To friends and family: Don’t worry! I remain fully clothed through the duration of this essay.

To the 77 of you who are duplicate subscribers, my apologies. I will be consolidating these two Substacks under Geezer at the end of the week. If you don’t want to migrate, please let me know or simply unsubscribe.

Now, onto the main event! Click below to read the whole thing on Geezer mag’s Substack!

Geezer magazine

Come for the Orgy, Stay for the Personal Growth

Howdy, friends! This story appears in issue No. 3 of Geezer magazine. If it tickles your fancy (or anything else), consider becoming an annual paid subscriber—you’ll get all the ‘Stack stuff, plus Geezer print mag delivered to your mailbox! Now, without further ado, my not-so-undercover foray into the world of middle-aged sex parties…

Read more

10 days ago · 12 likes · 5 comments · Laura LeBleu

I have 15 minutes to figure out what to wear.

Clingy black dress? (No. Wrong message.) Flowy blouse and wide-legged pants? (Weirdly business-like for a Saturday afternoon.) I tear through my wardrobe like a dervish, piles of clothes rising like stalagmites.

I’m flummoxed. What does one wear to their first sex party?

The mirror reflects a harried woman in the ultimate “I give up” outfit: jeans, T-shirt, tennies. Maybe this works? After all, I’m reporting on—not participating in—the day’s activities. But showing up looking more soccer mom than sex kitten feels aggressively normie.

In desperation, I send an SOS to my sex-party-savvy millennial friend Melanie. She talks me down and I land on a purple boho dress with flowing fabric that hits mid-thigh. Not overtly va-va-voom, but also not without possibility.

As I scramble to my car, I send a final text: What can I expect? Melanie’s droll response: It’s a party. But people are having sex.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF MIXTAPE

The 50+ play party I’m barreling toward is sponsored by Bonobo Network, a private, sex-positive community based in the Bay Area.

A few months earlier, I had reached out to Bonobo’s founder, William Winters, to discuss midlife sexuality and find out more about this burgeoning world of 50+ sexploration. Winters, a 46-year-old Louisiana native, and his partner, Anna, relocated to the Bay Area in 2008 and began exploring the polyamorous community. He threw his first play party in 2010, and by 2014, the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed him “the de facto king of the East Bay polyamory scene.”

I’m curious if there’s truth behind the cultural narrative that Gen X women, having fended off the twin dragons of AIDS and teen pregnancy, are reclaiming their sexuality and living their best cougar lives. Meanwhile, Pornhub’s 2025 Year in Review revealed that “MILF” was the platform’s second-most-popular search term (right behind “hentai”), with “hot MILF,” “mature,” and “GILF” (yes, that means “grandma I’d like to fuck”) on the rise.

What exactly is going on? In our first conversation, Winters gives me the lay (no pun intended) of the land.

At Bonobo Network, where the clientele skews a bit older and potlucks are as popular as orgies, the emphasis is on consent, community, and belonging, Winters tells me. “Even if you are someone who has never been to a play party before, you just look around and see how people are treating each other,” he says. “You see that people are asking before touching each other, being so friendly and welcoming. That provides the cues for how you should behave inside these spaces. And consent is a huge part of that.”

That said, there are thornier aspects of the communal sex experience.

“Play parties are almost perfectly designed to bring up your deepest high school shit,” he tells me. “Am I good enough? Attractive enough? Can I get what I want? Do I even know what I want? It gets really intense.” But he believes participants can grow by addressing these questions head on. “We encourage people to explore these feelings. And through the alchemy of vulnerability, there’s a lot of potential for healing. Especially since we create a culture of support and connection, of not shaming each other.”

During our conversation, it comes up that a 50+ party, aptly entitled Mixtape, is on the calendar. Would I want to join?

Um…maybe. Sure? I mean, the quickest route to knowledge is experience. Once I assure him that I will observe the proceedings in a non-lurky, creep-free way, numbers are exchanged, arrangements are made, and I am officially on the Mixtape list.

HERE THEY COME

During the two-and-a-half-hour drive into San Francisco, my apprehension percolates. I’m a sex-positive kinda gal, but a coital romp with a group of strangers is a million miles out of my comfort zone. Would there be a dungeon, dark and filled with menacing devices? What salacious activities awaited my mostly un-pornographied eyes?

This foray, I fear, might be about 17 steps too far.

I cruise over the Bay Bridge into one of those San Francisco days that make you swear off other cities forever. Crystalline sky, mid-70s, not a curl of fog. Soon I’m on a narrow, winding street that scales its way up one of Bernal Heights’ most formidable cliffs, where houses cling stoically over the city’s bustling expanse.

