I began thinking about this around 5 am this morning. I have always known that I enjoy the process of writing since my first “essays” written around age 7. Back then I was fascinated with Native Americans and their ponies. What I would give to still possess those short, but well-illustrated stories I wrote! I also loved to read. My favorite memory from grade school is the day my teacher Miss Miller had me stay after class, so I could visit the sixth grade library to pick out my books. I was only in third grade! It helps to have parents who are teachers.

For as far back as I can remember, I have been reinforced for my writing. Everyone said I was good at it. And I have read probably a million books in my sixty-five years on this planet. I picked up a lot of vocabulary that way. Often I knew the words and how to spell them, just not how to pronounce them. Writing always felt like a freeing experience for me, a place where I could express myself without any outside reaction or response. That’s why I began keeping a journal around eighth grade. I still have all those journals. I value them greatly. Perhaps because of that early experience I now find that:

Writing gives me access to my deepest thoughts and feelings…

When I feel the need to understand myself, my intentions and my deeper emotions around a certain topic, I find that if I write about it, new insights present themselves. I do understand how others find this type of personal expression through painting or other forms of art, but for me the solution is always writing.

I fell into writing professionally around age 50 when I was forced to abandon my chosen career in librarianship. Strange as it may seem, I had to be coerced into writing as a career, even though I loved everything about it. When I lost my livelihood, I hired an excellent career coach in Fort Collins who challenged me to just try writing for others. I was soon hooked. I worked as a freelance writer for a few years, selling my work and enjoying the process. However, I found a deep contradiction. In writing, it seemed like everyone was telling me I need to “Find my own voice.” How does one do that when the editors of the magazines I was writing for took away “my voice” when they edited and sometimes even messed up the articles I was writing? When I was totally ripped-off my “American History” magazine, with no kill fee or anything for the article they had requested from me, I gave up on freelance work entirely.

Luckily at that time I learned about blogging from a woman in my writing group. It was a pretty new concept back in 2006, but this woman had found great success, so I dug in and learned everything I could about WordPress.

From my blog “Midlife Crisis Queen” (now removed from the Internet) I built quite a nice platform and a great following, which led to nice book sales and some notoriety. But when I moved down south and we began building our solar home out in the country, I felt the need to diverge into new endeavors.

For one thing, I had chosen to change lifestyles. For another, midlife had passed me by!

Living away from cities is exactly what I needed. I have expanded my voice to include photographs of sunrises and sunsets as well as life close to nature. I like to call it “getting off the grid, mentally.” I learn everyday the lessons we can only learn by leaving “the chatter of the speed-and-greed world” behind.

Now I write for myself, and if others find it useful, so be it…

I greatly enjoyed the intelligence and wisdom of a recent interview with actor Steve Yeon on CBS Sunday Morning, February 7th 2021. He is a Korean-American actor, age 37, who weathered the influence of heavy parental pressure, and then transformed that character-building experience into an amazing career for himself. I especially related to his observations, because I have been a front seat observer of this process in my own family for over 65 years.

Steve’s response to boatloads of pressure to become a doctor from his first generation American parents was to take a few biology classes and in that way, show them that this just wasn’t going to work. I suppose I did the same thing, just a lot less consciously, failing a few classes at Colorado College where my Dad taught in the 1970s. My siblings tried other responses to my Dad’s pressure to become a scientist of some sort. My brother John told my Dad (a college professor!) “There’s no future in college!” after high school and then disappeared from our lives for decades at a time. My sister Diane rebelled at first, but then found ways to work within my Dad’s parameters of success. She has been quite stellar in her chosen field of nursing and Long-Term Care.

I found the research on this topic fascinating. It seems that when we relentlessly demand certain career choices from our kids, some may become compliant, but this apparent “compliance replaces the development of problem solving, judgment and autonomous thinking… Without the space to find their own way, teens fail to develop an inner-directed sense of self to anchor them” (Levine, 2006). “Alternatively, encouraging teens to think and advocate for themselves, make their own choices, and experience natural consequences of their decisions fosters the development of identity, values, responsibility, and competence.” “The Paradox of Pushing Kids to Succeed” by Lynn Margolies, Ph.D.

This was true for me. With so much pressure from my Dad, I felt inadequate to make my own choices, and boy did I make some bad ones in my teens and twenties! I especially did not develop the ability to “advocate for myself” until much later in life, when I had no one else to advocate for me.

I don’t recall my mother ever pressuring me to become anything in particular. She just wanted me to be a good person. I guess that is the way she saw her role as mother. Her mother, a career woman most of her life, finally became quite supportive of my career goals when I started working on my M.A. in Librarianship. I believe she decided since I wasn’t getting married, she should help me get a good job. She also gave me my homemade quilt at age 24, something she would normally give to me at marriage.

