My forty year old daughter just broke up with her partner of five years. She did not tell me this. In fact, my 89 year old mother, who lives on the east coast (my daughter lives in Minneapolis), told me in a letter. I did call my daughter (she is the youngest of three)yesterday, and talked with her for about 20 minutes as she was gathering some of her things out of the condominium in which she and her partner had lived together.

She gave me her reasons. He didn’t want to be as social as she did. He wanted to come home from work and relax. He didn’t initiate sex. She told me his complaints or his observations about her (that she might have a problem with alcohol, that she was never home, that it was time to settle down). I know, like Rashomon, that there is no one true story, only versions of the truth. I wouldn’t try to talk her or him into trying to work it out. I have two failed marriages in my own history.

What’s bothering me is that she didn’t feel this situation was important enough, or that I was important enough, to tell me about it. I believe she knows that I won’t judge her (or him, I like him very much). I believe she knows that I love her and would want to support her. So why no call?

Both of my Minneapolis daughters (the oldest and youngest) are notoriously bad communicators, especially by phone. I call them. They might answer, they might not. They might call back, they might not. They don’t apologize. Sometimes they call when they’re in crisis, but not always, as this latest situation shows. What’s a mother to do?

Murray (my husband) and I saw Cheri last night, a new movie with Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend. Of the three reviews I read before seeing the movie, all focused on how beautiful Michelle Pfeiffer still is. After seeing it, I can report that she is beautiful, was beautiful, and probably will be beautiful for the remainder of her life. What is so remarkable about this?

Our local critic gave the movie four stars. I would not have been so generous. The characters are not fully developed and Rupert Friend who plays Cheri, Pfeiffer’s love interest, never makes us care about him at all. In fact, I’d say he is dislikeable. Therefore it is hard to see why Pfeiffer’s character would have cared about him–except as trophy in the older woman-younger man sweepstakes.

There is one scene toward the end where Cheri looks at Lea (Pfeiffer’s character) when she doesn’t know he is looking at her. At 25, he sees the future (there is 30 years difference in their ages in the story), sees her as an “old” woman, and doesn’t like the future he sees. Given the premise of their relationship (sex, brandy, and more sex) I can understand this.

Women and men do not have the same currency with each other about sex. Women have their beauty. Men have their power (regardless of a woman’s professional power). I know this is a gross generalization, but as generalizations go, women are desired for aesthetic reasons more than financial. I don’t even quarrel with this. What I do quarrel with is the narrow definition of beauty as synonymous with youth. Women of a certain age now dress better, have better bodies because they exercise more and eat better than their mothers and grandmothers. We (as I count myself among these women) are beautiful, not in spite of our age, but at our age, whatever age that is. Even though we might not turn the head of a 19 year old (Cheri’s age at the beginning of the movie), we are indeed beautiful.

I get crosswise with too many people. I blame some of this on wanting things to be right more than I want them to be comfortable (perhaps this is a rationale, or an excuse for a lack of masterful coaching and conversational skill). The things I want to be right are either work related (I want my clients to do what they said they would do) or personal (I want my husband to do what we agreed). This sounds pretty clear cut though, in fact, it is anything but. Clients have their own agendas, their own needs and priorities, and sometimes what I think is most important isn’t to them. My husband is distinctly his own man, not cowed by other’s demands or requests (except those of his children), and he decides when he’s good and ready to do or be whatever he thinks is important. I, of course, saw this as an admirable quality before I married him. Sometimes, now, I see it as supreme narcissism.

Yesterday morning my husband and I had a beaut of a fight–in the garage–with the door open. The neighborhood was our audience. The argument, brief though it was, ended with my husband telling me to do something with my nether parts. I said I wanted to be alone, got in my car and left. My leaving was not a bad strategy for me. I do need some air when we have intense disagreements. I need to physically de-escalate our passions, or mine anyway. As soon as I was half a mile away I was planning our lunch together. I was still angry about what had precipitated the argument for me (I started it), but no longer saw it as very important. My husband, on the other hand, saw my final action as abandonment.

I began reading Verbal Judo as part of my early morning quiet time today. In it, one of the first things the author suggests to de-escalate disagreements is to respond to a taunt, or a provoking question with a straight answer. So if, as the author describes, someone asks me where I learned to drive (implying perhaps that I’m not a very good driver) I can respond, “Connecticut.” Smile. Go about my business. No fight. If I reconstruct our argument yesterday morning, there were several places where I could have answered or made a statement that was truthful, even humorous, that might have taken the air out of the fight and left both of us with our dignity.

I live on a very steep hill. The driveway to our house is a short causeway over the decline from the street to our garage. There are steps on both sides of the house so that tradespeople can get to our furnace and hot water heater in our basement. It is a topsy turvy house if you are used to traditional colonials, as I have been. The garage is on top, then the communal space is below with kitchen, my office, dining room and living room, and finally one floor below that holds all of the bedrooms. We go down to sleep, not up.

