Posts By Linda Egenes
Cooking Lessons
My mom was not a feminist. You could say she was a 1950s Donna Reed sort of mom, not the kind who had a job outside the home or marched in feminist rallies when I was growing up in the 60s.
She was a great cook, and because she made such fabulous, fresh meals, on time, every day, I never felt the need to learn how to cook myself. If I felt the urge to create something, it was more satisfying to sew a dress or draw a picture. A member of a 4-H club, I learned to bake brownies and cookies, and once, in high school, I spent all day preparing a ham dinner with all the trimmings—applesauce, string beans and dinner rolls—from scratch. For all my trouble, within 30 minutes it was gone, with only a few “gee thanks” left trailing in the air. To my teenage mind, it seemed like a massive waste of time.
Living Sustainably from the Inside Out
What does it mean to live sustainably? Is it recycling diligently? Driving an electric car? Growing your own organic veggies?
According to the dictionary, sustainable means “able to be maintained at a certain rate or level.” Or “conserving an ecological balance by avoiding depletion of natural resources.” Other people might define it as the energy going out never exceeding the energy going in.
Many Ways to Mother
I guess I have to come out with something. Even though I once taught children in grades 2-4 and trained elementary school teachers in the language arts, wrote articles for a children’s column for Plain magazine and am a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, have co-authored two books on children’s health, written articles on parenting and am the loving aunt of two and Godmother of three, I myself have never given birth to a child.
Don’t get me wrong. I really do love kids, which is why so much of my career and my social life is wrapped around them. But when it came to having our own, it seemed like my husband and I always wanted to wait until sometime in the future. There were real obstacles that I don’t want to go into here, but basically, I admit it—we didn’t want kids enough.
Making Technology Safe for Your Kids
As we hear more distressing accounts of children using social media sites and other technology to cyber-bully other children, sometimes with shockingly tragic results, you can’t help but think that there’s got to be a way to make technology safer for kids.
Moms often try to control their children’s use of technology, but that can only go so far. As in the recent disturbing case of Rebecca, a 12-year-old-girl in Florida, her mother had taken away her cell phone and restricted her use of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to protect her daughter from seeing nasty posts from a group of students who were targeting her daughter. But Rebecca later signed on to apps that the mother didn’t even know existed—such as ask.fm, Kik and Voxer. And the cyberbullying started up all over again, ending in a terrible tragedy as Rebecca took her own life.
Healing Your Two Hearts
Women are known to have a higher emotional intelligence (EI) than men, and that’s a good thing. In fact, for many of us, empathy, intuition, compassion and sensitivity to other people’s feelings are the beacon lights that guide us through each day.
Yet this emotional sensitivity and openness can backfire when we’re under stress. Researchers tell us that a woman’s brain is wired differently than a man’s, making women more susceptible to stress than men even when exposed to the identical triggers. As just one example, women in the military are twice as likely to develop PTSD than men.
Being a Woman First
Women in combat are facing enormous challenges as they return home. Reintegrating into family life, finding housing, finding a job, being a mom and figuring out how to be a civilian again can be daunting.
Yet underlying all of these seemingly disparate roles a woman plays in the world is the role of being a woman. If a woman veteran can nourish her most essential self, the subtle essence of feminine beauty, softness and pride, she has come a long way in finding her place in the world.
TM, Stress and Addiction
On the 4th of July I watched the fireworks from the Oakland hills, where I enjoyed a panoramic view of the entire San Francisco Bay area. From that broadened perspective, the chaos of civilization looked like a perfectly coordinated organism, the ever-flowing traffic the veins and arteries, the pulsing Golden Gate bridge display as the heart, the firework displays of at least nine different townships firing off like neurons in what appeared to be a beautifully coordinated synchrony.
Sometimes I wish that researchers and doctors—who focus so intently on a particular fragment of the human body, on one broken or painful area—could draw back and see our minds, bodies and emotions from a wider perspective, as a perfectly functioning organism with every part working in perfect harmony with the other.
Why 30 Is Not the New 20
I just heard a great TED talk “Why 30 Is Not the New 20,” by Meg Jay, Ph.D. Dr. Jay, who is a clinical psychologist and author of the book, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now, believes it’s a huge mistake for young adults in their twenties to think that they have all the time in the world to start their real lives. The decade that seems to be all about postponing careers, postponing marriage and postponing childbearing is evolving into an extension of childhood, yet according to Dr. Jay, the twenties are not only the pivotal decade of a person’s life, but claiming your 20s “is one of the simplest, yet most transformative, things you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for the world.”
Why are the twenties the pivotal decade of a young woman’s life? Dr. Jay gives the following research statistics: eight out of ten “aha” moments that make your life what it is have happened by the time you’re 35. More than half of Americans are married or are dating their future partner by 30. The first ten years of a career has an exponential impact on how much money you’re going to earn. Female fertility peaks at age 28 and things get tricky after age 35. She concludes, “So your 20s are the time to educate yourself about your body and your options.”
Protecting Young Women from Anxiety
Last year I spent some time helping a high school girl (let’s call her Katya) with her writing. Katya is an excellent writer, college-bound, but at the beginning of her critical junior year, she choked with anxiety and didn’t turn in a major paper for her honors English class. And got a D for the first semester.
As a family friend, I was enlisted to help build up Katya’s confidence, calm her anxiety, and boost her writing skills. Believe me, I felt a great deal of empathy for Katya. I remembered all too clearly my own teenage years, when writing a term paper was a matter of hacking my way through thickets of negative thoughts, quicksands of panic and swamps of self-doubt. Sometimes I would work so hard at writing a major paper that I would practically have a nervous breakdown.
How Women Inspire Men
It’s so easy to love a baby. The super-soft skin, the miniature fingers and toes, and the smell—pure heaven. Just being around a baby makes all of us—men or women—feel more gentle, more protective, more tender.
Yet it seems that girl babies, in particular, have a greater effect on their dads—they make them feel more generous, to the point of donating more to charity and paying their employees more. And this is backed up by research. In a fascinating new study, researchers found that the mere presence of female family members, even infants, was correlated with more giving. Male chief executives tended to raise wages for employees after the birth of a daughter, while the birth of a son caused executives to reduce wages for their workers (likely to claim more resources for his growing family).