WELCOME TO OUR WORLD
The Internet saved our friendship and quite possibly our lives. Sound dramatic? Maybe, but it's true. Any woman who has a best girlfriend who has stayed by her side through thick and thin (and we're not just talking waist sizes) will know exactly what we mean.
HOW WE MET:
We're Lorraine and Mary...two average American middle-aged women (middle aged meaning if we live to be over one hundred!).
We met years ago when our children were young and our husbands were out making their way in the world. Lorraine's husband was a young college football coach and Mary's was climbing his way up the investment banker ladder. This meant that our husbands traveled a great deal and we were home raising young children (six of them all together). The strong feminist wave that made its way through our generation seemed to pass us by, and we found sanity and comfort in the company of one another.
The thought of us living in different places never crossed our minds and we took for granted the wonderful familiarity of waking up knowing that the other would be there to offer support and friendship throughout the chaotic days. We were inseparable and at our children’s school and sports events, you rarely saw one of us without the other.
SHIFT HAPPENS:
Suddenly, it all changed. Lorraine’s husband made it into the big leagues of the NFL. It’s harder to say no to Mike Ditka than one’s spouse, so off Lorraine and her two young boys went to the cold shadows of Chicago. Mary was left behind in Colorado feeling like a conjoined twin who had just been surgically separated.
Right about this time, the Internet made its way into our lives. Daily e-mails became our intravenous lifelines that kept us sustained and connected.
Over the years, we, our husbands, and children, all went through many transformations and changes. Our one constant was the morning ritual of sitting down at our computers and checking in with one another to make sure we were keeping our sanity and most importantly, our humor.
Our e-mails became our personal journals of every thought, fear, hope and dream we had for our children and ourselves. And mostly, our e-mails were conduits for our need to make fun of every twist and turn life brought us, which in turn helped us keep our joy.
A loosing season, an acquisition deal gone bad…these may have been devastating to our husbands but to us they were funny. Our children’s wrecked cars, bad grades and missed curfews became hilarious. Our sagging bodies and continual weight gains had us rolling on the floor.
The Internet and our senses of humor became intimate soul mates.
LET’S GET TOGETHER:
And while, thanks to James Frey, we must call our account an “exaggerated autobiography”, we assure you that our stories are true, with only slight inaccuracies here and there that were necessary to protect ourselves from legal action and mean spirited people, including our own offspring.
We’re confidant that we will all become instant girlfriends (and for you sensitive males, we love you too) because we’re sure our stories will resonate with the thousands of you who are forging your way through hormone replacement, first or second marriages, children, careers and the vital friendships we women depend on…doing so with big grins on our faces.
We are wives, single professionals, mothers, grandmothers, employers, employees, and friends living in uncertain times. We are bloated, fit, content, greedy, up, down, scattered and clear.
Some of us experienced the ravages and lost loved ones in the Vietnam war, some of us burned our bras, protested, lived in communes, experienced “free sex” and some of us just watched our older sisters with envy. We broke the glass ceilings in business and political worlds and here’s the really good news: Women in their 40’s-60’s are the LARGEST demographic group in the United States. This translates into…
POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
POWER. YES, POWER! Women in our age group spend over ONE TRILLION dollars a year and you can bet your bottom dollar the retail, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and media market knows this.
Instead of resigning ourselves to quiet lives and housedresses, we are not slowing down. Rather, it’s the opposite. We’re experiencing a Renaissance time in our lives. We not only continue to be mothers, daughters of elderly parents, wives and friends but we are also professionals, rock climbers, pilots, writers, volunteers, seekers of spirituality, models (yes, models!) and anything else you can think of. Half of us LIVE ALONE AND LOVE IT!
LIE TO ME BABY! LIE TO ME!
We’re being told by the media and popular magazines that the 40’s are the new 20’s, the 50’s are the new 30’s, etc. Does this mean the 20’s are the new teens? Puhlease…
When we first heard it, we liked it. It sounded good. It boosted our egos and kept the nagging fear of aging at bay.
But, yet, deep down inside us, we’re not buying that the 40’s are the new 20’s. We certainly didn’t need reading glasses and support bras in our 20’s and we’re really (well, pretty) sure we wouldn’t trade the wisdom we’ve earned for a pair of size 6 jeans.
Gail Sheehy (author of “Passages”) put it well when she recently said, “The 60’s aren’t the new 40’s…the 60’s are the NEW 60’s!” Now that’s something we can swallow. WE decide what the new 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and beyond look like, not some 20 something advertising kid in a downtown Manhattan office.
COFFEE CLUTCH TIME:
So, join us daily for a cup of cappuccino (better make it a skinny) as we wrestle with age, menopause, weight, hormones, relationships, sex, lack of sex, who cares about sex, what is sex, careers, kids leaving the house, kids coming back (AKA Twixters AKA Boomerang Baggage), cosmetic surgery (pro’s and con’s, do’s and don’ts), and MEN—what to do with them, without them and deSPITE them.
Together, we will laugh, cry, commiserate and generate one big Internet pajama party.
