Indeed, some of us do have natural gray hair (although most of us need that monthly touch-up of auburn or blonde), some of us wear Juicy Couture, some of us refuse to be called grandma (and definitely not granny), and some of us redo our entire house as a playroom, including a trampoline and several king-sized beds lined up! And many of us keep close through video chats instead of weekly visits complete with chocolate chip cookies. We were, many of us, the Supermoms of our generation — and the Ubermoms. In our time, we were at the top of our games, raising kids, feeding kids, shopping, balancing our mothering with full-time careers as lawyers, accountants, teachers, even diplomats — and yet our lives were expanded by those soccer games, dance classes, and homework.

So it’s no surprise that lots of us have just slipped right into being Ubergrandmas. We help raise the grandkids, we shop for the grandkids, we go to their dance recitals and their soccer games, some of us even fly weekly from state to state to be there for our own Ubermom daughters and daughters-in-law… and, at the same time, have jobs. One grandma I know appears regularly in TV commercials and takes parts in movies. We are even now taking care of our own elderly parents, the great-grandparents. We embrace the challenge. We weren’t stay-at-home mamas and we are not stay-at-home grandmas now.

Of course, lots of grandmas are happy to be stay-at-home grandmas. But we’re hardly “The Goodnight Moon” grandma, with all her white hair tucked into a bun. (That truly confuses my granddaughter.) And we’re not like Grandma Rose either — we wear Spanx and not corsets. And while some grandmas continue to make chicken noodle soup, many prefer tofu burgers. So while today “grandmotherness” can be “grand-otherness,” we all give love and give ourselves.

It’s a small world after all.

Read more at MomLogic.com

Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

Those who’ve never married. Those who’ve never had children. Those whose spouses are gone because of death or divorce. Those who may not even have siblings they can rely on in old age.

Click here to read the whole story.

Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

If you’re an empty nester now, you’ll appreciate this! The home of Prudence Baird, a contributor to the Blogazine, “From Fifty is the New…

I stand just inside the front door, unable to move. Unwilling to hang up my keys. Incapable of addressing this morning’s breakfast dishes, still in the sink.

I am paralyzed by the sudden realization that all too soon there will be no more first days of school. No more carpools to drive, after-school games to attend or fundraisers to plan. In that not-too-distant future, what will autumn be like without the noise, commotion and companionship children bring to a home, to a life—to my life?

My eardrums ache, searching to pick up even the faintest of noises. In the distance, I hear my neighbor’s chainsaw cutting wood for the winter. Upstairs, a gentle snore tells me the cat is curled up in a warm shaft of morning sun.

As my ears adjust to the heaviness of this newly hatched solitude, I realize that the sounds I’m hearing, and those that are absent, are an auditory foreshadowing of life after and beyond school-aged children.

Ethan, 15, is already preparing us for the inevitable separation by spending most of his days and evenings at school or out with friends. But my youngest, Casey, is still very much at home.

At 13 years, with his 85 pounds stretched over a 5’3” frame, Casey is thin and taut like an old-fashioned car antennae. And like that obsolete car part, he picks up signals the rest of us cannot receive. He broadcasts these in an ongoing stream-of-consciousness that morphs into a (mostly) one-way conversation; his volume stuck on “loud” – the only variation being “really loud.”

If Casey is in the house, you feel his presence the way you feel electricity building before a thunderstorm. Intervals of stillness are punctuated by the scritch-scratching of his colored pencils as he draws. Paper rustles; the pencil-sharpener grinds. Soon, his pregnant hush gives birth to another singular portrait and a verbal onslaught of insights and endless inquiry.

“Who is this?” he demands, sticking an 8 ½ x 11-inch piece of paper five inches from my nose.

“Hmmm,” is my customary response as I back away to gain perspective. “Ho Chi Minh?” I venture.

“How did you know?!” Casey cries, delighted.

“It looks like him.”

“How? How does it look like him?”

