An online journal for women engaging the third third of their lives.
Perspectives: If The Third Third is an Age of Adjustment(s), how can we ease the transition and invest this newly defined developmental stage of our lives with meaning and purpose? Contributors share their Perspectives in stories, columns, articles, and other tomes about all the choices that matter to us: faith, health, relationships, work, retirement, finances, lifestyle, and current events.
Grandma Love
To be a grandparent is to enter into a netherworld of new, heretofore unexperienced emotions -- especially love. Not that we don’t know the deep abiding love of spouse. Nor that we haven’t realized the unconditional love we have for our own children. Nor that we haven’t l...
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RELATIONSHIPS | 17 Views | 0 Comments
From the mountaintop
I have spent the last five days “Out West,” quite literally in the middle of nowhere, (or at least as out of touch as to be beyond all AT&T cell phone and 3-G reception). There I have spent hours in awe of the natural splendors our earth has given ri...
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SPIRITUALITY | 18 Views | 0 Comments
You Can't Please Daddy
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What is it about selling my father’s house that prompted a full-scale emotional meltdown on my part?
It stuns me, it really does, to think that I have arrived in the third third of my l...
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AGING PARENTS | 25 Views | 0 Comments
Alma Mater
When I was a student in the late 60’s, my alma mater, Wellesley College, adhered to the legal theory, in loco parentis. The administration decreed it was acting “in place of” our parents, dictating when we could go out, and for how long, and establishing consequences should w...
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LIFESTYLE | 60 Views | 0 Comments
No Time to Write
It’s getting increasingly difficult to find the time to write about The Third Third, the more I live into its issues.
It takes a pretty big chunk of time to attend to the parent we moved to town, for example. Don’t get me wrong, I am very grateful he is here....
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LIFESTYLE | 44 Views | 0 Comments
Truth or Consequences
When I was a child, the word “parent” was a noun, and not a verb.
I was trained and disciplined, fed, clothed, educated, loved, criticized, corrected, reprimanded, and, upon occasion, punished. I was not parented. My parents knew of Dr. Spock, but not of Brazelton, Piaget, ...
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AGING PARENTS | 91 Views | 2 Comments
Letting go of my Father
When things are “not quite right” (as Miss Clavell says as she turns out the light in Ludwig Bemelmans’, delightful children’s tale, Madeline), I tend, like many of my friends, to start reading anything I can about the subject at hand.
I want to know and understand, as if ...
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AGING PARENTS | 73 Views | 0 Comments
Stuck in Neutral?
Somewhere in the transition from a Sunday Styles Page Two column on one topic which I thought was hot gay men on the town (or was it the one that chronicled the family relationships of an insightful, sensitive working mom?)-- I’m sorry, I should know, but I don’t -- anyway, sometime in t...
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RETIREMENT | 60 Views | 0 Comments
Abuse in the Church of the Faith and the Faithful
Life changes when the doctor says you can’t drive for two weeks. The pace, your priorities, the way you spend your time. A husband learns to use the post office and the debit card. You learn (or I am learning) how to wrestle with Quiet.
In Quiet, Input begins to over...
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SPIRITUALITY | 81 Views | 0 Comments
That Hope-y Change-y Thing
Sarah Palin’s recent derision of “that hope-y change-y thing” may be a slam-dunk politically. But in religious terms, coming from the devout Christian she claims to be, it is a puzzling disavowal. After all, next to “Love,” “Hope” and “Change&rdq...
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SPIRITUALITY | 157 Views | 0 Comments
Olympics of the Mind
We are a competitive sort, we baby boomers.
And it appears we have found our next arena.
In an ongoing effort to stave off dementia, Alzheimer’s, and even the benign-but-prejudice-causing vicissitudes of aging, we are intent on keeping our minds active and engaged.Equipped with studies...
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LIFESTYLE | 109 Views | 0 Comments
Who are you going to call when you start to fall apart?
I have come face-to-face with my mortality in recent days – or, at the least, with some of the vicissitudes of aging – and it is not a pretty picture.
Indeed, “picture” is the right word. It is the images that I find so jarring – depressing, actually -- as if they ar...
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HEALTH | 134 Views | 0 Comments
A Battle for the Ages
I have always believed that a significant portion of the newly-aging 60-somethings (formerly known as baby-boomers) felt called upon to –finally – make a real difference in the world in this third third of their lives.
I have read tomes, in fact, that suggest in the strongest of all ...
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CURRENT | 138 Views | 0 Comments
The New Normal
The New Normal.
Isn’t there a line in the musical Hair that eschews “Normal” for children of the sixties for all time? (Something like “Please, God, Please, Don’t let me be Normal!”)
So, if we never truly mastered the “old” Normal, what bothe...
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FINANCE | 127 Views | 0 Comments
It's Very Complicated
Some of what I read about the new movie “It’s Complicated” and its Hollywood woman-of-the-hour, writer-director-producer Nancy Meyers, made me embarrassed to want to see it. I was reminded of the quiet scorn I once received from a college president about to leave on sabbatica...
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CURRENT | 138 Views | 0 Comments
The Retirement Journal
Retirement: Week One
It is not that I had not given a lot of thought to my husband’s Retirement from the practice of law after 37 years. He has been talking about it for about two years. It’s not even that I had not laid down a few rules and worked toward...
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RETIREMENT | 144 Views | 0 Comments
Good Job, Dad!
Last year about this time, my grown children elicited a promise from me that I would never again post any writings about them without their permission. The word in play at the time was “betrayal,” and they were right.
I’ve kept my word (sort of like Mary...
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RETIREMENT | 142 Views | 0 Comments
Thank You, Church Ladies!
The last time I felt I had a role model worth looking up to, I was a sophomore in high school. I remember watching a senior girl and thinking “I could be like that,” and that it would be a good thing.
But when I looked around after high school, the journey to adultho...
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SPIRITUALITY | 146 Views | 0 Comments
All Wrapped Up
I love the holidays.
Go ahead – say it – Bah! Or Humbug! You can’t snuff my spirit.
I love the holidays. And I even like them when they no longer turn out exactly as I might have planned. (Did they ever?) I’m getting used to them co...
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CURRENT | 157 Views | 0 Comments
Retirement Daze
DAY ONE
On a bad day – and there are some – Retirement feels like a chronic disease my husband has given me by leaving work at age 61. A chronic disease to which one must adjust and adapt, with symptoms that require changes in lifestyle and, perhaps, diet. A ch...
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RETIREMENT | 186 Views | 0 Comments
Use your IRA to buy a Vacation Rental for investment, income and personal use.
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