My parents were teachers and did support my choice of librarianship, but I always said I would be a librarian until I knew what I really wanted to be. That turned out to be a writer, which I began in my early 50s. I enjoy writing so much that I couldn’t care less if nobody reads it! I will continue to write until the end of my life… Did I mention stubbornness is our strongest family trait?

Some more wisdom from Steve Yeon: “Generations miss each other right now.”

As a middle boomer (born in 1955), this pandemic hit as my father was on his death bed. This experience last March threw my Mom, his wife of 69 years, into depression and confusion. As she put it, “My leader is gone.” His death threw me into many thoughts about my upbringing and how that process develops over a lifetime. I see it now as first trying to live up to what your parents want you to become — a process of letting go of all that in your middle years, and then a return to re-connect with your parents as they prepare to leave us.

My Dad was first and foremost a renowned botanist, naturalist and teacher. That was his life’s work. I was reminded of that fact this week when I learned that the third edition of Dad’s book: Trees and Shrubs of New Mexico just came out, edited and printed by the Gila Native Plant Society of New Mexico. He always hoped that his kids would get as excited about nature as he was his whole life. And, as it turns out, my older sister Diane became a nationally renowned Elder Care expert, my brother became a high school science teacher eventually, and I became a writer, photographer and gardener of Colorado native plants.

See, sometimes it all works out in the end…

There is no end to the complexities of women, our obsession with weight, and self-love. Being raised in an extremely visual culture, where men tell us how we “should” look and feel about ourselves, has led to far too many girls starving themselves to death over these exact same issues.

Whenever I hear Karen Carpenter singing her syrupy love songs like “Close to You” and “Goodbye to Love” I can only feel a deep sadness that she would or could not choose to keep herself alive past age 32. Carpenter suffered from anorexia nervosa, which was little-known or understood at that time. Her death from heart failure in 1983 related to complications of her illness, led to increased visibility and awareness about eating disorders.

Karen was born five years before me in 1950 into a world where how you looked was just beginning to mean everything to a girl. I don’t remember weight influencing my childhood much, but once I reached puberty I began to notice that weight could be a powerful influence. My older sister seemed perpetually tortured about her weight. I was skinny as a kid, but I did have my own personal experience with anorexia in my early twenties. I became severely depressed and lost over 40 pounds very quickly, but as soon as I fought my way out of depression, the weight came back on easily.

Through the decades I tried not to worry much about my weight, but in my early fifties I found myself seriously overweight. My days of eating whatever I wanted whenever I wanted were apparently over.

I was lucky to find a weight-loss program that finally taught me the best way to choose my foods and the right amounts to maintain my weight in a healthy and generally sustainable way.

I lost over 50 pounds and kept it off for a few years, until I became absolutely stressed out over our move to Walsenburg and the process of building a new home in the middle of nowhere. I was so stressed I decided,

“I deserve to eat whatever I want!” That did not work out well…

So recently I’ve begun again. Back to tiny portions of starch and lots of protein and vegetables. I’m glad I eventually learned what proper nutrition looks and feels like. I’m also happy that I’ve never had to obsess about my weight. My only concern now is my health, aka keep breathing and moving!

There’s just two things I wish they would have taught us in high school. Why didn’t they teach us something practical like proper financial planning and what proper eating looks like? They could have saved most of us a lot of grief!

I hardly ever share recipes here, but these are way above average… GREAT!

Ingredients

• 2 Tbsp. olive oil
• 2 cups diced 1/2 inch pieces of butternut squash
• 1 tsp. each: chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, sage & cayenne for heat
• 1 large can green chili enchilada sauce
• 1/2 cup milk
• 3 cups left over shredded turkey or uncooked ground turkey
• 12 ounces shredded sharp cheddar cheese
• 10 flour tortillas

Saute squash in oil for a few minutes then add ground (if uncooked) turkey. Cook until browned, then add spices and 3/4 cup of green chili sauce and milk. Cook until sauce is much thicker and ready to be put inside enchiladas. Put 1/2 cup of enchilada sauce in the bottom of a 13 X 9 inch cake pan. Roll enchiladas with cheese and sauce. Cover dish with the rest of the enchilada sauce and cheese and bake in a 375 degree oven for 35-40 minutes.

ENJOY with sour cream and avocado on top!