And thus begins another lesson in the ancient art of physiognomy, or “face reading”… something children like my son are supposed to be unable to do. Like a cat that senses he’s not supposed to trespass on certain laps, however, Casey ventures there anyway, attempting to capture with his portraits the very essence that drives unique individuals who push society forward, haul civilization backwards, or simply create a wake with their unkempt or munificent lives. Samuel Johnson, Spinoza, Gandhi, James Brown – no one escapes his scrutiny.

He forces my somnambulant brain to awaken, to dust off forgotten lessons in history, geography, cultural trivia. He makes connections, hauls me along untrodden pathways, bumping into long-forgotten factoids or stumbling over new information. The impact of war, greed, poverty, and education on a person are examined and parsed; all part of a borderless jigsaw puzzle Casey has constructed, starting point unknown.

“Who was the president of South Viet Nam?” Casey demands.

I’m stumped.

“It’s Ngo Dinh Diem!” he crows.

Eventually, I deduce that Casey’s Vietnam War obsession began with an overheard comment on NPR days ago.

Figuring out Casey’s inspirations is a Sherlock Holmesian exercise; I congratulate myself on solving the mystery. Casey, however, has moved on to another portrait, another obsession. The pencil scratches furiously.

Now, with the boys back in school, I have a whole six hours to myself every day, five days a week – plenty of time to catch up on just about everything I ignored all summer.

But instead of feeling relieved, free of Casey’s strenuous curiosity, I feel adrift in a fitful silence.

Somewhere, I wonder, is he asking someone else, “How? How does it look like him?”

Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

Wishing I were Marlo Thomas or Mary Tyler Moore, I took to wearing a cheap dynel “fall”, a wig that fell straight to my shoulders from a black velvet headband, curling at the ends into a neat flip. Purchased with a postdated check, without my mother’s permission, I snuck it out of the house every morning in a brown paper bag, furtively bobby-pinning it to my scalp in the school bathroom.

Flinging the shiny strands of fake hair from my shoulders and puffing with mannered gestures on my cigarettes, I sat long hours at the donut shop with my friends from the Drama Club, bragging that someday I was getting out of this town, I was going to Broadway and hitting it big. I drank innumerable cups of coffee, extra light with two packs of sugar, and wrote Rod McKuen rip-off poetry on paper napkins.

Out of the corner
of my eye
i see myself
in that dark corner
huddled all curled up afraid
of all the people and the light

but when i turn to face myself
my image disappears
and i stand looking
into empty corners
all the time …

The postdated check cleared the bank prior to the automatic deposit from my part-time job at Woolco. When the check bounced, the bank phoned my mother. I found this out after I was yanked out of history class and hauled down to the nurse’s office to take my mother’s call. My heart pounded and my hand went clammy on the receiver as I said hello. Having been told only that it was an emergency, I expected to hear that Pam had been rushed to the hospital. Instead my mother began to rant that young women who bounced checks to purchase forbidden hairpieces were headed for a life of crime. I gritted my teeth. She had a good mind to call the police, she said, and send them right over to arrest me. My eyes turned hot and wet.

“Is there anything wrong?” asked the nurse when I hung up.

“It’s my sister,” I lied.

“Oh dear. I hope she’ll be all right.”

By the time I got home from school a modicum of reason had prevailed, and my parents settled for house arrest. My reaction was by now, standard.

“I HATE you,” I screamed, blasting up the stairs to my room in tears, slamming the door in my usual fashion, this time so hard it blew through the frame and stuck so that I couldn’t get back out.

“Good,” said my father, surveying the damage from the other side of the door, “you can stay in there ‘til you’ve had a chance to think things through.”

My sister understood better than anyone what had happened and why, and it was she who rescued me, prying the door open with a screwdriver.

“I don’t know why you bought that stupid wig in the first place.”

“Because, I’m ugly.”

“No you’re not,” she said. “You just think you are.”

