Heart Beats

I'm at the playground again. I have fleeting memories of being at the playground as a child - all metal and hard edges - swings, seesaw, slide - vying for my turn, being pushed, pushing, crying to my mommy, trying to play with kids that didn't want to play with me...You get the picture. Many of you have been there yourself. Spin the clock forward a quarter of a century. I'm back at the playground. It's a nicer playground - wood structures, rubber mats, safer, prettier. I'm a young mom and I've got an infant and a four year old little boy. I now have two focuses of interest and attention - my child and how he's doing out here - and my peers and how I'm doing out here. I see my son casing the joint, figuring where he wants to go, where he feels a bit uneasy, who he will join, who he'll stay clear of. It isn't really about the equipment. It's about the social interactions. I could probably have learned a lot more then than I did about how my f...

It used to be I defined my days into two groups - work days, weekends. Easy. I remember the joy of Fridays, the depression setting in by Sunday night, that Monday morning feeling of dragging myself out of bed to start a new day. It was a long time ago that I had a traditional "job" - nine to five, what a way to make a living . Not that I didn't like what I did because I did. My work as a psychotherapist, especially when I was quite young and worked in the prison system, was fascinating, sometimes rewarding, on a few occasions downright scary...But I digress. My point here is that I was well-grounded in the days of the week. I never had to stop and think, what day is this? There was a rhythm to the days, they rose and fell like a graph on a chart. But then I started my writing career quite a few years back and the days of the week got a bit jumbled. I didn't write on a 9 to 5 schedule. I didn't have a specific rhythm. I didn't have the pressure of a boss, e...

It started this morning. I'm addicted to Masterpiece Mysteries (no wonder since I've written mystery novels for umpteen years) and this latest series is based on a Swedish mystery series that I've followed over the years. A bit of a SPOILER here if anyone is going to watch "WALLANDER" starring Kenneth Branagh. Ken has aged quite nicely. I find him quite attractive and it's admittedly part of why I watch the series although to give it its due I like dark, melancholy mysteries. So I'm watching the show and, yes, noticing how very attractive Ken is and then his father, i.e. the Wallender character's father dies. And Ken is standing at his dad's grave site and I notice the dates on the father's gravestone- mind you, this dad had looked damn old, almost decrepit - and I see he was born only eight years before me! And I start calculating in my head... OMG! Kenneth Branagh could be young enough to be my son . And that starts a flurry of names runnin...

When did that start? I remember the times someone would say, Hey, you look good. Maybe at a wedding, after a long time no see, whatever. Whether you were once a beauty or not, you've all heard it. You look good. So when did the tag-on...for your age...begin? Forties? Fifties? Sixties? And beyond? And why is it on the one hand I take it as a compliment when I get the tag-on, and other times it leaves me feeling annoyed? Are we only supposed to look good when we're young and then when we get older we need the tag on because older people aren't supposed to look good anymore? Men get the tag on, too, but I'm willing to bet not as often as women. I hear women and other men tell my husband, "you look good". It might be because he's lost some weight, is wearing a nice sweater, has a bit of color from the sun, whatever. But I can't tell you how many times I get the "You look good...for your age."  I get it from people my age but I especially get i...

I don't think my husband and I are the only ones. I'm talking about our relationships with our parents once we, the kids, were adults. I'm not going to get into individual issues here because I'm thinking of the whole not the parts. And the whole is that we never really viewed our parents as people. They started out and always remained our parents. We loved our parents, we saw our parents, we kept them up to date about general stuff but we didn't really have a relationship with them. An adult relationship. We didn't talk about real issues, emotions, concerns. I can't think of any of my friends back then doing it either. I'm struck by the change I see in my relationship with my grown children. We do talk about real stuff. It's not that we don't respect each others' privacy and it's certainly not that we share everything. But there's not this sense of editing what we say or do. We're not wary or distrustful of each other. There...

We were at a gathering and I heard someone say the problem with some of these internet dating sites is that the guys are often looking for a friend with benefits rather than a girlfriend. A lot of us knew what she meant but one woman was perplexed. It was one of the men in the group who explained it to her. The guy wants a woman who he can have sex with and not feel any responsibility, obligation, commitment, or romance. Forget about love, he added. The thing is he didn't seem to think it was such a bad arrangement. In fact, several of the men found the idea enticing. No big surprise there. Of course, one of the wives gave her husband one of those looks and said even if you were single you'd too old to find a friend with benefits. But several of the women disagreed. They thought there were a lot of women our age who were single who would take him or any of the men in the room up on such an offer ( if they were also single, she emphasized). I was a bit surprised. Until they ...