity of its content. When I Google a topic, the one question I mentally ask every time I go to a website that has come up in a Google search is – “Who is talking to me?” If I read about treatments for menopause or explore websites I have found while searching for information about social media and nonprofits, the question is the same. “Who is talking?” And answering that question is not always easy.

Many websites or blogs today are well designed with excellent marketing copy. In fact, many companies, organizations and government entities are moving almost exclusively to a “blog-like” format for their content. The idea is that is seems more “conversational.” You know, just a couple of friends sitting at the kitchen table having coffee. Are they the most informed source on a topic? Not necessarily. They may be providing good information, but do they have an ulterior motive that slants what they provide you?

Finding “About Us”

Some websites tell you upfront and in their web banner exactly who they are. For example, when I was researching web content for a future post on menopause, my Google search produced a number of sites from public agencies. For example NIA has a page of publications, some of which are directly related to women’s health issues. The Department of Health and Human Services also has a site called Womens Health developed specifically by the Office on Women’s Health. I’m not saying that everything that comes out of the federal government is God’s honest truth. I am only suggesting that you can expect greater rigor in the evaluation of what is published than you can expect from a drug company that sells HRT and is telling you about menopause.

If the site doesn’t immediately tell me the source of the information, before I read any content on a page, I scroll to the bottom and look for the “about us” section of the site. When you find the “about us” link, you usually get the information you desire. But finding it isn’t simple. Most websites provide this link and use the exact phrase “about us.”  It has become the standard we all expect.  Regardless of whether you feel positively or negatively about the content of a website, don’t do anything else until you check the “about us.”

Reader Beware

The Internet is truly a buyer (or reader) beware environment. That can work for you (as in President Obama’s recent campaign for President) or against you (as in President Obama’s recent campaign to convince the voters he was not a Muslim). There are some things you can do so you have a better idea whether you are getting information or propaganda – or how much of each from which side.

When you visit a site where the first thing you see are articles, look around in the sidebars and see what kind of information you find.  Most blogs these days host a certain number of ads.  It’s one of the way to advertise your blog and increase your readership.  And even if your only motivation is that you think you have something important to share, it doesn’t do anyone much good if no one knows it’s there.  Other bloggers are trying to both share information and make a living (not a sin, but the way).  So advertisements (from Google ads to affiliate marketing) are all options.

As is the way with business and takeovers and multinational corporations (sorry, that may be the jaded failed small business person’s perspective), the blog site on the Internet is no exception.  And trying to find out the source of information you read or services you purchase is often a long and convoluted task.  The following site is a great example:

After a search on menopause and weight gain, I clicked on one search result on page one that took me to a site called “Life123 - Answers at the speed of life.”  “Nice tag line,” I thought.  And immediately my next question came.  “Who is talking to me?”  Looking at all the ads and partners and affiliates only confused me more, and the number of topics made it impossible to locate any single source. If you scroll to the bottom you see that this site was a Mindspark property. Well that peaked my interest.  But I search the Internet and write blogs for a living.  If I were an ordinary searcher, would I look?  I think this one might have even made me curious when my searching was regular person searching.  So I went to another Google search and put in Mindspark.

I want to be sure and explain that the Mindspark properties referred to by this website are NOT mindsparke.  Mindsparke is a company that makes brain fitness software that has been found helpful with older and young people alike in increasing mental functioning.  They used it at a senior program where I volunteered teaching older adults how to use their computers and they were very impressed with the program’s features.

Mindspark, and about a kagillian  other companies, is owned by a company called IAC.  It would take me several posts to explain IAC, and it took them a very long webpage.  If you are interested the links are all here in this post.  The long and the short of this is that you never know where asking the “Who” question will take you. Did this tell me whether or not the information I was reading was legitimate? Not totally, but knowing the complexity of ownership caused me to read or “listen” very differently. Being who I am in the business I am in, I found it also fascinating from a cyber-business perspective. Fodder for yet another post…

Something really bad happened to me the other day. I couldn’t find my tweezers. This may not seem like a big deal to most of our readers, or even to most people in the world. But I know there are postmenopausal women out there silently thinking “Oh, no!”