Available at Amazon: Sixtyfive Roses: A Sister’s Memoir

Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

9. Set the kid’s computer so all the bookmarked porn and poker sites go to GoArmy.com.

8. Invite your friends over to have a party in your child’s room. Trash it and smoke all of the dope.

7. Buy a chauffeur’s hat and start calling your child “Jeeves.”

6. Hack into the kid’s My Space page and change the profile picture to a slug.

5. Say, “I’m glad to have you home but I’m afraid Dad might miss using your bed for ‘our quickies’.”

4. Throw a bridal shower for your child’s high school flame on Super Bowl Sunday.

3. Decorate the room as a nursery and say, “Won’t it be great to share your room with your new baby sister?”

2. Secretly sprinkle all the leftovers with Metamucil.

1. Ask your kid to stay home one evening and say, “Dad’s been awfully frisky lately and I’m worried about his heart. You don’t mind listening in on the old baby monitor, do you?”

Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

I’m an advice column junkie. I can’t help it. I kick off my morning with a frothy soy latte, my “Crack”berry and a heavy dose of the “Dear crew.”

When I’m lucky, I can persuade my husband David to play along with a game of “What would Dear Abby do?” If he’s is in a particularly sporting mood, we can delve far beneath the layers of the written word. What if the husband, “Chip,” is really in need of Viagra, and is not, in fact, having an affair as “Horny in Hoboken” thinks? What if the meddling mother-in-law, “Madge,” has a point — maybe “Good Mommy in Leavenworth” is, indeed, a bad mommy. Normally, I can convince myself that it is a game of good clean fun. The anonymity of Chip, Madge, and Horny are fascinating and comforting — obviously, these semi-fictitious characters have problems too.

But today’s column is just plain disturbing. And any baby boomer might have written it. It involves a mother who is a newly retired homeowner with an outstanding mortgage. Unless she is the CEO of a major publicly traded corporation, this lady is on a whopper of a fixed income. Now get this: she has two butthole sons, aged 22 and 24, living in her home and she has asked them to pitch in and pay $30 a week. “Stressed-Out Mom” says they are now “ranting and raving and calling her a bad mother.” She goes on to ask if she is being unreasonable. What?!?

Kick those pot-smoking, Cartoon Network-watching little punks out of your house! How can you even ask if you are being unreasonable? It’s time for you to grow some balls and live the life that you have worked your butt off for. They are friggin’ able-bodied men who are completely taking advantage of your enabling ways. Are you going to raise their kids, too? Because sooner or later, one of them will actually get a date with a loser girl who doesn’t care that she’s seeing a guy who lives with his mommy. Then you are going to have quite the zoo on your hands.

I’m sick and tired of hearing about Boomerang ‘Kids’ and how hard it is for them to make it on their own in the big, bad world. Granted, our generation tended to be more involved with our children’s education, nurtured their every talent, made sure they were safe from balloon-related latex allergies … but the helicoptering MUST stop at some point. The longer we wait, the bigger and badder the world will seem to our offspring.

“Stressed-Out” should have started her sons along a different path a long time ago. Isn’t part of the job to teach your kids to care for themselves? I didn’t raise my son and daughters to be good kids, I raised them to be real adults. That means once they are of age, they are on their own. They began hearing about this early and often. As they headed off to college, they didn’t expect to hear, “Honey, come back any time things get hard.” “Watch out for the screen door” was a bit closer to the mark. They know I love them. Enough to want them to have lives they are proud of. That’s not going to happen in my basement.

Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

’s book, “Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found.” Brenner has written investigative articles for “Vanity Fair,” but she told the magazine that turning out this personal memoir was “the hardest writing assignment I have ever undertaken.” It’s about combative siblings who finally face their differences. BoomerCafé is pleased to publish this excerpt.

We fight at the dinner table.

Stay away from my apple farms, my brother Carl says.

And stay away from the Cascades.

You don’t know anything about apples.

