Adventures at Midlife

The Spouse and I will be taking a quick trip across the Channel to Normandy. (No, we’re not taking the Chunnel. It’s $600+ each just to get to Calais on the coast!) And then we’ll fly back to the U.S. for Second Son’s wedding. I’ll blog if I can find an uplink somewhere. Have a lovely weekend!

The excellent Ask Allison is featuring my blog this week on Women Bloom, her online community and resource for women in their 40s and beyond. Thanks, Allison! I have been most fortunate to fall in with a group of very supporting and colorful midlife bloggers. Keep on posting, divas!

Update: Oh, dear! It’s a real embarrassment of riches! The always-witty ByJane has included one of my posts on MidLifeBloggers as well. The stars must be in perfect alignment! Thanks, Jane!

The NYTimes recently featured a story about a new Web site for the 40+ crowd: Wowowow, a title the founders had to wrest away from a porn site.

The fare on the new PG-13 Wowowow is in some ways no different than that of other women-focused community Web sites like iVillage: horoscopes and posts about love and marriage, health and fashion. Wowowow also has political commentary, but what is particularly distinctive are the conversations, …which read like deeper and more intimate versions of the “hot topics” segment of the television gabfest “The View.”

“It was very loose and fun and intimate,” [Candace] Bergen said of participating in the discussions, which the women have practiced while the site is in beta mode. The cozy tone of the exchanges, the participants say, reflects their decades-long overlapping friendships, stretching back to the 1960s and ’70s when many were among the first women pioneering their media and entertainment fields

Candace Bergen? Oh, yeah, and Peggy Noonan, Joan Juliet Buck (one of my favorite Vogue writers), Lily Tomlin, Judith Martin (aka Miss Manners), Whoopi Goldberg and site founders Liz Smith, Lesley Stahl, Mary Wells and Joni Evans, all media titans (or titanias) and all of a certain age. Nice cast.

Wowowow’s chief appeal may be the glimpse it promises into the personal lives and beliefs of a group of businesswomen who broke through glass ceilings… “IVillage has always puzzled me,” said Ms. Buck, a contributing editor to Vogue and a consulting editor to Wowowow. “I love the idea but it’s like Macy’s or something.”

Gee, I ASPIRE to shop at Macy’s. I hope they’re not too lofty for the rest of toiling away at home, in classrooms or middle-management.

Statistics show there is a market for such a site. A comScore Media Metrix study of the growth in visitors among the top 100 United States Internet properties found that women’s community sites were, along with political sites, the top gaining Internet category last year.

Well, that’s certainly some vindication for my earlier lament over the dearth of sites. I know I’ll be logging in.

(FYI. I clipped this from another blog that I have been experimenting with, so if you find another blog with this entry, I have in essence plagiarized MYSELF.)

Homeschoolers in California will be unhappy: According an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, a “California court ruled this month that parents cannot ‘home school’ their children without government certification. No teaching credential, no teaching.” The only cheers you are hearing are from the teachers’ union.

For some parents, the motive for home schooling is religious; others want to protect their kids from gangs and drugs. But the most-cited reason is to ensure a good education. Home-schooled students are routinely high performers on standardized academic tests, beating their public school peers on average by as much as 30 percentile points, regardless of subject. They perform well on tests like the SAT — and colleges actively recruit them both for their high scores and the diversity they bring to campus.

Really? I wish my experiences with homeschoolers were more hopeful. My first brush with homeschooling came with one of my mother’s next-door neighbors. This woman gave new meaning to the term “laid back” — if there is a notch above totally comatose, that would describe her. She was very devout, in her own careless way, and claimed to be keeping her children home to school them, but neither Mother or I ever saw any evidence of it. Sure, her children — not having been exposed to the rough-and-tumble of school life — were incredibly gentle, but they were dumber than bunnies, and just wandered the streets day and night. They completely baffled my own school-age kids.

And a friend has a daughter who recently became engaged to a home-schooled young man, who is very bright but possesses some serious, well, gaps. For their honeymoon, he told her, he wanted to visit the capitals of Europe for a couple of weeks and stay in some nice resorts. “How much do think that will cost?” she asked him. “Oh, maybe, $200?” he replied. Huh? I suppose he’ll figure out the realities soon enough, but I suspect that’s not his only blind spot.

Three cheers for those out there who are homeschooling their children and who are doing a good job. After all, as the WSJ noted, “That so many families turn to home schooling is a market solution to a market failure — namely the dismal performance of the local education monopoly.” But I worry that, for every home-schooled kid who earns a college scholarship, there are several seriously emotionally and socially crippled kids out there whose parents thought they knew best, but didn’t.

A new study indicates women who are conflicted about their parents may be conflicted about their own parenting:

The study suggested that women who felt their childhood relationships with their parents were characterized by “rejection and unresolved conflicts” were likely to view children as more demanding compared to women with happier childhoods. Women with childhood conflict also may become stricter parents. Women who clashed with their parents were also more likely to indicate they would set a lot of boundaries for their children than other women in the study.

I was conflicted by my parents, particularly my mother, but I wasn’t conflicted by my sons. I found the whole motherhood responsibility rather daunting, and I was determined that my sons would not grown up always questioning themselves. I cultivated experiences for them where they could succeed, and heaped on praise on the many occasions when it was due. And, to contradict the study, I think I became a mother who wasn’t particularly strict or caught up in boundaries, and who, as a result, didn’t find her children particularly difficult.

My son’s fiance can’t believe he was never grounded. Well, he never needed to be. And they were both incredibly easy to discipline: All I had to do with the oldest was just hint that I might separate him from his friends, and he would immediately turn into a tower of Jello, and the younger one was so sensitive that just looking at him cross-eyed would make him burst into tears. Shameful.

I think the key has something to do with self-awareness. I knew precisely what kind of parent I DIDN’T want to be, and that made a lot of decisions and reactions automatic: Praise. Don’t hover. Say yes to shorts in mid-winter or blonde hairtips or last-minute sleepovers so you can say no later to something more substantial. Keep lots of Otterpops in the freezer in the garage, and don’t get mad when they disappear. Say “I’m sorry” when necessary, and mean it. Praise some more. Don’t make a big deal about minor screw-ups. Be low-key around their friends. Listen.

As they say, it isn’t brain surgery — It’s a lot more important than that.

“The Master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in everything he does, leaving others to determine whether he is at work or at play. To him, he is always doing both.”

— Zen quotation

Cool, eh? Zen and all — at least the letter-to-the-editor writer in the recent Wall Street Journal SAID it is a a Zen quote. A quick Google search, on the other hand, attributes it to American author James Michener, who probably had his Zen moments but could hardly be called a master.

Gee, I love a good quote, but I’ve been suspicious of them ever since the Desiderata hoax in the Seventies. (Why do Zen-sounding quotes always wind up being written by some guy from the Midwest?) My other favorite is the “Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate” quote that has been attributed back and forth from Marianne Williamson to Nelson Mandela so many times that I’m beginning to suspect neither one of them wrote it.