Stick Horse Cowgirls

I am a baby-boomer/sixties-to-eighties-rock-lovin’ old person.  I am sitting at the computer listening to my Pandora “Dire Straits” Station.  (I have an opera station, too, so don’t judge me too harshly). Along came the old Journey hit, “ Don’t Stop Believing .”  It made me think of a post— inspiration !  You just never know how the Muse will strike, right? Journey said: She Took the Midnight Train Goin’ Anywhere Wow . These lyrics made me think about advice I wish young women everywhere would heed.  It is advice borne of my longish life, tinged with sorrow now softened, and of my very-long work as a divorce lawyer.  Ahhhhh , if only they would listen to me. As I age I am learning the importance of living life intentionally…making conscious decisions about what I like, what I want from life, how I want to live it.  So many of us, women especially (hang with me, here), just drift through days, taking life’s midnight train to anywhere....

I have seen two news stories within the past twenty-four hou rs which have inspired me to write this post.  One was the interview of Melinda Gates (wife of Microsoft's Bill Gates).  The other was a news clip about the execution of a  woman in Afghanistan yesterday. If I have a political-issue passion it is women’s issues.  I care about American women issues, but my real passion is global issues.  If you really look at things in depth, I think you will find that women are the class of people who are most deeply oppressed and against whom the most historically-sustained, egregious treatment is inflicted.  I believe it has been this way for a long, long, long, long, long time.  We American women have our challenges, but most of us never consider how our sisters across the world fare—much, much worse than do we. If you are interested in this topic as every thinking/caring person should be (spoken like a true fanatic), then you might want to read Half ...

Well, for once it is not the liberal women up in arms, but the stay-at-home-moms!  Have you heard Hilary Rosen’s comment about Ann Romney?  (Who the H is Hilary anyway?  Wikipedia says she’s a “lobbyist and Democrat pundit.) Here’s what she said: And here is what I have to say: I grew up in the sixties.  I married in 1970 at the ripe old age of 18, but I proudly wore a t-shirt that said “ A woman without a man is like fish without a bicycle. ”  Yes, I was/am a feminist in many senses of the word. I am a big believer in traditional marriage, so please do not misunderstand me on that score.  But I do believe that a woman can have a very fulfilling life without a man.  I’m doing it now. No woman should ever rely on a man in order to become who she wants to be/ who she should become.  In fact, as a divorce lawyer, I can tell you that it is absolutely a disastrous decision to rely on your husband totally for any aspect of life: emotion...

When my son was a child and my husband was out of town, one of our favorite things to do was to sit in the bed together early and watch what he called “nature flicks.”  We enjoyed the Trials of Life series, National Geographic animal specials and all things such as might be found these days on Animal Planet.  I love seeing into the social habits and ways of animals.  Often I see parallels to our own lives or hints at how we humans might could manage a little better than we do if only we’d take cues from our non-human brethren.  I thought about this aspect of nature study the other day when I saw a documentary on elephants. In one scene a zoo elephant was being prepared for the delivery of her first calf.  This was one tame elephant—they are so huge that they’d better be tamed.  Her keepers were loving and attentive.  They had trained her to submit to restraints, fearing that her domestic life away from the herd  setting that nature had inte...

Appearances deceive sometimes.  Our minds can fill in what we want to see but isn’t there; our assumptions can lead us astray. Sometimes this is merely interesting.  Sometimes it can lead to peril. I was in an airport awaiting a flight to Florida some time ago.  Walking ahead of me was a woman in a brown leather jacket with a long, beautiful ponytail swishing attractively in high contrast to the dark leather.  I just could not help noticing and admiring these beautiful locks.  Imagine my surprise when she turned to expose an equally-impressive beard, a grizzled, worn face that I would never have put with that ponytail!  This was, in fact, a man! It happened again, to a lesser degree, on the same trip.   I was deplaning in Houston to make my connection, standing in the aisle.  I was behind a young African American woman.  I “knew” this because she had attractive braids streaming down her back, a cute figure dressed in jeans, and a ...

Vee asked about my senior law partner, whom I mentioned in my last post on trivia.  For one thing, let me say that she is not “trivia,” by any means.  This post is a brief overview of “A’s” remarkable life.  The anecdotes would fill a book.  Why, we could do a whole separate blog simply on A’s life stories. A was born in 1921.  She came up through a time that was not only financially-challenging, but was no world in which a woman could reasonably expect to gain anything but a husband and family without a hard struggle.  A had the brains and the grit for the struggle… She had an older b rother who was in “business school” in their small town. At the age of 12, this little girl talked the owner of the school into letting her attend class to learn shorthand in return for chores around his house.  (Do you people remember Gregg Shorthand?  I do!  I still use mine, from my high school class).  She took to this like a duck to water and eve...

Yesterday I told V a work story that made her remember one of our favorite movies: The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio .  But first, here’s my story: My client was sad, alrigh t, but the most accurate description I can think of is “exhausted.”  She was exhausted as in the really tired sense, but she was  also exhausted in that she had pulled out the stops to save her marriage—exhausted all avenues, as it were.  It was not to be, despite her best efforts. Her problem with her professional, graduate-school-educated husband was prescription drugs.  He was hooked, had been to rehab twice and had, unbeknownst to client, drained their entire financial reserves, which were at one time substantial—all gone now.  Husband was now unemployed and just coming out of rehab for the second time (not cheap) thanks to his parents. Both sides of the family gave her emotional support as she made the hard  decision to divorce.  They were about to lose the house an...

In his marvelous little book Tribes , Seth Godin defines a a tribe as …a group of people connected to one another…connected to an idea.  For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another.  A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate…People want connection and growth and something new… Last night V and I responded to the tribal drumbeat sounded by Kyran Pittman of Notes to Self.   We made the ritual trek to the “high place,” an 18th floor swanky room just perfect for our gathering.  What we found there was, indeed a tribe: about 25 young women (yes, we were the elders) who came together solely because we are members of the same tribe: Arkansas women bloggers.  V and I had not previously met any of the attendees, but when we walked into that room, it was clear that we belonged.  We had a common experience with each one of these women: blogging.  It was magical; and although...

She was the lone sister left at home to care for her widowed father, selflessly.  She had given up college to do so.  Her father needed her, after the long battle with her mother’s illness. When she was in her mid-thirties, much to her surprise, a gentleman began to court her.  He was a big fish in their small town; he spoke in public for the local chapter of his preferred political party.  He was a lawyer and accountant; a man of substance with the freedom of a professional office in his home.  By this time he was divorced from the mother of his four almost-grown children, all of whom lived in another county a couple hours away.  He was fifteen years older than her. After several years of storybook courtship filled with trips to stage plays, dinner in fine restaurants she had never before experienced, and surprise gifts, they married.  As a wedding gift, his mother gave the new couple a nice five-acre tract sliced from her larger holdings. ...

Yes, I’m on a Mel Gibson roll, here.  This is the third post in a row which has sprung from his shenanigans (see these links for the first and second ).  I have a bully pulpit, here, and I’m fairly elbowing V out of the way to write my thoughts.  Al Gore did me such a favor by inventing this internet thing… There is so much that this episode has stirred up in me.  I think that one benefit of celebrity for us “nobodies”  is that famous people can play out their dramas in public and portray life in a magnified way so that sometimes we can pick through the drama and learn something. Mel’s girlfriend, Oksana is in a pickle, isn’t she?  She’s saddled with an aging, crumbling man (because when you have a child with someone, you are saddled with them) and she’s saddled her little daughter with one, too. While I am on Oksana’s team when it comes to exposing and resisting domestic violence, I cannot help but point out her own complicity in getting herself i...