Month: October 2025

Love Letters

Happy Anniversary, J! Words really cannot convey how I feel about you. You are my greatest gift. I love you, always and forever.

“I wish I could explain “the secret formula” to having a long, successful, happy marriage.  Just like all the centenarians who give conflicting advice on the secret of having a long life, I’m not really sure that there is just one answer, or just one way.  I just feel incredibly blessed and lucky and thankful that the formula my husband and I have created, works for us.  I’m totally in love with my husband.  I love the life we have created together and I’m so grateful for the many life adventures we have shared.  I cherish our family.” – from Adulting Second Half, 10/29/2018

“This story is still playing out, but I think the moral of the story will remain the same. Believe in love. Live love as an action. Be in awestruck gratitude when you find someone who is willing to give to you every part of their very self, for the rest of their lives. Know that there is no greater gift that they could give to you. Honor and respect and reciprocate that gift. The gift of Love grows and grows when it is nurtured, and that blooming of Love is where the greatest treasure, out of all of Life’s wonderful treasures, is truly found.” – from Adulting Second Half, 10/29/2019

“This union is a safe haven for them and for their children, to always be able to come home to, and to rest and to renew in its kind, empowering nourishment. Nothing was more important to the man or to the woman than what they had created together. They understood that about each other and thus, the man and the woman both felt fiercely loved and treasured and honored and cared for, and there is no better feeling in the world, than that feeling. It is everything that these two lovers want for their children and their grandchildren and for the generations to follow them.” – from Adulting Second Half, 10/29/2020

“I share a passionate, loyal, understanding, caring, dedicated love with my husband, the love of my life. . . . . and we will always be each other’s yin and yang. We fit together really well. “ – from Adulting Second Half, 10/29/2021

“When picking a life partner, always go with solid, not glittery. Solid withstands storms, whereas glitter flies away in the wind. . . . I have always been eternally grateful for my husband’s steadfast, lifelong commitment to me and to our family. He gave me his life to share with me. This is the greatest gift anyone has ever given to me.”– Adulting Second Half 10/29/2022

(We were on a trip in 2023 – I wasn’t mad at you, J. wink wink We were having fun.)

“My marriage is my sanctuary, my comfort, my joy, my adventures, my framework for how I go about living my life.” – Adulting Second Half 10/29/24

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

White Plus Spaghetti Sauce

We have been using our newly remodeled kitchen for less than a week now. And like most new and/or remodeled kitchens, it is 50 shades of white (who knew that white came in so many shades??). And so yesterday, when I was getting my oatmeal down from the cabinet for breakfast, I also unintentionally took down a large jar of Rao’s spaghetti sauce. And that thing splattered. It looked like a horrendous murder scene in our new white kitchen. I don’t think there was any part of the kitchen (and also my bathrobe) that wasn’t covered in glass and red sauce.

Yes, I swore. Yes, I had tears in my eyes. Yes, I went into high gear cleaning mode for fears that the spaghetti sauce would add orange splotchy stains to our new surroundings if I didn’t act fast. Miraculously, despite the thick red sauce being all over the cabinets, the counters, the floors, the backsplash tile, various lines of grout, the oven, the refrigerator, the rubber stuff that seals the refrigerator door, and even a hallway, I was able to get it all out. No one would have ever guessed it happened. I used to watch true crime shows in disbelief. Despite stabbing someone a million times in a heinous jealous rage, the vicious murderer was able to clean up all of the evidence, seemingly without a trace, until some try-hard detective used a blue light to find a “speck” of blood. After yesterday’s experience, I more understood how this could actually happen. Necessity is the mother of invention. When you are in a panicked frenzy, doing a “going against the clock style of cleaning”, it’s amazing what you can achieve. (And yet, when I headed to bed last night, I still found a small piece of spaghetti jar glass in our entryway.)

