always a sensual soul

Listening to Marty Moss Coane's interview this a.m. with Peggy Orenstein on sex & the American girl, found myself thinking over & over of my mother, Katharine Reynolds Lockhart, of how blessed I was to have her as my mentor into human sexuality.

From my first awareness of her to Mom's final days, she modeled a healthy attitude toward sex & sexuality.  There was truth to her jocular claim she wanted to have "They did it 'til he died" on their tombstone.  

Mom always saw the physical act of sex - which, to her, was far more than simply intercourse - as an active, integral part of her perception & experience of a loving marriage relationship. 

To Mom, the love act was the crowning glory of spiritual union.  This was radical, compared to what some of her friends felt - that it was base, carnal, necessary for the procreation of children but somehow flecked with infernal lust.  A few looked forward to having a heavenly marriage with their beloved husbands, since "there is no sex in heaven."  

That, to Mom, was heresy! She'd set 'em straight, sharing her belief - "We're taught that things in heaven are as they are on this earth, but at an unimaginably higher, spiritual level.  Intercourse is about conjunction, the ultimate union between husband & wife.  As glorious as it was in this life, I can't begin to imagine how spectacular it will be in the next!"  

There was never any question with Mom about the joys of sex.  Peggy Orenstein would have been delighted, hearing & watching Mom talk about its pleasures.  Mom worried about girls & boys who were taught that sex was bad, nasty, filled merely with risks & dangers.  She felt such young people were sitting ducks, if they went from kissing to the pleasures of heavy petting to the WOW of intercourse. Far from pulling back, they'd more likely think,  "This?  Bad?  Boy,  are our parents clueless!"

It was remarkable, growing up with a mother who had an open, honest view of sex, who believed that a healthy respect & honoring of it was part of our developing a healthy respect & honoring of true married love; that sex & intimacy with your spouse was as close was we can get on this earth to experiencing complete conjunction; who expected her delight with sex to continue to the end of her days.  

Too many of my friends had mothers who shrank from discussing s-e-x. Human sexuality was an unspoken given in our household, mostly because it was clear that Dad was totally over-the-moon in love with Mom.  It infused our house, but without being gross.  It was seen & felt in the way Dad draped his arm around her waist, the look in his eyes when she walked into a room, the lovely respect he showed her, their playfulness - it was clear that man was flat-out loopy about the woman.  And vice versa.  She was totally googly eyed about him.  


She was also clear that intercourse was rightly reserved for marriage.  The thought of someone having experienced multiple sex partners was anathema to Mom.  In Mom's heart & life, guys & gals were meant to keep themselves for the one person who had your heart, you waited until marriage, you were mentally & physically faithful to the other forever.  

God bless her, Mom also made it clear - as too few adults did - that waiting was anything but easy.  When we heard about a couple who had to move up their wedding day due to a pregnancy, Mom's surprising response was a sympathetic, "That could have been us.  Luckily, when I wanted to give in, Pete was strong, and when he wanted to throw caution to the winds, I was strong." 


I grew up with a mother who taught that the reason to delay the full pleasures of sex until marriage wasn't because "doing it" would cheapen my worth, make me damaged goods, damn me in some way, but because both of us holding ourselves in check until marriage - when "going all the way" was what we WANT almost beyond reason - made the intangible relationship of US more important than the "YES!!" screaming in our heads & bodies, resulting in a deepened relationship that would stand us in good stead throughout our life together.  Truth be told, I took some missteps along my way to John, as he did on his way to me, but once we connected, we played out our relationship the way I'd always been taught by Mom, the way I'd seen it played out with her  Dad - we waited, putting our love, attention & energies on developing the relationship in its most appropriate order.  It wasn't easy, but what a difference it has made!

In her later years, Mom was horrified by friends who were no longer intimate with their husbands.  Dad died so young - 63 - he was still fully active, but Mom never doubted that, had he lived many years longer, their love making would have evolved into something less acrobatic yet still massively pleasurable.  

