When she turned 50, amid personal and professional challenges, Mary Fran turned to writing a blog as her outlet. Her musings about midlife hit a chord and have spawned her series of books, Not Ready for Granny Panties.
When her youngest child was in high school, Jodi began to plan her life after the empty nest. She tapped into her passions and skills around education, business, and finance to found her successful business, College Financial Aid Advisors, and has released a new book as well.
You write and speak about sex in the hopes of educating your audiences. You also counsel midlife women (and men) about sexual issues. What have you found are the most common challenges when it comes to sex for women in midlife?
The biggest challenge I see for women, partnered or single, is adjusting to their aging bodies—menopause, body image, life stressors and their impact on our bodies and our sexual desire. I speak to women who seem to have shut down at some point and they want to figure out a way to enjoy sex again but often don’t know how to begin. How do women find the answers to deeply personal questions? I think that’s one of the biggest challenges given our reluctance to talk about female sexuality in an open and positive way.
After several failed marriages, Patricia went back to school in midlife and became a psychotherapist. It would take a lengthy correspondence with her aunt, a Franciscan nun living in Central America, to coax Patricia into writing her memoir, Motherlines
After a “Mommy midlife crisis,” Caytha started writing again and went on to write and produce three feature films. Her newest work, The Other F Word, is a webseries on Amazon that explores four women’s midlife journeys.
A difficult breakup at age 50 led Lisa to take a hard look at herself and her life and start a serious workout regimen then challenge herself further by signing up for triathlon training. She’s now a competitive triathlete with aspirations to combine this passion with her love of travel and her desire to support women.
My husband Peter and I love the sun and the ocean and have made it a tradition to take a beach vacation nearly every year since we met in 1993. After we got married, we explored moving away from Chicago, with weather a key driver of our potential destinations. After visiting both the San Francisco and San Diego areas, a combination of factors (work, friends, familiarity) kept us in Chicago.
When the Twin Towers came down, Molly decided to make a change. She quit her job, started writing, and eventually found her way to poetry. She is now a published poet with several books and anthologies in print.
After selling her successful PR firm at 64, Judi revisited her childhood dream and started taking acting classes. She is now a busy stage actor and even performs her own show, “Husbands: An Owner’s Manual.”