I am a person who needs to find meaning in everything. I cannot go through anything in life, feeling like it is meaningless. And so I create meaning and lessons for everything that happens to me, every day of my life. What was yesterday’s lesson for me (besides putting spaghetti sauce jars in a new, safe place where they would not fall and splatter all over everything)? It occurred to me, as I was desperate to get my kitchen back to its “back to brand new” state, that we tend to take much better care of the new things in our lives. We are ginger and careful with our new cars, our new furniture, our new clothes, our new engagement rings, our new puppies and kittens, and our new relationships. We are so excited about these things! We treat them with kit gloves. We revel at how wonderful it is to have gotten this special new thing in our lives, and how hard we worked to get it. The real truth is, every new thing in our lives, is often the answer to one of our dreams. How amazing is that? And yet, pretty soon (usually sooner than we would think), these things become “old hat.” We start being less careful. We start taking these now “old things” for granted. We start nitpicking what we don’t like about these things. And before long, we are dreaming about replacing them with something new. The thing hasn’t changed all that much. Yes, it’s gotten use, but isn’t that use what the thing was acquired for, to begin with? The “thing” – the car, the kitchen, the pet, the relationship, hasn’t changed that much. It’s just showing some wear and age from being used and useful. Still, it is our perception of the thing that has really changed more than anything. It is no longer “new” to us. It is no longer “fresh and interesting.” It loses its preciousness to us.

I understand that things get worn out. You can’t keep everything. There is a place for “new” in all of our lives. This quest and desire for new and interesting and different is what keeps humankind growing and progressing and expanding. However, there are some things that are our velveteen rabbits. The velveteen rabbits in our lives, actually become more precious with age and wear. I asked AI this morning what was the true meaning of the story of The Velveteen Rabbit and this was the first line of its answer: “The meaning of The Velveteen Rabbit is that love and deep emotional connection are what make something truly “real,” even if it becomes shabby in the process.”

The velveteen rabbits in our lives, deserve the same care and appreciation, and careful handling that we give to all of the new things. Not all of the new things will evolve to be one of our velveteen rabbits. It’s not possible nor healthy for this to be so. (see the TV show Hoarders) Still, it’s a good reminder that as much care as we give to our newly obtained stuff, we should reserve some of that deepest care and concern and reverence, for the most precious “stuff” that has been with us all along. Perhaps we must remember that as we age, we are our own primary, irreplaceable, shabby, but authentically real “velveteen rabbits” and we should treat ourselves as such – the most precious things that will be with us, throughout our entire lives.

“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby.
But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” – Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Monday – Funday

I asked my husband how he was feeling about it being Monday morning. He said that “he was channeling Jerry Maguire’s mentor.” And then he asked me, “What was that guy’s name again?” I didn’t remember. It turns out that the Jerry Maguire movie came out almost 30 years ago. (Ugh, really? Can that be true?) I looked up Jerry Maguire’s mentor clips. Jerry Maguire’s mentor was named Dicky Fox and here he is with some Monday motivation:

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Mutual Appreciation

“I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.” – Jane Goodall

What I like best about being in my 50s and being a woman, is that I feel that I have actually and finally reached that stage of true, grateful, supportive, empathetic, enthusiastic, appreciative appreciation of other women. Today, I was in the grocery store and I stopped at a sample station. The woman who gave me the sample was probably in her 60s. Yes, she had wrinkles and gray hair, but I was noticing her beautiful bone structure, and her surprisingly long eyelashes, and that knowing sparkle in her eyes that only comes from living a lot of life. We were having fun with each other, sharing pleasantries. She said to me, “You are really beautiful. You have wonderful, effervescent energy.” I replied to her that I was just noticing her own beauty. And that was absolutely true. There was no cattiness. There was no competition. There was no jealousy, nor one-upmanship. I’m not a lesbian. I don’t think that she was either. We weren’t flirting. We were just admiring each other, like one might admire an exquisite antiquity, aged well and rare and daring and real. We were valuing each other, and in doing so, we were valuing each other’s exquisite examples of femininity.

It’s sad to me that it takes being older to truly understand the amazingness of women. Men totally get it. They get it right away. That’s why so many weak men, out of fear, have tried to downplay and to harass women into submission and subligation. Men know our power and our worth and our other-worldliness more than we do. And often it takes almost a lifetime for us women (and sadly, not all of us) to finally realize it. I love that I have come to this realization, albeit later than I wish. I have come to a clear understanding that it is we women who have brought all of life that there is, on to this Earth. And that is so powerful. That is true magnificence. I love that we women have been trusted with this greatest of responsibilities by the Universe. I love how multi-faceted and complicated and ever-changing we women are, and we will ever be. We weren’t made to be simpletons. We are beautifully perplexing. I love my sisters dearly. It is now that I fully realize that it is time to help my sisters, of all ages, to love themselves, by showing my own deepest, most loving appreciation and reverence for the women whom I come in contact with, every day of my life, and also showing my own most loving, deepest appreciation and reverence for myself, as I go through my daily life. It is time for me to let my sisters know that I “see” them and to allow myself to also be vulnerably “seen” by them. What could be more powerful?