Mom saw herself as a sexual being, even after Dad slipped from us. Will never forget one time - it was post-John, so she in her 80s - that Mom shared with Mim & me that she'd "been wondering if the old machinery still worked, so I gave it a whirl & it does!"   Amazing!  


What a pity that Peggy Orenstein never had a chance to meet Mom.  Me & my sibs were blessed to have a mother with such a delightfully sensual soul, who saw love making as a gateway to spiritual union, something that would be beyond- the-beyond better in the next life.  I am forever grateful for experiencing how her savoring of her sexuality continued to the end of her days, the power of her physical union with Dad staying with her.  Always.

 

 

 

living full-throttle across the full spectrum

THAT's my calling because that's the only way to overturn our ghastly culture around aging - start from youth to implant an appreciation of what comes when we slip from facility with all life offers to needing a bit of a hand, from our wild independence days into the blessings of interdependence. 
  
I've thought & I've thought until my thinker was sore & that's what occurred - it's never too young to start, never too old to begin.  The glorious fact is that we weren't created to go kaput after a certain age.  As someone stated, there is no expiration date on the bottom of our feet or on our butt.  We're so warped by the go go go emphasis on productivity that came in with the Industrial Age, with the immediate out-of-dateness of the now defunct hot new item, that we mistake people with things.  

 

My work isn't limited to the aging & elderly, their families & loved ones.  It's just as much with the young & especially with the middle aged, who are too easily caught up in the fears of not being what they once were that they're blinded to what they could be.  

Because if we don't change our attitude, the generation after mine will be even more messed up as they age than we are, and that is saying something.

Man the barriers!  Hoist the battle flags!  We foment revolution or go down in defeat, captured by a lack of appreciation for what this wild, wonderful life is all about.

All of it!

Every season!

Every moment!

 Always remember that!!

Who knew? My crazy professional path was HEALTHY!

It turns out that all the different career changes that life foist upon me were GREAT for my mental, emotional & even physical health.  Who knew?!

Three cheers for Barbara Bradley Hagerty, whose interviews & articles have been playing touch tag with me for almost a week, who wrote Life Reimagined ~ the science, art & opportunity of middle age and the dandy article "Why a midcareer change might help you live longer."

 

It's the article, tucked into the Dallas News, that is getting my attention, caught by her wondering, "Perhaps you are one of the lucky ones. Perhaps you have reached your 40s, 50s, or 60s blissfully happy in your job. You are engaged, fulfilled, and challenged. Your work draws on your natural talents and passions. If so, feel free to skip this article."

Praise be, I have been!  Whether it was teaching, working with physicians & their staff & top execs at US Healthcare, working in-house with Prudential Healthcare marketing offices throughout the Middle Atlantic/Midwest, helping HR heads & employee benefits brokers handle the ins & outs & 'round abouts of financial service programs at BISYS, I was blessed to have jobs that made a difference to others, that drew on such different, often untapped skills & interests, took me into wildly uncharted territories.

 
Mind you, I had change thrust upon me, but the changes all contributed to the current work before me that will require I take everything from the past & integrate in my now into something splendiferous in the future.

Alas, it seems that my experience is not the norm. Polls indicate that a scant 1/3 of all Baby Boomers & Gen Xers are actually engaged by their work.  1/3!  That is shocking.  And the same studies suggest that about half of the same workers don't feel engaged.  Yikes!

A lot of them had an unforeseen opportunity to rethink their life work. After the financial melt-down of 2008, people who never saw it coming were suddenly out of a job in a workplace that offered few openings, with glaring age discrimination making finding a new position almost impossible if you were 30+. 

Folks like yours truly were thrust without warning into a new world.

 
These included LOTS of people who would never have left their jobs, even though many - maybe most - didn't feel all that satisfied by what they'd done.  In a lot of cases, people who'd tolerated a ho-hum job ~ yes, even those high up the success ladder were often bored - for the sake of benefits or a pension realized that they'd spent a shockingly large part of their lives doing something that did nothing for their personal development, their inner growth. 