Since it is a 70 degree slope, no gardening is possible in the front or sides of the house, so I have deck gardens on the steps and landings to our front door, and on the decks at the back of the house which offer panoramic views of San Francisco and the Bay. I’ve learned from a helpful friend how to construct these deck gardens and have rigged, with my husband’s enthusiastic participation, a drip system for watering. I actually have more garden than I’ve ever had on level property, having come to the pursuit of flowers rather late in life.

What I find fascinating is that the plants have their own cycles, not just of blooming and greening, but of robustness and dormancy. Nothing dies off in my California deck gardens. Wait! That’s not true. Things do die off, but when that happens it is mostly due to my lack of knowledge and not the plant’s unwillingness to grow. I’ve learned about fish emulsion (pee yeuw) and cuttings, thinning out, and whacking away at spindly tall stems. I was quite timid about this to begin with, but now am bold in my pulling and cutting, regrowing in water, and transplanting to better locations. I know what likes sun and what needs to hide shyly in the shade. I’ve tried my entire adult life, for instance, to grow both jade plants and hydrangea with no success. Now I have a jade plant that won’t quit and a hydrangea with enormous pink blossoms bursting out of its container.

This morning I’m noticing the cycles of growth. My geraniums are spindly and I’ve cut them all back. My lavender has gone wild and woody, and I’ve cut that back too. My upper deck looks like a little boy with his first summer haircut, kind of exposed and not too healthy. This is the way I feel when my work has taken the sap out of me. I want to keep doing it, and occasionally, I need to be whacked back to regroup and regrow.

I just threw out an art project from a course I took with Osher Lifelong Learning at the University of California Berkeley last Spring. It was a large box, about a foot square and about six inches high with impressions of who I think I am to others on the outside, and the internal quiet space I want to create for myself on the inside. The colors on the outside tended to be reds and oranges, angry faces and happy faces, lots of people, and one fuzzy gold pipe cleaner spiraling up into space (representing stress). The inside tended toward blue and green. I had placed a wonderful metal goddess head (I don’t know who she represents, but I do know she is female) in a nest of swirling blue and green tissue paper with butterflies (stickers) resting in her hair. I loved the box. But I found I was moving it from one place to another without ever finding a home for it. Yesterday I thought to myself, I know what my outside life is, and I also know that I want more internal peace and flow. I don’t need the box to remind me.

It was the act of making the box that was so creative. Eight women and two brave men ripped pictures out of magazines, molded playdough, cut and pasted images and tissue paper onto flat and three dimensional surfaces, all in the name of discovering and describing ourselves to ourselves and a few others. The energy in the classroom buzzed. We learned deep stuff about each other in a kind of safety zone. While we might talk about our pictures, we didn’t have to talk about ourselves, or what the representation in the picture or box meant–unless we wanted to.

Our instructor, an art therapist, had worked with all kinds of populations–kids in jail, kids in therapy, alcoholics, and us oldsters. She was enthusiastic without being cute or patronizing. She was respectful without being standoffish. She was perfect for our group of 55 to 80 year olds. And we flourished. We ripped and we drew. We cut and we pasted. No one resisted an urge to create because we would not be great artists. It was more fun than anything I’ve done in a long time outside of being with my five-year-old grandson.

I’m trying to pare down. The box was one thing that could go. I kept the goddess. She sits looking at me from my bookshelf (another place where I could pare down). I know the orange and red life well. I’ve lived it long and continue to reside mostly inside of it. Increasingly, though, I heed the call of the blue and green, the peaceful goddess, time to just be.

Yikes, today has been a day when so many balls got tossed to me that I had to make a running (and expanding list) so I didn’t forget to do (or even think about) what I committed to do every time a ball was added. I used to facilitate leadership development classes where we would learn to juggle. Does it mean anything now that I never could get the hang of it, even with three balls?

I’m working on my favorite consulting project and have a presentation draft due my colleagues for their reflection and suggestions. I teach/facilitate my own webinar about Appreciative Coaching and the next session is in a few days so I need to at least look at my notes. My grandson is coming to visit and the logistics of this (I go to Minnesota to get him, his mom picks him up ten days later in California) were finalized this morning. I have two coaching certification classes on Monday (I’m a student here with homework and peer coaching responsibilities). I needed to schedule three more coaching clients within the consulting project mentioned above. I am responsible to open our local International Coach Federation meeting tonight with a bonding exercise for attendees. Fortunately I figured out what the exercise would be last week, but I still have to do it tonight. Oh, and I have papers to grade in my masters course. Whew, just writing all this down makes me tired.