It is a tone that I know well. The mixture of hate and love, rage and need, all scrambled together.

It is not easy for him to breathe. His girlfriend, Frika, is by his side, acting as if everything is as it always has been, as if nothing in the world is the matter. She is oh-so-British, drops her voice at the end of questions, takes on like the queen. She pulls me aside in the kitchen and says, “He is the love of my life and always has been. We have never been happier.” Her cheeks flush like a debutante’s.
 

Her black lace nightgown hangs on a hook in his bathroom. At night, they stay up late and listen to Parsifal, Wagner’s dark score of the holy fool. Her eyes gleam with pools of longing. She looks at him as if he is Devonshire cream. At the dinner table, she hums a few stanzas from Das Rheingold. “Fricka’s theme!” she says. Her expression says it: Top that.

He eats two helpings of filet, then asks for a second dessert.

Tarte tatin.

Made by the other girlfriend, who was at his house for lunch.

“Heather sure knows how to cook,” he says.

A shadow passes over Frika’s face.

At lunch, Heather demonstrated her pastry-cutting technique. “I always put a crimped leaf on the top for Carl,” she said.

“He is the love of my life,” she said.

There are always apples around him. Women, too. Apple pie. Big, chic antique bowls of wooden apples in all colors: red and gold and striped. Apple ceramics, apple pencils, apple photos. Produce labels framed on the library wall: Gulf Brand Texas Vegetables from the Rio Grande Valley, Empire Builder, Wenatchee District Red Seal Brand. I am an American first, then a Texan, he would say, not understanding he sounded like Augie March. The clues are there, in the grad school classic Augie March, I later realize. “A man’s character is his fate,” Saul Bellow wrote, quoting Heraclitus.

You always have to show off and tell us what you know, Carl said.

“I’ll be in Washington next week,” I say. “I have an interview. I have to close a piece.”

“You promised me,” he says. “You said you would stay away from Washington State. You sat right here and said that you would not go to the Cascades.”

He yells as loudly as I have ever heard him.

“Washington, D.C.,” I shout back.

I have the trait as well.

He glares. I glare. In that glare is the jolt of our connection, the fierceness of our attachment. We stare at each other hard.

“I don’t know what you are so angry about,” he says.

The next morning, he is at his desk when I say good-bye. It’s a bright Texas morning. March 29, 2003. The San Antonio Express-News had a headline the day before: “Deployment. Fort Hood’s 4th Infantry Division Moves Out.” The country is now at war and we are in San Antonio, a city of military bases. Starbucks on Broadway is filled with young army officers from Fort Sam Houston. They wear camouflage clothes and are on their way to Baghdad. “Macchiato skim,” one says.

Fort Sam Houston, the country club of the army, borders the lush suburb of Alamo Heights. It’s an oasis of privilege with a Texas zip code that is used conversationally—“09,” for 78209, the demographic of debutantes and ranch kings, fiesta princesses, new-money Latinos and WASP bankers with Roman numerals after their names, some of which date back to the Battle of the Alamo.

“What do you think of the war?” I ask a woman I went to high school with. “I don’t watch anything depressing,” she says. “I know y’all are concerned about 9/11, but we feel so safe down here.”

Starbucks had a swarm of kids leaving for Iraq, I say when I walk up the stairs of Carl’s house. He has a shredder next to him, and at the moment I arrive, he is filling it with orchard reports, glossy brochures for Procure Fertilizers, invitations for dinners at the McNay Art Museum. I think nothing of this. He is a neat freak who shreds everything that crosses his desk. He has always lined up his pencils and sharpened them just so.

On the wall where he works is a large map of South Africa in the Boer years, framed in antique gold, and several pictures of our grandfather, Isidor, a man of committees and awards, donating his specimen camellia bushes to a worthy cause. It is a mystery to me why Carl has kept a shrine to a relative he did not know. He looks out of large windows with window seats to neat stone houses of 78209 and bright lawns with a sea of bluebonnets in the grass. You know it’s March in Texas when you take to the hill country and see an unending blue mist covering the fields.

