Ageless Aspirations
Practical, empowering ideas for your best years yet.
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Setting Boundaries With Adult Children Who Assume Free Childcare
After a talk I gave last spring, a woman waited until the room emptied, checked over her shoulder, and asked me this: “How do I tell my daughter I don’t want to watch the grandkids every day… without sounding like I don’t love them?” Then she immediately apologized for asking it. I’ve thought about her…
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Learning Something New at Seventy (Badly, and Loving It)
I have been learning to paint with watercolors for two years now, and I want to report my progress honestly: I am terrible. Not “modest-beginner” terrible. Terrible with tenure. My clouds look like upset sheep. My one attempt at a portrait of my grandson produced something my daughter — carefully, over the phone — called…
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Talking to Your Spouse About Money After Decades of Avoiding It
Forty years of marriage, and the two of you have discussed everything. Politics. The neighbors. Whether the casserole was better before she changed the recipe (it was, and you’ll take that to your grave). Your children’s marriages, in detail, in the car, where they can’t hear you. Everything, that is, except money. Oh, you’ve mentioned…
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When Your Grandchildren Live Far Away and Video Calls Aren’t Enough
Sunday, 4 p.m. The tablet is propped against the fruit bowl. Your grandson is six, and he is currently a blur — you’re getting the ceiling of his playroom, then a close-up of one nostril, then he’s gone entirely and you’re talking to an empty couch while somewhere off-screen he narrates a toy dinosaur fight.…
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Learning to Enjoy Your Own Company After Decades of a Full House
The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott — who spent his career watching mothers and babies — once made an observation that sounds backwards until it doesn’t: the capacity to be alone, he said, is one of the most important signs of emotional maturity. Not a misfortune to be endured. A capacity. Something you have, or build —…
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Ask Eleanor: How Do I Stop Feeling Guilty for Asking My Kids for Help?
A letter came in last week that I’ve read four times now. With permission, here it is, lightly trimmed: “Dear Eleanor — I raised three children mostly on my own. I worked two jobs for most of the eighties. I have never asked anyone for anything. Last month I needed a ride to a cataract…
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The Call I Was Too Ashamed to Make
Being fooled by a sophisticated scam says something about the con, not about your judgment. On the shame that keeps people silent after being scammed, and why telling family usually goes better than feared.
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The Empty Chairs at the Table
Friendship grief is real grief, even though our culture rarely treats it that way. On losing friends to death or illness in your sixties and seventies.
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The Ledger He Used to Keep
Not knowing the finances after losing a spouse doesn’t make you careless. What actually helps in the early months of managing money alone for the first time.
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The Name They Used to Call You
The title was never really the thing people valued in you. On retiring from a career that defined your identity, and finding where those qualities go next.