Sisters, I love you. Sisters, I see you. Sisters, rise in your power and in your beauty and in your strength. Sisters, the world needs us like never before. Let us hold hands and let us be the conduit of the power that is life, that is love, that is truth, that is meaning, that is eternity. We were made to carry it all.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Farewell

Yesterday we gave our Ethan Allen dining room set to a worthwhile charity. Next week, my husband and I will be married for 31 years. We bought that dining set a few years into our marriage. It was one of our first “major, significant” purchases of our marriage. And honestly, this set signified so much more than just a table and chairs and a place to eat. It was paid for by one of my husband’s first bonuses from work and it cost almost the entire bonus. It was one of those moments that I knew that my husband’s chips were all in, on me and our children. We were “it” for him.

We took our dining room set to four different houses, in three different states. We hosted on it, countless Christmas dinners and Thanksgiving dinners and other various celebrations along the way. Although the set was made of top quality solid wood and we were generally careful with it, like us, it was definitely showing its age. It had a fair number of scratches (and I could have named most of their occurrences) and as the kids grew up and out, it became more of a “catch all” than any part of a fine dining experience. In our current house, the dining room is a 12 foot square, and so the long rectangular shape of the table, always felt somewhat teetering on its edge, when all of its leaves were in it. (Sometimes, I would worriedly envision the Thanksgiving Dinner plunging to its untimely demise, since our dining room is two steps up from the main floor) And while the dining table was a simple, traditional style, it wasn’t old enough to be considered “mid-century” style. In short, it was hopelessly out of place and outdated.

And so yesterday, we gave away our Ethan Allen dining room set to a worthwhile charity. And today I am reflecting on what it represented to me: love, generosity, quality, celebration, abundance, memories, solidity, constancy, reliability, artistry and craft. Despite contrary belief, sometimes it is the “things” that point you to what matters. If life is nothing else, it is a nuance.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Empty to Full

Empty nest is often portrayed as a grieving process. Empty nest is often a time that one is expected to feel a little lost and afloat at sea. Even the thought of an actual empty nest is such a sad, mental picture – a lifeless little blob of browning grass, slowly turning to dust. But my experience with empty nest (and what I am witnessing my friends’ experiencing) is while definitely being a time of transition and of BIG feelings, entering into the empty nest is anything but lifeless and empty. Empty nest is a time of refilling the empty spots with the rediscovery of yourself and the latent interests that you had long buried. Empty nest is a time of celebrating the family which you created, and successfully delivered to the starting line of their own adult lives, by leaving behind all of the daily duties and worries and time juggling that raising a family entails. Empty nest is the end of a lot of the “make do”. When we are raising our families, we parents often “make do”. Our priorities are our children’s needs. We live in neighborhoods close to good schools, sports facilities and other families. We buy enormous family cars, (which quickly fill with random petrified French fries, food wrappers and stinky cleats) and these battered tanks of cars, often go in opposite directions on the weekends, as we move our broods around to their events and birthday parties and games. We take “family vacations”, with the idea of getting away, but still being able to keep the kids entertained and on a reasonable sleep/food schedule. We typically spend any leftover money (ha!) on ourselves, only after we are sure that our children have all of their needs met. We try to sneak little bits of time for ourselves, only after we have supported everyone else’s needs and activities. And we don’t regret doing any and all of this. Our families are the greatest loves of our lives. Our families are our most enduring creations. Our families are our hearts and our stories, walking around on legs.

My husband and I spent this past weekend with our youngest son and his girlfriend. A couple of weekends ago, we spent the weekend with our middle son. A month ago we hung around NYC with our eldest and his fiancée, after having spent a fun week with our daughter. When you are raising four kids, one-on-one time with any of them is a rarity. You do your best, but time and space is a commodity in a big family. One of the biggest joys I have experienced as an empty nester is getting to experience more focused one-on-one time with each of our children. Getting to know our children better as individuals, instead of just a part of the blob of “the kids”, has been one of my biggest surprise blessings of the empty nest. And of course, getting them all together at times like the holidays, or witnessing our children getting together with each other, makes my heart glow with comfort that they will always have each other to lean on, even when my husband and I are long gone. Remnants of “our family” will always remain in family lore, which I hope will go on and on for generations.