Carl’s bloodwork is coming through the fax. He stares at the numbers. He is now a student of the CRP test, which measures inflammation and must read 3 or less; the CEA; the glutathione test, which is a barometer of the liver; a new one, the CA 19-9, with its Geiger counter to monitor the pancreas; the prothrombin, which tells you about clotting; the remnant lipo test, IDL plus VLDL3.

My CEA is going nuts, he says.

It is just a number, I reply too quickly. These numbers go up and down. You know that.

He’s working with an assistant, a woman I have met through someone at the gym. I pretend, just like Frika, that everything is as it always has been. That I can escape. That my brother is normal. That this time in his life is just a challenge, a euphemism I use all the time. That his condition is “chronic.” Something to be handled. Another euphemism. I am going back to my home in New York City. Just six hours away, I tell myself. We have blown past whatever went on the night before. We always do. Anger is our Prozac. I am trying to train myself to say: I love it when you’re angry! You sound like you did when you were fourteen! Or: Here you go again! That wonderful juicy aliveness! Rage! Instead, I yell back and get stuck in a whirl of fury—what the Buddhists call samsara—the endless repetition of a treadmill, the prison I am in.

You have the best doctors in the country.

I know, he says.

This is manageable, I say.

I love you more than anyone, I say. You are my brother. We are Brenners. Team Carl.

There is no epiphany. There are no final words.

“Don’t leave me,” he says. Tears run down his cheeks. “I am sorry for everything.”

“I will be back in four days,” I say. “Nothing bad is going to happen. There is nothing to worry about.”

“No one ever tells you the truth,” Carl says.

He fills jumbo lawn-and-leaf Hefty bags with files. “House-cleaning,” he says. A copy of the New Testament is on his desk. I see a box marked “Orchard.”

“Father Jesus,” he now says before every meal, “we pray for our troops in Iraq.”

I have a list in the car. Last-minute sources to double-check: Queries from Mary Flynn, the chief of research for the magazine at which I work. Phone calls I must make to Paris in the next twenty-four hours. Phrases to double-check and translate for the text: My notes on a legal pad—“On piege les mecs: Is this the idiom for ‘one sets a trap’?” A review of a Leonardo da Vinci show of drawings at the Met, from The New York Review of Books. I have circled the word “sfumato.” Later, I search it on Wikipedia.

“Sfumato is the Italian term for a painting technique which overlays translucent layers of colour to create perceptions of depth, volume and form. In particular, it refers to the blending of colours or tones so subtly that there is no perceptible transition.”

In Italian, sfumato means “vanished,” with connotations of “smoky,” and is derived from the Italian word fumo, meaning “smoke.” Leonardo described “sfumato” as “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane.”

I always tell everything I know.

Why are you always interrupting? Carl always says.

I regret everything.

If Carl could speak, what would he say?

Excerpted from “Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found” by Marie Brenner. Copyright © 2008 by Marie Brenner. Published in May 2008 by Sarah Crichton Books, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

One day I woke up and discovered that my flat stomach had been replaced with a tiny roll of fat.  Not to worry.  Not much, anyway.  I promised to get back into my old exercising routine.  Forty, fifty, maybe even sixty sit-ups each morning.  This was definitely something I could handle.

A few days later I rolled over and suddenly had grey hair and needed reading glasses.  Okay, still easy enough to fix.  A few phone calls, a few appointments, and I emerged into the world with blonde hair and progressive bifocals.

A few weeks after that I bolted upright in bed and realized I now had hot flashes, memory loss, and anxiety without anything specific to feel anxious about.  Hmmm.  These changes seemed a bit harder, but I told myself I could still handle it.

After all, I am a baby boomer and according to the headlines, “Baby Boomers Are Good At Everything.”

