What Modern Women Seek | Certain Age Magazine

Unleashing women's power one story at a time.

Beauty Unchained

Invisible? Not exactly.

We are modern women over 50.

When we speak, we expect to be heard.

When we ask questions, we listen to the answers.

We hold power.

We enjoy what we’ve earned and share what we have -

thereby making miracles.

We find wonder in small things and seek to know more.

When our soul speaks, we act on its promptings.

We are Women of a Certain Age and we are a force.

Street art image of a cat head on a woman's body

Dapper Cat image by Dee Dee (@deedeewashere)

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Editor's Note

Welcome. No seriously.

Travel is one of the defining impulses of my life, one I’ve succumbed to over and over. In Indonesia I sang karaoke – in Indonesian! – with a family who took me in after I literally missed the boat. In Zimbabwe a woman named Faith walked me onto a dance floor and showed me the local moves. In India I watched a Hindu-Buddhist-Bollywood Christmas pageant. Here in Greece, our Albanian neighbors once bestowed upon us their very best chicken (and homemade raki) after we’d brought them a small treat.

I took this photo recently in Nérac, France, on my morning bakery run for yet another chocolatine. (I’m powerless against them!). Zap! The girls with their bright backpacks went straight to my heart.

Seeing them, so eager, made me realize something. No matter where I’ve wandered, I’ve never found a place where people don't want their kids to have a good day at school. Or where, when someone’s born or someone dies, they don’t take a dish over to help out. I don’t know of a place where people don’t want to put food on the table or wash up afterwards with clean water. Everywhere I've been, there is a way to say "Welcome!" And more times than I can count, people with nothing shared everything with me, their hospitality freely, joyfully given, a point of pride, a gift in itself.

Nonetheless, in this season of rancor, it’s tempting to perseverate on our differences. We’re certainly encouraged to do so. But I beg to differ. My plan is to seek out all the ways we are alike. Because I believe, based on years of direct experience, that these are our strengths, and that the spirit of welcome is the source of our hope.

Join me, won't you? Together, we can do radical things. Like name the common good. Touch the common ground. Welcome the stranger. Dismiss any voice that tells us to crouch in fear. And we won't listen when they say there isn’t enough, or it’s too late, or we can’t.

There is, it isn’t, and we can.

xo Jean