MSI Press Blog

  Excerpt from Healing from Incest : Lies and Secrets When I think about the lies my father told and all the unsaid thoughts and fears that were part of the air we breathed at our house, I remember a particularly frightening time when the truth was almost brought into the open many, many years before that session in Seanne’s office.   Mother and Father had come for my college graduation—a ceremony I had attempted to forego, perhaps to avoid having them come. But that same weekend my cousin had planned his wedding to coincide with the gathering of the families and friends for our combined graduations. I was involved in the wedding preparations, and Mother decided to ride along with me to a nearby city for the rehearsal. The truth was, she had an agenda that I couldn't have imagined. If I’d had any idea of her intention, I'd have been even more frightened and much more uncomfortable.   I sometimes had nightmares about Mother dying and me being forced to marry my...

Farewell to Mother  Reading Dr. Alexander’s book about his near-death experience, I was immediately struck by the experience I’d had when my mother was in a coma. It was so vivid I can remember how it felt to this day, though it was now 29 years ago. My mother was a very healthy woman. In her 70s, she swam every day, worked on her writing and maintained a busy social life with the local garden club and other organizations. When my father died, Mom was 75 and her abilities were undiminished. After two years, sShe seemed to be rebounding nicely from Dad’s deathafter two years, yet something may have been missing that I wasn’t aware of. Or perhaps, as a neighbor hinted, she’d met a new man… One night I was awakened by a phone call around 1 a.m. “You’d better come down to Florida,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Your mother’s in a coma.” I was astonished. Just four days earlier I had talked to my mother and she’d told me she was on her way to Miami to see the Pope, who was visit...

  Mother’s Day didn’t begin as a commercial celebration. It began with one daughter trying to honor the woman who shaped her life. The modern holiday traces back to Anna Jarvis , who founded Mother’s Day in the United States after her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis , died on the second Sunday in May 1905. Ann had spent her life organizing Mothers’ Day Work Clubs to improve health and sanitation and even created Mothers’ Friendship Days after the Civil War to help former Union and Confederate families reconcile. In 1908, Anna held the first formal Mother’s Day service at her mother’s church in Grafton, West Virginia , distributing white carnations — her mother’s favorite flower — as symbols of remembrance. Within a few years, nearly every state observed the day, and in 1914 , President Woodrow Wilson declared Mother’s Day a national holiday. Ironically, Anna Jarvis later fought against the commercialization of the holiday she created, believing it had strayed from its purpose: a quiet...

  Excerpt from  Creative Aging  (Vassiliadis & Romer) - Feminism and Creative Aging   Feminism is a word that sets some people’s teeth on edge (visions of bra-burning and man-hating fanatics flash into mind), but there’s really no other word that describes the revolution in attitudes toward women that took place in the 1970s. Feminism, like it or not, has had an enormous impact on aging Baby Boomers as they make life choices for the next span of their existence.   Feminism, defined, simply means the drive toward equality for women in all aspects of personal and professional life. We have not reached true equality—salaries, for instance, still are not equal between men and women—but compared to the households many Baby Boomers were raised in, things have definitely changed.   My mother, for example, did not have a job while my brother and I were growing up. She was there to greet us every day when we got home from school. A physical education teacher bef...