Currently, our kitchen remodel is getting close to being finished. Our home is being transitioned from “make do” to “make a wish come true.” When we bought our home, we were renting it first. It needed a lot of work, but it was big enough and it was in the right zip code, for the right schools. We eventually decided to buy it, mostly so we didn’t have to move again. We filled our home with a hodgepodge of “make do” furniture that we collected along the way of living in three different states. Our home is filled with furniture that shows the wear and tear of teenage boys and their sweaty friends, making good use of it, always with a couple of dogs trying to get in on the action. (with dogs, it’s always “the smellier the better”) I recently tried to donate a couple of our old leather couches to a thrift store. They didn’t want them. Sigh.

Our home always felt “temporary” to me. We moved a few times when the kids were young, so it occurred to me that we may easily move again. We rented our home first. And truthfully, despite its lovely views of a teeming nature preserve, I never felt like I gave my heart fully to our house. In my mind, our home was a “stop gap” until we got the kids all launched. But then suddenly, the kids were launching like rockets. They were plunging off the diving board towards the pool of their own lives, in rapid succession. In the last few years, my husband and I have had to have real conversations, about our own real next steps. And this felt awkward. When you have lived “the family formula” since 1996, it’s hard to fathom coming to the end of the formula. It’s hard to start a new equation that seems simple, 1 + 1 = 2, but is really filled with so many more possibilities than we were ever afforded before (it’s so overwhelming that sometimes the formula seems more like 1 + 1 = infinity). And yet, we eventually came to the conclusion that we weren’t ready to sell our home. We were just ready to give it a refresh and a makeover. We decided to take our home along on the journey, of our own transition into this new stage in life.

When something is empty, it is natural to want to fill it. Empty to full to empty to full to empty to full, is just another cycle of the endless cycles which we experience in life. We experience the mixed feelings of loneliness, quietness, peacefulness, simplicity, that empty brings, and we start filling it again, until the fullness feels too brimming, too cluttered, too overwhelming, too claustrophobic, and so we start the process of emptying again, so we have some space to fill our lives with something new. And this process comes with a lot of feels. It comes with a lot of conflicting feels. As you age, you better understand that “happy/sad” is a real feeling. In fact, in life, “happy/sad” is often the prevailing feeling as you go through the many cycles of filling up the empty spots, and emptying out what is no longer needed. And no matter where you are in the empty/full cycle, you realize that there is always room for feelings. In fact, it is these feelings that are the true guides to the next steps you are meant to take in this journey of the cycles of your life.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Monday’s Musings

+ “An important fact of life is that it’s often difficult to know what will make you happy, but quite easy to identify what will make you miserable.” – Morgan Housel

I took this quote from an excellent article (excerpt from a book) which I read this morning. The article is so good, I sent it unsolicited to my four adult children this morning. The quote is from Morgan Housel’s latest book, The Art of Spending Money. These are listed as the key takeaways of the article:


“Happiness in life can be elusive, but misery often follows clear patterns. 
Chasing status, wealth, or others’ approval with your money almost always undermines independence and contentment. 
Treating money as your identity or a social scorecard also leads to regret, while using it as a tool to create freedom has the opposite effect.”

The author argues that it is much easier to eliminate what is bad for you, or what makes you sick, or what is unhealthy for you (i.e. certain toxic relationships, your detrimental habits, what you eat and drink and consume, etc.) than to come up with a perfect formula of what to do in your every day that will make you happy. In other words, happiness can sometimes more easily come from a process of elimination. See the entire article here (it is well worth the read):

https://bigthink.com/books/how-to-spend-your-money-to-be-miserable/?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email&utm_placement=newsletter&user_id=66c4c2a3600ae15075906bd3

****On an aside, I am a huge proponent of gratitude lists. I do believe that basking in gratitude on a daily basis, is one of the best vehicles to take you towards what makes you happy and peaceful and contented and filled with awe.

+ Like so many people, my breath was taken away a little bit when I heard that the actress Diane Keaton had passed. She was so unique and iconic and it wasn’t a forced, rehearsed pretense to be so. Diane Keaton was just one of those rare birds, who was absolutely authentic, comfortable in her own skin, and true to herself (Brian Philips of The Ringer called her “effortlessly original“) and we all recognized and resonated with that fact. As Ingrid Bergman said, “The world worships an original.” In Diane Keaton’s own words:

“Memories are simply moments that refuse to be ordinary.”

“What is perfection, anyway? It’s the death of creativity, that’s what I think, while change on the other hand, is the cornerstone of new ideas. God knows I want new ideas and new experiences.”

“I never understood the idea that you’re supposed to mellow as you get older. Slowing down isn’t something I relate to at all. The goal is to continue in good and bad, all of it. To continue to express myself, particularly. To feel the world. To explore. To be with people. To take things far. To risk. To love. I just want to know more and see more.”