People who had been making a decent weekly income found themselves looking for something that provided a greater sense of purpose, which might bring in less moola but yielded massively greater returns in once undervalued or even dismissed intangibles like increased health, greater satisfaction, even an enlarged social circle.  Many of those folks ultimately found work that paid less but gave greater satisfaction.  Quite a few took the same route I did, realized that the greatest security is found within ourselves,  created a position that uses our strengths, taps into our interests.  

Barbara mentions that having a sense of purpose in our work can even help hold off Alzheimer's.  Astonishing!  She notes: Researchers at Rush University Medical Center have found that a third of people whose brains, upon autopsy, display the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s never exhibited memory loss or intellectual impairment. The best predictor of whether someone would escape these symptoms was whether they felt strongly that they had a purpose in life. Those who did were two and a half times as likely to be unafflicted as those who didn’t.

Yes, it helps to be creative, to not be intimidated by change, even when it feels catastrophic.  Life can be set on its ear in an instant & the people who rise to its challenge might not be the ones you'd expect, predict.  Still, ability is meaningless without drive, creativity empty energy without follow through.  

Learning new things, navigating unknown terrains can be intimidating, even downright scary, but it turns out our brain LOVES it when we master new skills.  Am thinking about taking up knitting, something I've never done yet has long called to me.  And John & I are taking up mastering vegetarian cooking as a team!  I am going to make walking not just a slap-dash sometime thing, but something I make into a daily routine;  it will be good for John, too, as it will shake up his routine.

Reading Barbara's article is a good swift kick in my pants.  For YEARS, I've talked about making my contribution to changing how our culture approaches eldering.  Lots of talk, backed up by only a modicum of action. It's easy to wax rhapsodic about eldercare anarchy, daunting to put in the WORK needed to see results. 

As noted in the article, doing anything new & complicated takes time, creates discomfort & ushers in periods of frustration & disappointment.  But it turns out that mastering previously unknown tasks, perhaps especially outside our comfort zone, preserves new brain cells in the hippocampus, which makes & retrains our memories!  Big IF - the challenge needs to be not only novel & complex, it also needs to have a significant degree of difficulty.  The point is to get out of procedural memory, where everything comes easily because, no matter how hard it first was, it's become routine.

Honestly, it gives me goose bumps, reading Barbara's article & thinking about my personal & professional motto ~ engage, energize, empower. 

Friends, pleasant acquaintances, total strangers look at what I'm doing & say, "Well, you're lucky to have such a defined interest & related skills."  Jaws drop when I track my work history. 

Yes, I am at an exciting place - finally!  Took me decades - decadeS - to get to here.  There were jobs that tapped into skills but not my heart or touched my heart but offered little to no salary.  While folks are wrong that I stumbled out of a job & straight into my current true north purpose of helping people of all ages live as expansive, friggin fabulous a life possible, they were right that I always had a major advantage over (sadly) the majority of people in a similar  boat - I have always been open to seeing life reimagined, my faith in a better tomorrow always stronger than fear of any intimidating present moment.

It is pretty darn astonishing, looking back over the past 35+ years, realizing all the different skill sets that needed mastering, from being a home room teacher to baking bagels, to taking orders for balloons & fairy figurines to writing scripts & press releases, to supporting employer's 401k plans & teaching high school science. 

Thank you, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, for showing me how all those unexpected detours & switchbacks were not only good for my life's work, they were good for my health.

Who knew?!

unexpected lesson

We typically learn more from bitter lessons than from sweet.  That's certainly been true with an older friend of ours, someone we expected to be seeing regularly throughout any given week, someone we see less & less.  We'd hoped to take him out to lunch this afternoon & on a ramble, but got the call from his regular care partner that he's home-bound today, only heading out with her for a physical therapy appointment. 

Didn't feel comfortable suggesting we come over to the house with some nibblings & a copy of Thank Your Lucky Stars or Sabrina (Bogey, not Ford).  He's part of a close-knit clan, lives with a daughter & her family.  She is heart & soul committed to his care, but is - at her own admission - juggling more out-of-home commitments than when her father became part of their household. 