There’s a man dressed in black standing in front of a home, either hedging or waiting. This must be what the exterior of a sex party house looks like.

The entrance leads to a nondescript basement space, where two gentlemen receive guests. In my desire to come off as chill, I overexplain who I am and what I’m here for. One of the guys, Smash, asks if I brought my Covid test results. I’m thrown by this prerequisite—it is, after all, 2026. But rules are rules and, frankly, if I were getting up in a stranger’s business, I’d want to know he was virus-free, too.

So I swab and sit and wait while people wordlessly swap civilian garb for play costumes. As I look on, the immortal words of Radiohead creep in: “What the hell am I doin’ here? I don’t belong here.”

HIGH POSSIBILITY, LOW EXPECTATIONS

Test clear, I climb the stairs to the first floor, where the kitchen and main living space are located. The throb of Need You Tonight by INXS underscores the low-key chatter of people ready for action, and I locate Amanda, one of the three hosts of today’s event. I introduce myself in what I hope is a cheery, neutral demeanor.

Amanda’s vibe is “favorite professor,” if your professor was a 53-year-old hottie rocking a pair of fishnets and a frilly black micro-miniskirt. She shows me around and we navigate through the crowd of 50 or so, mostly white middle-aged club members. Bodies of all shapes and sizes are festooned in fairy wings and sexy thongs. Others are more subdued, like the pair of men in groovy, button-up shirts sinking into the couch.

The very Gen X-friendly start time of 3 p.m. rolls around, and the opening ceremonies begin.

Amanda puts on her glasses, grabs her notes, and announces, much to my delight, “Welcome to the geezer party!” She introduces her fellow hosts, Tim and Dane, and tells the crowd that their job is to set the tone and show what a healthy and respectful sex party looks like. “Those of us who are considered ‘experienced sluts’ are here to model excellent behavior,” she says.

When Amanda asks me to introduce myself, I stand and smile, clutching my issue of Geezer No. 1 like a shield across my chest. “At this point,” I say, “I’m here to observe and talk with whoever wants to share.” The audience quickly picks up on my leading qualifier, and a collective hoot follows. Blushing, I flash my yellow Bonobo bracelet, which I chose upon entry to communicate that I could be approached if anyone wanted to talk but that I would not approach anyone who didn’t. (In practice, green signals a person is open to receiving non-sexual touch without being asked; yellow that they want to be asked first; red that they don’t want to be asked and will initiate contact themselves.)

I return to my perch on the stairs, and Amanda continues with some housekeeping rules: Cups go in the dishwasher. Have sex on a puppy pad or on one of the rolled up blankets provided, even though, as Dane chirpily points out, “not everyone’s a squirter!” Don’t have sex in the owner’s bedroom, unless you know her and ask first. And please, keep the banal chatter, like talking about your taxes, to a minimum while people are trying to fuck.

It is like the most bizarre summer camp orientation imaginable.

Amanda moves on to the Bonobo mantra: high possibility, low expectations. “It’s reasonable to come to an orgy with some hopes and dreams,” she tells everyone. “But you need to set those hopes and dreams aside to align with connection.” Nods all around.

Next, she introduces the most important component of a play party: consent. Use your words. Ask for what you want. Articulate what you don’t. “We are in dialogue with each other about what feels good and safe. And if someone says no,” Amanda asks, “what is the proper response?” The group answers back dutifully, “Thank you for taking care of yourself.”

As a Gen X woman, I find this concept both foreign and beautiful.

ENTER THE MEET MARKET

The atmosphere becomes simultaneously more relaxed and electrified. Those who came as couples sink further into each other while those who did not have scouted potential playmates.

This is when the Meet Market begins…

MADE IT THIS FAR? Continue reading here!

Geezer magazine

Come for the Orgy, Stay for the Personal Growth

Howdy, friends! This story appears in issue No. 3 of Geezer magazine. If it tickles your fancy (or anything else), consider becoming an annual paid subscriber—you’ll get all the ‘Stack stuff, plus Geezer print mag delivered to your mailbox! Now, without further ado, my not-so-undercover foray into the world of middle-aged sex parties…

Read more

10 days ago · 12 likes · 5 comments · Laura LeBleu

For those who subscribe to both this and my Geezer magazine Substack, this post will be a duplicate. Apologies! Would you mind if I migrated your Laura’s Substack subscription over to Geezer? This would eliminate the double-posts and consolidate my efforts. If you have thoughts one way or another, please post in the comments.

Now, onward!