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Erase, Repeat, Deny

One of my least favorite things in life is just “sweeping everything under the rug.” People love to say, almost righteously in their “kindness”: “I just hate confrontation.” And I think to myself, “Of course you hate confrontation. Almost every healthy person whom I know, with any level of kindness and empathy, hates confrontation. Nobody likes confrontation. It’s uncomfortable. It sparks defensiveness. It’s painful to think someone finds something that’s going on is ‘less than perfect.’ It rouses our own meanest inner critic and insecurities.” But here’s the rub, the relationship starts breaking down, as people try to walk on eggshells, on a bumpy rug, covering a floor of unhealed resentments. When we don’t address situations, the relationship starts being based on our own one-sided idea and thoughts of what is going on, without any earnest communication about what the other person is feeling and thinking. And in the worst situations, toxic controllers use this very human “I just hate confrontation” against us. They can keep the “erase/repeat/deny” cycle going, because we have shown that we are continually willing to just throw things under the rug, again and again.

Now one of my other least favorite things in life is pettiness. If we hold on to every little aggravation and every little annoyance and we make everyone around us miserable and we make their behavior accountable for our own happiness, that just turns us into being one of the toxic controllers. It is best to confront the truly unacceptable things that happen in a relationship or in a situation (the things that if we are honest with ourselves, we know will definitely turn into major bumps under the rug). The other minor things are our own responsibility to work through and to let go. (It’s often occurred to me that all of us would like to have magic wands to turn everyone in our lives into exactly whom we want them to be, without realizing that they too, want to use their own magic wands on us!) It’s not an easy dance. However, if we value truly authentic, real relationships, then healthy, compassionate confrontation is the only way to go. Otherwise, the monsters who have been swept under the rug will have nowhere else to go, and so they will eventually come out with great, indomitable force. And sometimes, these monster resentments have grown so large and so angry and so full of indignation and emotion, that they can cause a final rupture that is irreparable. And these terrible kinds of ruptures make a normal, healthy confrontation look like a sweet little kitten. These ruptures are hurricanes, in comparison to a small storm of confrontation that will pass on by, without any real damage, once it is cleared.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

A Fire is a Fire

I just recently had to have a complicated root canal that involved several dental visits and two hardcore antibiotics. So when I mentioned to my husband that I was now feeling soreness on my bottom left line of molars, he said to me, “Don’t wait until a 5 alarm fire to make the appointment. A fire is a fire, but smaller fires are easier to put out.”

I like to think of myself as the wise, deep thinker of our relationship, but the facts are, my husband is every bit as wise and deep as I am, probably more so. (he just doesn’t pontificate as much as I do) And this fire analogy is one that certainly deserves to be in this thought museum that we call Adulting – Second Half.

We do this to ourselves all of the time, don’t we? (at least I do) We often, deep down know that things are beginning to smolder somewhere – in our bodies, in our relationships, in our homes, in our jobs, in our daily habits, in our finances, etc. but we don’t really want to deal with the little fires. They are annoying. They’re not that big of a deal. Anyway, we don’t have time (nor desire) to deal with them right now. We think that if we just ignore these little bothers and issues, they might just disappear.

When raising my kids and something relatively minor happened with one of them, say a parking ticket, or a bad grade, or sleeping in late, etc., I would always admonish them to take the lesson early. There are small consequences for small mistakes, but if you don’t learn the lesson, the Universe is sure to send you a bigger version of the teaching, until you finally learn the lesson and change direction. I would say, “Consider yourself lucky that the Universe usually sends small hints and experiences to learn from, unless you don’t heed the lesson and you are finally hit over the head with a big ol’ hammer of a lesson for not heeding the breadcrumbs which were being sent to you, all along the way.”

So I heeded my husband’s good reminder about degrees of fires, and I went back to my dentist yesterday. “You again?” the entire office staff teased me, with mixed looks of pity, concern, and empathy. I sat down (once again) in my dentist’s chair and I told him what my husband said about fires. “Well, let’s take a look,” he said kindly. And what the x-ray showed was not decay. My teeth were all healthy. It appeared that my back molars were sore because my bite was “off” from my recently replaced crown. He shaved down a little bit of my back molar, charged me nothing to do it, and sent me on my way – happy, relieved and smiling. Another fire put out!

And now on to a plumbing issue, although this one doesn’t really fit the fire analogy quite as well . . . .

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.