I looked everywhere. They weren’t in the usual place in the bed stand. They weren’t in the back-up location of the drawer in the bathroom. I couldn’t find them on my desk next to the computer (a place they have been known to reside). And I even looked next to my chair in the living room, to no avail.

Many of you must be thinking, “Why would tweezers be anywhere but in the bathroom next to the mirror and make-up?” Even if you don’t wear make-up very much, the tweezers are always in the bathroom next to the mirror and the other tools essential for personal hygiene and beauty routines. And if you can’t find them, just Google tweezers and you will learn that there are 12 pages (count them – 12) of tweezers available for purchase in the “tweezers and brow” section at www.shopstyle.com.

Just as an aside from the original point of this story. Who would have guessed that there are 12 pages of options for tweezers? You have your Tweezerman Mini Slant White Polka Dots tweezers as well as your Lavender Polka Dot Mini Oval Slant Tweezers. There was a particular type of tweezers that advertised it’s ability to be used even with your glasses on. (I apologize that I can’t give you that name because there were so many I lost track of where I read about it). My reaction to that one was typical of an aging woman. “Who can use tweezers without their glasses?” Oh, I forgot, that’s why you always have that mirror handy with the magnifying side. And just for the joy of the English majors out there, is it tweezer or tweezers? (the online oxford dictionary provides both options)

To get back to my panic at loosing my tweezers. If there are any of you postmenopausal ladies out there who don’t yet understand my distress, you haven’t yet had the joy of trying desperately to remove the hormonal gift of a random chin hair. You are sitting there working, maybe writing a post for your blog, minding your own business, and you lean your chin on your hand for just a moment to think. And you feel it. A chin hair. Now you are toast. You can’t ignore it, you can’t grab it with your fingers, you can’t scratch it off, you can’t rub it in. After several minutes (or hours depending on how determined you may be or unwilling to get up and find the tweezers) you start looking for your tweezers.

This may again seem like a simple task. You go to the bathroom drawer, the one near the mirror, and you get the tweezers and remove the hair. Or, go to the drawer and use one of the other pairs of tweezers you have in the drawer. There are two problems with this simple solution. First, your tweezers are usually wherever you most recently removed your last chin hair and who knows where that was. And second, not just any pair of tweezers will do. I suspect that most women have several pairs of tweezers in their bathroom drawers, and in our youth we saw them as pretty much interchangeable. I could pluck my eyebrows (the few times I actually agreed to do so since I was a very fair haired blond – maybe material for another post) with a number of different styles of tweezers. I had my favorites, but the competition between them wasn’t fierce and life altering. That changed when the target of my tweezers became chin hair.

Because I was blond (or sort of) to start with, my chin hairs are light or grey. They typically don’t present me with the public display problem. But if I know they are there, they do present me with the “this is the most annoying thing in the world” problem. But because these are small, light and frequently soft little hairs, tweezing can be a huge issue. I had a very old pair of tweezers that were small and tight and allowed me to get rid of these stupid hairs. You need to understand that not every kind of tweezer will work. These hairs are pretty tiny when you can feel them. When you find a pair that works, they are like GOLD! Hence my panic when I lost mine.

When my searching brought me no closer to my tweezers and the hair had driven me mad over the course of a couple of days, I went to the local drug store. I spent at least 20 minutes studying the various options (not as voluminous as the 12 pages on the Internet, but more than I ever expected). I finally selected two versions, just to be safe. If one didn’t work, surely the other one would. My partner called me when I was in the drug store asking where I was. When she asked me why I was there my answer was “Looking for something I lost.” After a moment she knew what I meant and started laughing out loud. I wasn’t amused.

I brought my new prizes home, tried them out and was immensely relieved to succeed in deporting that chin hair from residence on my face. My relief was quite palpable, albeit hard for anyone else to understand. Now I had two prizes, one for my bed stand and one for my purse.