And then the alarm went off.  Loud, piercing, unavoidable.  I jumped up and stared at myself in the mirror.  Who was this woman staring back at me?

This woman with lines at the side of her mouth and eyes?  And God, it’s hard to think about— let alone say – wrinkles on her neck! 

Just yesterday I was a free-spirited college student with no one but myself to worry about and now I have a husband of thirty years, a twenty-something daughter, thirty-something stepchildren, parents in their eighties and grandchildren on both coasts of the country.  I am a bi-coastal grandma!

When had all these changes taken place?  It was like I had walked out of 1966 and into 2006 without even pausing.

Who asked Father Time to put me on this fast train to middle age?  I certainly don’t remember buying a ticket.

And that’s when I threw up my hands.  I’d had enough.  It was time to stop.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret.  Well, maybe not so little.   

You can’t stop it.  Time just keeps on truckin’ and the only thing to do is, flow with it.  The alternative isn’t much of an option.

That’s when I decided to call up my longtime friends.  Time to take some “time” for ourselves.   

When I mentioned my idea to Friend Terry, she said, “Count me in.”  In her twenties, Terry was a stay-at-home mom, closing hundreds of paper bags full of bologna sandwiches and chips.  Now at fifty-eight she’s a super real estate agent closing million dollar escrows. 

Friend Jeri’s response was, “When?” Jeri’s a retired Correctional Officer and an old hippie, who still believes everyone should get a piece of the pie even if they haven’t helped bake it.   

And Friend Joannie, a small business owner with a big heart and lots of laughter, who said she wouldn’t miss this adventure for the world.   

So what if we had cottage cheese thighs, wiry, stubborn hair, and rolls around our bellies?  The last time I checked with the Auto Club, being young and fit was not a prerequisite for a road trip.

We chose Las Vegas as our destination.  Three days on the road and we’d be there.  Just like old times. 

Now for the record, three days on the road in 2006 does not equate to three days on the road in 1966.

Back then, we packed sleeping bags and tents.  Now we pack debit cards and a “Guide To The Best Hotels on the West Coast.”

Then, we took toothbrushes and hair spray.  Now, we carry anti-aging lotions, firming fluids, and anti-wrinkle eye creams. 

Then, we talked about hot guys and college plans.  Now we talk about hot flashes and retirement plans.    

Then, we looked up at the stars, making wishes, drinking Boonesfarm Apple Wine.  Now, we sip our Ketel One martinis, realizing we are the stars.  The stars of our own lives.

As baby boomers we’ve been documented, categorized, analyzed, departmentalized, boomerized.

Baby Boomers play hopscotch and tether ball.
Baby Boomers drive faster than the speed limit.
Baby Boomers add MD’s, DDS, & PhD’s to their names.
Baby Boomers become parents.
Baby Boomers buy stock in estrogen!
Baby Boomers’ children have children.
Will Baby Boomers ever retire?
Baby Boomers learn to blog.
Oldest Living Baby Boomer Tells All.

Well, I may not be around for that story, but I have plenty of my own.  And one of the best involves those friends on that trip to Las Vegas.

We were Menopausal Maniacs on the loose.  From hotel to hotel, seeing the world through fifty-something eyes.

Watching crazy teenage girls in shorts, shorter than the miniskirts of the sixties.  Cheering them on for their gumption and spunk.  Knowing that we were once there and now it’s their turn.

Seeing the hope on the face of a twenty-something guy playing a slot machine.  Knowing that the real jackpot is in living his life, his way.   

Calling home and hearing a granddaughter say, “I love you.”  Checking in on parents who still want to know that you arrive safely at each city.

And laughing, laughing, laughing.  The three important ingredients to growing older.

How we traveled may have been different from our college days, but one thing remains the same.

Then – Great times with good friends
Now -  Great times with good friends.

As far as I’m concerned, the best years are yet to come.

Contact Janie:  janieemaus@aol.com

Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place