What I’m aware of this afternoon is that being this busy used to make me feel important. For the last few years it has made me feel either tired or fearful–tired because my energy is not limitless, and fearful because I’m likely to forget something (to drop one or more of the balls thrown in my office during the day). If I go with this juggling image, I’ve been adding balls all day, looking up in the air for the next one to appear and keeping my hands tossing and catching. Even jugglers have a limit, don’t they? The funny thing about this is that I’ve been feeling quite sane until today–teaching only one course, loving the coaching and consulting, reading novels, taking naps. Today feels super-charged, and super-charged doesn’t feel good any more, or sane.

I love to walk. Even with some pain from arthritis in one hip, and a knee that hasn’t been as strong as I’d like it to be for a long time, I can walk for hours up and down hills, through towns and woods, across bridges and floating pathways, anywhere. It is especially good to be outdoors. Even though I love to shop, walking in the mall is not exercise to me, nor is it pleasurable.

My husband has been a tennis player and a skier his whole adult life. I do neither. But what we have in common is that we’ve worn our particular exercise groove pretty deep. I walk, he hits a ball, or weaves gracefully (I’m told) down mountains. For about 10 years I also did yoga until the aforementioned hip started to scream at me. Occasionally I swim. This also comes naturally to me as I swam in competition in my growing up years.

What brain research tells us, however, is that to remain bright AND vigorous in older age, we need to mix it up. Continuing to walk is fine, but I also need to dance, row, bike, or play tennis in order to keep my brain active. My husband occasionally walks with me, and even more occasionally did yoga with me. Now we need to find something together or apart that we love to do, don’t mind looking incompetent at doing for awhile, and add it to our exercise repertoire.

In this moment, the thing that comes to mind is dancing. We love to dance with each other. I fell in love with him on the dance floor (and in the movies) as his grace is remarkable and somehow touching to me. Last night we watched Jessica Biel and Colin Firth do the tango in the movie, Easy Virtue. I want to do this with my husband.

I was 30 when my maternal grandmother died. She had been the source of unconditional love for me during a fairly stormy teenage period. As I look back, I’m not sure I could have navigated my early adulthood without her either. She took her own life after fracturing her hip and surviving multiple short stays in several nursing homes. My mother was devastated by guilt and sorrow for well over three years. I found solace in her evident courage, her determination always to have lived her life her own way, and her tattered, hand written recipe books.

My dad died when I was 50 after a long and complicated bout with heart disease. When his wet behind the ears young surgeon suggested another heart surgery the week before he died, I couldn’t imagine how his considerably diminished body would withstand it. He didn’t have surgery and died shortly thereafter. I’d been with him the week before (present for the surgeon’s visit), and knew he didn’t have the strength to go on much longer. My dad too had courage. He recovered from a long love affair with alcohol. He acquiesced to many medical procedures in his last 15 years of life that were painful, invasive, and prolonged, with grace and without losing his dignity.

My mom is 89 and I am 65. She has entered the hospital for the second time in two months. Last time the doctors diagnosed congestive heart failure after so many other docs had been mystified by a chronic and seemingly incurable cough that overtakes her in the evening and when she is generally tired. Perhaps I have deluded myself all these years that my mom is immortal. She has certainly seemed so. Now it is clear that she is human and not superhuman, that her engine is wearing down.

She has been a central figure in my life, for my whole life. With the exception of a period of six months when I didn’t speak to her as a result of her consistent need to report to my brothers and their wives what she is thinking about me (rather than sharing that with me), I have been in contact with my mother at least twice a month. I’ve shared wonderful vacations with her, books we both love, and the Chautauqua Institution–the magical place in northwestern New York state that hosts world-class speakers, musicians, dancers, and singers–all summer every summer. Several years ago my mom asked me to write her obituary. It is in my file cabinet, having been enthusiastically approved by her after I wrote it. I woke this morning, knowing that I need to update it as her life is nearing its end.

Today I feel so grateful for my age. I spent time with two very different clients this morning. They both are engaged in complex lives chock full of too much to do, too many priorities, too much to even think about. I am grateful for continuing to have meaningful work, to have the privilege of working with these people and others who, in addition to too much do to, want to achieve something for themselves and their organizations, in partnership with me. AND, I’m grateful that I’m not working at the pace and with the demands they face every day.

I’m grateful for the sunshine and the time to enjoy it. When I finished with my clients, I walked to my car in glorious sunshine, drove through some of the most beautiful city in the west, and sat at my computer on my deck overlooking that beautiful city and bay. Although I continued to work after I got home, it is not nearly at the pace I worked when I was 30, 40, or even 50. I sit in the sun and work, instead of an office with only limited access to the beauty of the day. I take breaks and often those breaks include naps. My energy is remarkable but it is also circumscribed, and today, I’m even grateful for that.

I’m grateful for this full life and for the energy and opportunity to keep working, loving, creating, and reflecting on what I still want to do and with whom I want to do it. I realize that at 65, and in this tenuous economy, I am very fortunate indeed to have both work I love and time for the pleasures of a more leisurely life.