As I was emptying the washing machine later that day I heard a funny metal sound. I couldn’t imagine what it was, since the clothes were clean and there weren’t any other movable parts. After removing all the clothes, I looked down into the washer and there, lying quietly at the bottom of the washing machine was – you guessed it – my tweezers. And then there were three….. I guess my pocket is yet another place to look.

OK, this might not be the most critical issue for women to face on this blog – but sometimes we just need to make fun of ourselves.

This blog began as a conversation between two women in their fifties, each in a new and unfamiliar phase of their lives. Haunani and Peggy were both business women who closed businesses in 2008. You will hear more details about that simply stated fact in several postings on this blog. Check out the business, health and technology sections to hear more.

As we talked together and looked around for articles, books and other sources of inspiration and information, we found something missing. We searched websites, blogs, support groups and books and we couldn’t find the conversation we were having. Now, that may be because our conversations are always a bit funky, but we suspect there are other 50 something women out there who are having the same conversations – or would like to.

Suzanne Braun Levine wrote a book in 2005 called “Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in second adulthood.” We both read it, and it is probably the framework that started us down this journey of conversation. Levine describes the journey of “The Question (what am I going to do with the rest of my life?) in its serial form – What matters? What works? And what’s next?” (1) We talk about her book more in later postings, but this gives you a sense of how this whole thing got started.

Here we were, two women whose life had been defined (at least a significant part of it) by our professions and our work. We always worked and saw ourselves as professionals making our way through our lifetime’s maze of employers and business ventures. There is an interesting yin and yang between us, as Huanani is the engineer and Peggy the social worker, so we approach the maze with different mental processes. But we have had interestingly similar paths. You can read about us in our bios.

Nothing we found out in the blogs, articles, media, discussions, seemed to be talking about what we were talking about. Sounds egocentric, I’m sure, but the traditional response to our present situation – go find a job, or a business, or get busy, or make money – just didn’t seem to fit this time. Our old ways of responding weren’t working, either because of our individual needs or the economy itself, and we hadn’t yet developed any new ways.

So, we started listening to ourselves and each other. And what we are learning in that process is what we want to share – with any of you who are interested in listening and speaking back. Here are some things we take away from our still evolving process:

1. Take time. There is a sense of urgency to being what we call “work still.”  If you have always worked and now you aren’t, for women, particularly, this creates a sense of panicky guilt.  No productive activity and no money coming in.  But take the time to listen to yourself, even when everyone else thinks you are wasting time.  What you do with that time will be as varied as the women who take it.
2. Speak. We don’t care if you speak here in this blog, in your own families, with support groups, in the library, in chat rooms, wherever.  Just speak.  We believe that turning thinking into speaking is transforming.
3. Passion equals power. If you find what you are passionate about, you will find a way to take back the power this inactivity has had over you.  Your passion will show you the path, even if it doesn’t seem very obvious when you start.
4. Life is a spiral curriculum. You will discover, explore and learn about things that will seem very familiar to you.  It’s because you have heard them before, but then they weren’t important and you didn’t need them.  Now you do and you are learning them in a new way.

We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started.
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot

Yes, there are millions of blogs out there and we suspect you may be asking yourself – Why another blog?   According to the 2007 State of the Blogosphere report (the most recent I could find), “Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and we’re seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That’s about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day.”  (We think we have a theory on why so many blogs, but you will need to go to our technology category to read more about that.}

So why in the world are we creating another one?  We think we have found something both profound and simple at the same time.  We provide each other strong and true sounding boards – opportunities to talk problems without the need for solution.  We think out loud to offer each and other the chance to move from thinking to speaking – and eventually to action.  It’s a process that is virtually impossible to accomplish on your own. So we have combined the “cyberinfrasture,” in this case, a blog, with the very personal, individual, excruciatingly human need for discourse.  So it really doesn’t matter if everyone sees it, or if even a bunch of people see it.  It only matters that enough of you choose to speak – and the conversation is worthwhile enough for us to keep talking.

(1) Levine, Suzanne Braun.  Reinventing the Rest of Our Lives:  Women in Second Adulthood.  New York:  Penquin Press  2005. p.19.