Baby Boomer Women: 50 is Your NEW Fifty!
Suzanne Braun Levine, author of Fifty is the New Fifty, has many life lessons to share about embracing our age and achieving a new sense of self-empowerment at fifty and beyond.
We boomers are indeed fortunate because, as Suzanne writes, for our mothers and grandmothers, the “change of life” meant their lives stopped changing. As their nests emptied so did much of their focus and purpose. Without careers and with limited options and outlets, many of them became ladies who lunch, played tennis or bridge, or waited anxiously to become grandmothers. Maintaining home and hearth remained their primary responsibility and, with fewer mouths to feed, their job description became marginalized.
Ours, however, is a different generation. The women’s movement, the trailblazing spirit of the baby boomers, and the current economic realities have combined to keep us actively engaged in life way past our half-century birthdays. Traditional retirement is a thing of the past as the “forever-young” mindset of the boomers drives us to continue to contribute, interact, and break social barriers.
With our passion and energy still intact, the popular phrase for women our age has become “fifty is the new thirty.” But Suzanne buckles at that one! As she wrote: “That is not it at all. I have discovered that most women in Second Adulthood are very happy being where they are—they don’t want to go back to any of their earlier stages or decades… The assumption is that youth—or at least younger—is the ideal state and that given a choice, no woman in her right mind would relinquish it. I have found the opposite to be true.”
I, too, have found the opposite to be true and I bet you have as well. The years of fifty and beyond present us with many gifts: a newly found freedom to speak our minds and renounce much of our reflexive need to please; a greater sense of strength, mastery, and the ability to roll with the punches; and the drive towards authenticity and becoming the magnificently ripe and wise women we know ourselves to be.
Fifty also brings with it life lessons. Suzanne has highlighted ten of them in her book Fifty is the New Fifty and I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing her about all ten. Please take the brief fifteen minutes to listen to the final broadcast in our series and then check back to listen to each and every one. The lessons are powerful and profound and will guide you well through this amazing time in your life. In fact, you too, will likely start taking umbrage when someone smugly states, “fifty is the new thirty.”
No—it’s not! It’s far from that. Fifty is the brand new, remarkably fertile, ripe, robust, and exceedingly feisty FIFTY!
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July 26th, 2010 at 5:30 am
It’s great to connect with women in my age group. It seems that everyone I know is younger or older than me. I feel like here I’ll find some friends.
July 20th, 2010 at 3:18 pm
I love what Suzanne says about being 50. It definitely isn’t the new 30–but it is the new 50 in the sense that we are not living like our mothers once did. The world has changed and we have changed right along with it. And as far as being on the “feisty” side–that hasn’t changed for me either!