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 As we approach Mother’s Day this year, it got us thinking about how our parenting styles have changed now that many of us have adult children. Doing a good job at this stage generally reflects a cautious balancing act. Telling adult kids what to do just doesn’t cut it any longer. It isn’t anything we did; we’ve all had wonderful times together. But in a flash, our kids have grown up as we also grew older. They separated from us and now have their own lives. And isn’t that what we wanted for them? “Mommy May I” has become, “Hey, it’s...

One day, out of the blue, Barbara received an email from a long-time friend, Dennis Lockhart, 74, the 14th president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Now retired, Lockhart, had lost two wives to different, protracted illnesses. He wrote Barbara, “Since it’s most natural for women to survive a husband, I was thinking that there are a lot of guys out there who haven’t thought about everything they have to take care of when a wife or partner pre-deceases them.”    The email started us thinking about how differently men and women seem to deal with spousal loss....

  You get up in front of a group. All eyes are on you. You are about to speak and suddenly laughter erupts. You look down and realize you are buck naked. You shriek and run off the stage.  You just had a common recurring nightmare about humiliation when performing. To take it a step further, some therapists believe this common nightmare is also about guilt and inferiority, according to a piece in HuffPost, “What it Means When You Dream About Being Naked in Public: It’s all about keeping your emotions in check” by Sarah DiGiulio, Feb. 23, 2017.  What about...

Piv-ot. It’s the most overused term of the pandemic era and a concept that has bubbled to the surface as crucial to surviving. It’s about shifting gears, if you will, from a job you may have been in for years or decades, for which there is less need now, to one that offers greater demand of your time and services—and for which you are wildly appreciated. Kudos to all those restauranteurs who can’t serve diners inside but knew they could set up outside spaces in which they could feed them safely or become caterers and take-out food shop owners. Some...

Typically, when Barbara and her beau drive in the car together, the conversation is sanguine and pleasant. Until one day recently.  As they drove to the University at Albany, SUNY, campus, in a snowstorm for one of them to get the coronavirus vaccine (the other had already done so), another storm began to brew in their car.  With her beau at the wheel, Barbara grew concerned about road conditions as she noticed that the two-lane highway merged into one lane and few snowplow trucks were working.  It was at this point that the conversation took a nasty turn. It happened...