Two news items caught my attention this week. The death of Alex Trebek and the election of our first female vice president. Being a long-term Jeopardy fan, I was sorry to hear Trebek’s battle with cancer ended in death. Then I heard that he worked at his game show up until two weeks before his death. Who does that? Answer: My Dad!

Last night on the NBC Evening News, in the story about Kamala Harris’s election, they interviewed young girls and their mother’s about female empowerment. At the end, one of the mothers said, “When I look at my daughter I see a CEO or the president!” I followed her exclamation with, “but no pressure…”

But seriously, how wonderful and extremely DELAYED to finally have a woman as our vice president, especially an Indian and Black woman. Looking back over the mixed bag of white men we have survived in the Oval Office, I believe a woman certainly cannot do worse. My greatest concern is that the young girls of our country don’t feel bad or inadequate if they cannot reach their parent’s highest goals set for them.

I come from a family where there was extreme pressure to become something “semi-great” preferably in my Dad’s area of interest. That kind of self-imposed pressure, coming originally from parents, to become the best in the world at something, can be devastating if the child never reaches that parent-imposed goal, and even sometimes when they do. The confusion within the child when her natural proclivities do not match the dominant parent’s demands, can lead to a debilitating crisis in self-confidence and self-authority. In other words, it can be destructive for their entire life.

Is there an authentic need to find our true self?

“The human mind can imagine both how to break self-esteem and how to nurture it – and imagining anything is the first step toward creating it. Believing in a true self is what allows a true self to be born.” – Gloria Steinem in “Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem

The distraction of feeling constantly inadequate, stands in the way of a person ever learning to love and respect their own natural intuitions and talents. How do we identify our natural interests? “The more regularly you create, the more you will notice an image often repeated in varying ways. This is your true self made visible.” (Gloria Steinem, The Revolution From Within)

In 2004, one of the best books I read to encourage this awakening within myself was “Revolution From Within” by Gloria Steinem. There I found my strong desire to finally find and be my true self is quite common among women in their forties and fifties. Most of us did not find any real encouragement to change until then. We were too busy living our lives…

Midlife Crisis Queen!

Unfortunately, it took me until my late-40s to begin this long journey. It was only after I had been forced to give up on living an average and basically inauthentic life, that I began to explore what was authentic within me. What was crying out for personal expression? Eventually I began a writing career, something I had always dreamt of, but felt inadequate to pursue. I also started a blog in 2007 naming it “Midlife Crisis Queen.” In my mind this title was humorous, but it caught on more than I ever expected. (I removed this blog from the Internet in 2014.)

Finding true self is the liberation of finally giving yourself permission to be all that you are inside. It is also the only path to finding positive love relationships with others. There is so much more in Gloria’s book about how our connection with nature reinforces our connection to true self and how patriarchal religions suppress power in women.

To young women I say read this book and see if it speaks to you. Don’t spend most of your life searching for wholeness and rightness outside of Self.

All that you are seeking is within…

“I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that. Think of the joy of self-discovery: solving a problem, making a bookcase, inventing a dance step… all by reaching within for a vision and making it real.”

I cannot remember one time in my 65 years on this planet that I have felt so embarrassed by my own culture and country. Everyday, when I see the latest news, I cringe at how crazy and mindless we have become.

This leaves me wondering: How much can we separate ourselves from our own culture and country? I have never felt this need before…

But when I see how our entertainment has become completely commercialized and mindless, with its obsession with sex and violence. When I see far too many Americans who I might consider intelligent, believing in the craziest conspiracy theories EVER, I feel nothing but disappointment with my culture. It seems, that when faced with true threats to our very existence on this planet, we instead run toward conspiracy theories to obsess about.

Denial runs far too deep in the human race!

How can we not unite to save our home planet and our country?

I feel like I did my part to save our planet. I didn’t have kids in part because I was afraid of our present stupidity as a race. And all those fears about our inability to read, learn and think clearly about the future of our planet have come true. It isn’t because we don’t have the technologies necessary to research and understand things like the warming of our planet or the melting glaciers and ice sheets at our poles. We have plenty of data and scientists telling us about this everyday.

But instead of focusing on the real threats to our world, millions of Americans choose to put their energy into conspiracy theories like

QAnon: “a wide-ranging, unfounded conspiracy theory that says that President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping pedophiles in government, business and the media, speculating that this fight will lead to a day of reckoning where prominent people such as former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will be arrested and executed.” Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/53498434

Really??? Is this the best we can do? If this is the level of intelligence of even one quarter of Americans, than we are all in big trouble! I guess our education system has truly failed our population.

Whatever happened to critical thinking? Now say this with me: Everything you read on the Internet is not true!

Pay CLOSE attention to your sources of information!