Both John & I wish we knew when she was going to be away on business, when her work requires her to be secluded in her office or if she's maxed out with meetings.  We'd love to bring over a meal or munchy, take her dad out on a drive (springtime arrived early in SE PA & everything's blooming like crazy) or bring over some of the classic movie dvds we purchased on his recommendation.

But the call never comes, the e-mail or text message never arrives.  Will swing by tomorrow with a copy of our schedule for the next ten days, along with some of the movie titles we have waiting for his perusal, our phone #, e-mail address & LOTS of hearts.  That's all we can do.

It's a priceless education, but the cost is being born by a dear friend who has repeatedly made it clear he enjoys heading out with us & looks forward to watching some of the flicks waiting none too patiently to be busted out of their cellophane packaging.  He is not a relative, the family are not our longtime friends.  It feels like his life is so much more restricted & home bound than needs be.

Sadly, there is no talking to his daughter, who thinks she knows all that needs to be known & then some.  This is the person who stopped reading Atul Gawande's priceless Being Mortal because she didn't need it, already knows it all.  

I've been & am blessed to work with a broad range of clients & families, each bringing their unique approach to providing help & support.  This is my first experience with someone newly thrown into the challenge of an elderly, mentally challenged loved one who thinks she knows - a priori - all there is to know.  Am sure she is not alone, that what we are discovering will stand us in good stead with others.  

To switch from a teaching to a coaching analogy, John & I are finding it tough being sidelined, so decisively benched, but we're taking it as an invaluable, albeit unexpected lesson... and looking forward to getting back in the game!

  

a real-life "Dan In Real Life"

On Easter Sunday, John & I had the pleasure of unexpectedly spending a snatch of time with a family who seemed right out of one of my favorite films, the small treasure, Dan in Real Life.  

We were blessed to hang out, however briefly, with a multi-generational family that seemed to truly madly deeply care about each other.  Such get-togethers are their happy norm - the proud grandfather, who hails from Central PA, dashed inside to get a picture of his brood at their annual bowling outing.  

The grandparents, their children & grandchildren (ranging from 7 years old to 31) descend from not-so-near & rather far at Easter to celebrate with one of the daughters & her family, while everyone treks to the grandparents' for Thanksgiving & Christmas.  In the summer, the pilgrimage is to an over-sized rental house at Virginia Beach.  

Our brush with this delightful family came out of the blue, totally touched our Easter with a magic we could never have imagined.  

Thinking about writing this posting got me thinking about how utterly blessed we are to have quite a few Dan in Real Life families within our circle of friends & pleasant acquaintances.  Our bestest friends in the universe gather every late Jan-early Feb with four generations of their family in Hawaii - this year there was a great-grandmother & a soon-to-be great-grandma, our friends, their children, grandchildren, a beloved niece & her family.  I think of all the photos of Easter dining room tables that were proudly posted on Facebook, of pictures of far-flung family arriving for a weekend of reconnection & savoring the joys of being together.

A friend of mine pointed out, "You know, they have their problems, too."  Naturally - as did the fictional reel family in Dan in Real Life.  But they do keep coming together, do keep getting past whatever challenges divide to find the things that draw closer.  

When John fell in love with me, he marveled at how many happily married couples I knew.  He knew one, maybe two.  A couple years after we married, he marveled at how almost all the couples he knew seemed happily married, including two of his good friends who'd been together for years but decided to take the plunge after seeing how well it had gone for us.  

Am feeling blessed to have spent part of our Easter in the heart of a loving family, to have seen the multi-ages competing in the egg toss that attracted us in the first place (great back story!), to have heard the happy voices & seen the beaming faces, to have learned bits & pieces of their stories.  And blessed to be able to look around at our circle of close friends, good chums & pleasant acquaintances and see so many families that take the deep delight in one another's presence that has always & forever been a treasured picture in my heart.  It does exist, it can happen.  

It's not easy, I am sure.  Nothing that matters ever is.  Still, there they were, whether around a dinner table on Marlin Road or tucked off of Buck, down in Atlanta or out in Sacramento, or tossing eggs on a large front lawn in Wyncote, in spite of the challenges & all that divide  Real life playing out even better than fiction!