Category: Midlife Observations
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Do I Really Have To Give Up Drinking?
My choice to drink less has nothing to do with “seeing the light” in terms of my health, or because I’ve managed to avoid the dangerous lure of addiction that runs through my family tree. It is not even based on the advice of my doctor – although I’m sure she would back me wholeheartedly.…
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Ageing: Is 10 More GOOD YEARS Too Much To Ask?
The thing about the ageing process is that one minute you’re cruising along feeling relatively young for your years and the next you are using hand cream. And yet, despite my lifelong battle with health anxiety, death scares me somewhat less than the journey there and the “not knowing” exactly how and when my finale…
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Trusting the Journey: The Secret to Happiness in Middle Age
It is only now, in middle age, that I am finally accepting that I don’t possess the superpower (or indeed any superpower) to fix everything – no one does, not even those with the money to buy whatever they want or need. Money may be able to buy rockets, but it can’t buy you back…
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5 Wardrobe Essentials Every Middle-Aged Women Should Have
Recently, I wore a cropped sweater to work and one of the kids accused me of not dressing my age. I was so outraged by the comment that I demanded to know why she expected me to kowtow to society’s construct of how women should dress in middle-age? Needless to say, she looked back at…
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Middle-Aged Women: We Need To Be More Selfish With Our Time
Have you felt really exhausted lately? I know that excessive tiredness comes with the territory of menopause and living through a pandemic, but what I’m feeling at the moment is more like a heavy weight pushing down on me, squeezing every drop of energy from my body. And I know exactly what it is –…
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11 Painful Truths About Living With Men
To be honest, I thought I’d done my time in share houses until COVID-19 attacked our shores, but it turns out that the most confronting change brought about by this virus is not my fear of catching it but my forced cohabitation with two men. Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash Some of you know…
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C-Words like COVID-19 are never good, but most clouds have a silver lining
Historically, c-words have had a bad rap. For example, the c-word “c*nt” is described as a vulgarism for female genitalia on Wikipedia, and the euphemism for “cancer” used to be the archetypal c-word. That is until recently, when a far more sinister c-word entered our vocabulary. I suppose it is fortunate, therefore, that the negative…
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“Clear intentions” may help you focus in lockdown, but treading water is also fine
It’s very easy to get sucked in by the words on those memes about writing a novel or finding a cure for cancer during this period of isolation, especially if you’re a perfectionist like me. After all, who doesn’t want to defy the challenge posed by this pandemic and come out at the end of…
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COVID-19 Is All Fun And Games Until You Start Looking Like Your Grandmother
I’m sitting at home, dressed to the nines with nowhere to go. Dressed to the nines during COVID-19 (?), I hear you ask. Thanks to Far Kew for this wonderfully appropriate image Well…yes. But I do have two very good reasons for such crazy behaviour: The first is that like many of you, I imagine,…
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Pity The Parents Whose Boomerang Children Have Been Forced Back Home By COVID-19
One aspect of COVID-19 that is rarely mentioned on the news is the impact on families who – due to recent job losses – have had grown children return back home. Some of you, I imagine, view the bounce back home of our Boomerang Generation as an opportunity to rebuild relationships, fatten them up and…
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How’s Everyone Coping With The Latest COVID-19 Isolation Restrictions?
So…how’s everyone travelling? YOU’RE NOT, I assume, and neither will you ever consider booking a cruise ever again, I would take a guess (if you’re of sound mind). Photo by Curology on Unsplash In the spirit of Gloria Gaynor, I am surviving, although as you can imagine, this is not a great time for hypochondriacs.…
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When There’s No Tonic On Supermarket Shelves, You Know The Civilised World Has Gone Mad
Here in Australia, we are not in full lockdown yet, but the system is already broken. A couple of days into any sort of meaningful distancing rules and not a drop of tonic water is to be found on supermarket shelves. Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash I’m not certain where it all went wrong,…
Louisa Simmonds 