President Elect Barack Obama
Does How You Look Affect How You Are Living Life?
Regenna London age 48
What Happens When You Get Old?
I remember hating turning 29, because that meant that I only had one year left to be young.
I thought thirty was old. Now at forty eight, I know why I was always a little jealous of older women. I look and feel better than ever before. At my heaviest weight of 219 pounds, I lost my confidence and I was uncomfortable with my body. With all that goes on in life, I realize now that I had simply neglected myself. My spirit was deflated, but I wanted to live. I wanted to be happy in spite of death, divorce, unemployment, moving, and weight gain. I wanted to have fun and be at peace and I wanted it enough to do the work required to reach my goals. My girlfriends were there to support me, constantly sharing health, fitness and beauty tips, planting seeds to help me grow.
Where Women Grow is the fruit of those seeds.
My friends in their forty’s and beyond are looking sexy, feeling confident and staying fit.
Costume Party - October 2008
Join us! Where Women Grow ...A place to share wisdom, gain knowledge, explore new things, and plant seeds to help us enjoy life more. We are living life with passion, growing, and being comfortable with ourselves.
Are you loving yourself enough to pursue your dream, to live life with passion, to live true to yourself? Tell us how you're doing it!
Get Off The Nail
Living My Dream
Lions, Tigers, and Cougars - Older Women With Younger Men
Is Three A Crowd? The Real Deal on Threesomes
Hot Flash - Menopause
I’ll be honest and say that I was afraid of aging. What the heck was menopause about? Although I looked forward to the thought of not having a menstrual cycle, the other things I’d heard about like hot flashes and night sweats weren’t making me feel any better about aging. But the more you know, the more you grow so lets start by defining Menopause. Menopause is a normal process that all women experience as we age. Menopause is the term used to describe the changes a woman experiences either just before or after she stops menstruating, marking the end of her reproductive period. The experiences are so varied that we decided to bring you different experiences from women who are or have experienced “the change.”
So check out our stories, and feel free to comment or send us your own story.
editor@wherewomengrow.com
Living With Chronic Back Pain .... Cheryl L age 50
At the age of twenty-seven, I was living the “good life.” It was my second marriage but the first time I’d ever been in love. I thought the college degree and good job that my husband held meant that he was a strong black man and that he would always be there for my six year old daughter from my prior marriage, and the two children we would have together. We had the new house and car and were the profile of a black successful family. He was very abusive from the beginning of our marriage and ended up being addicted to crack. I was forced to move, divorce and raise three children as a single parent with no financial help from either of my children’s fathers. I hurt my back by picking up something too heavy during one of the many times we were forced to move. I recovered, started feeling good and moved on, trying to hold things together. I would forget about my back problem and re-injure it by lifting heavy things myself instead of asking for help. Now four back surgeries later, I have permanent hardware between L4, L5 and the S1 areas of my spine. I deal with lower back pain, and sometimes leg pain on a daily basis. I started out taking six pain pills a day after the last surgery for about two years. I was in constant pain, gained weight, and felt very weak and fragile. The extra weight added more stress on my back and it was hard for me to move around. I started to exercise, lost fifteen pounds, and went from six pain pills a day to two. My goal is to continue strengthening my body and not take pain meds on a daily basis. My children are grown and now my focus is to just do me, while dealing with menopause.
Are You Having An Affair? Or, Are You Cheating?
The truth is that I was sexually unfulfilled in my marriage for several years before I got a good excuse to cheat. I never told my husband that I was sexually unfulfilled. I thought if I told the truth, that he would think I was a freak, or cheating on him, or that it would make him feel less than a man. I loved him and I didn’t want to hurt his feeling. I accepted it as a part marriage and since everything else was okay that I could live with boring sex. But everything else wasn’t okay. I never felt like he lived up to the financial responsibility in our relationship, but I was willing to accept anything as long as he didn’t cheat on me. I couldn’t prove that my husband was cheating, but I knew he was lying and his lies were the excuse I used to seek the sexual fulfillment that I wanted. I told myself it was about getting even, that what’s good for the goose blah, blah, blah. But when I look back and examine it truthfully, I was only lying to myself.
I tried to have an affair with a married man, but he was only interested in cheating. He never said I love you, or gave me money, or said he was leaving his wife. He made it a point to not involve me in any of his family business. He didn’t want his wife to find out. His actions made me know that it was all about sex. We even had the conversation and agreed, “No strings attached.” Once again, I was lying to myself, because now, not only was I sexually unfulfilled, I was seeking emotional intimacy that I no longer had with my husband. So although I agreed to ‘no strings attached’, my actions made him know that I was seeking intense emotional intimacy. We were co-workers so it was easy to bring his favorite treat, to look great everyday, to treat him special. It was an attempt to control and manipulate him into feeling a certain way about me. I wanted emotional intimacy and sexual fulfillment. Real soon into our relationship, I abandoned my attempts to have an affair. I couldn’t make him share intimate feelings with me, and it was making me want intimacy even more. It was making me crazy, so I stopped the drama. I called it being a man about it. But now I know that I was accepting the truth. And the truth made me free to decide if I wanted to be in a sex only relationship. No more stress about why he didn’t call, or is he thinking about me and all the drama and uncertainty. The truth was that I didn’t love him, and he didn’t love me. All we had in common was intense sexual satisfaction and our job. I settled for sex, for five years. It didn’t make my situation at home any better though. I was hating my husband for ‘having an affair’ even while I was ‘cheating’, and no matter what excuse I used to cheat, I still felt guilty about his wife, but that didn’t make me end the sexual relationship. It was only after I decided to end my marriage, get my own place, and start new that I ended my ‘cheating’ relationship. Now that I was free from marriage, I wanted to be free to seek all that I wanted in a relationship. Ironically, during the time I was ending my marriage, my cheating partner and I were hardly spending any time together. I had moved on to another job and he had family issues, which he kept private.
My sex partner later confided that his wife was diagnosed with cancer in its late stages and she subsequently passed away. As she was dying, she asked him if he was cheating on her. He lied, like so many of us would do in the same situation. Maybe if he had told the truth she would have died without the stress of a lie on her heart. Maybe he was trying to comfort her by sticking to the lie (a cheater’s tip he had earlier passed to me). I was ashamed for the part I played in her stress. I understood why she still wanted to know the truth. It would take a year after I moved out of my house before my husband would come clean with the truth. It was too late for any chance of us reconciling our marriage, but I still wanted him to tell me the truth. I was surprised that I cried when he finally admitted what I suspected. By this time, his affair had been going on for about seven years and I thought I was done with tears. With the truth, I was able to proceed with divorce and start a new life. What’s the moral of this story? What did I learn? I loved my husband, and if he had told me the truth from the beginning or before it got to the point that I stopped caring, then maybe we could have remained friends if not married. Name withheld … age 41
The difference between telling the truth and a lie is that the truth allows us the opportunity to make decisions based on reality. A lie takes away our freedom of choice and robs us of time we can never get back. When you are not happy with your present reality, it's time to do something different. You cannot change another person, but you can change yourself. Make a change to direct your life in the direction of peace and happiness. Exercise your right to grow.
Regenna L