Here’s how I got to know Jane Pratt: Last April, she published an article I wrote about the time my aunt tried to baptize me in her swimming pool. The twist? I sent this essay to Jane magazine in the early 2000s. It was politely rejected. When I found the original printed copy lurking in my files, I emailed it to Another Jane Pratt Thing. Jane responded immediately, this time with an enthusiastic “yes!”

Some stories need to wait to be told. I was thrilled when Jane shared mine, and I’m equally thrilled to share hers. Enjoy!

Jane is late.

Jane is late and I’m not annoyed, dismayed, or disappointed. In fact, I’m kind of delighted. As I wait for her at the top of the 28th Street entrance to New York City’s High Line, my smile is one of goofy anticipation. Because, while Jane may be late, I know what she’s doing.

Jane Pratt, founder of Sassy and Jane magazines, is searching frantically for her keys while texting with her bestie, R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe. Or maybe she walked out the door but forgot her glasses, went back inside, then decided to change into more comfortable shoes before somehow misplacing her phone, which she found only when other bestie Courteney Cox gave her a call.

I know this because Pratt has been low-key living in my brain since 11th grade, when my best friend, Lacy, gave me my first Sassy magazine. She slid it over like a secret handshake and whispered, “You’ve got to see this, LeBluh. It’s for us.” By “us,” she meant the outliers, the theatre kids, the crystal-wearing vegetarians growing up weird in Texas.

We were drawn to Sassy’s ambient intimacy. Editors went by their first names. Readers put their darkest secrets on display in the popular It Happened To Me column. Articles dug into sex, AIDS, and homosexuality in a frank way no other teen mag dared. (For good reason: Sassy was hit hard in 1989 when a letter-writing crusade by the Christian Coalition scared away a good 30% of its advertisers.)

Pratt was a master of parasocial relationships long before any of us knew the word “parasocial.”

*******

This same clubiness percolates today on Pratt’s Substack, Another Jane Pratt Thing (AJPT), which bubbles with TMI anecdotes and back-and-forth reader comments.

In one post, Jane tells us about losing her bra while changing clothes on the way to a fancy art opening. Then she asks for advice: Should she call out the person who claims they worked for Sassy when they didn’t? Then she gives an update on her search for a new editor—an editor who will be chosen from the thousands of readers who applied using the subject line I Am A Good Person.

It’s the same playbook she used for her print mags, hyperactivated across the Substack platform. And while the relationship is still parasocial—for all her energy and banter, she can’t possibly be as connected to us as we are to her—readers are thrilled to bask in Jane’s glow.

We know we don’t know know her, but we know her…you know?

The wind has whipped my hair into a Medusa-like froth by the time Jane ascends the stairs.

Wearing the standard-issue NYC black on black, she bops my way with a smile that almost matches my own. Her blue eyes are vibrant behind black-rimmed glasses, and her voice is lower than expected, with a pleasantly gravelly tinge. Meanwhile, my inside voice is “squeeeeeing” loudly: OMG. It’s JANE PRATT!

We set off at an acceptable NYC pace (fast) toward Joe’s Pub, the East Village performance space where she actually will be meeting Stipe, whom she has known since college. I ask if she realizes the magnitude of the impact she has had on Gen X women’s lives, and she seems genuinely reflective.

“People will contact me and tell me what was going on in their lives when they got Sassy magazine and how it changed things for them,” she says. “So I’m used to hearing these individual stories, and some of them are pretty dramatic. But the sheer number…I never really thought about it.”

This is an understandable surprise. It’s been almost 20 years since Jane magazine shut down and 30 years since Sassy stopped publishing. In the interim, her audience grew up, started careers and families, and were largely consumed by the care and feeding of day-to-day existence. Only recently did Gen X women get loud about the societal and hormonal midlife fuckery they’re experiencing.

True to form, Pratt has tapped into this shift. Just as Sassy targeted teenagers and Jane was aimed at twentysomethings, AJPT has popped up just in time to catch this wave that is, in many ways, an evolution of the conversation she kicked off all those years ago.

“I certainly don’t take credit for it,” she says as we weave our way through throngs of lollygagging tourists, ”but I think there are an inordinate number of really cool women right in this age range: 40s, 50s, 60s. We’re more open about everything we’re going through.”

We flag a cab to make up for lost time, and I ask her what her life looks like today. “It’s so fucking fun,” she says with a grin. “I feel like I’m in the best time of my life. I know people always say that, but I feel really lucky that I get to work with and for the same amazing people I knew when they were 13, 14, 15 years old…it’s incredible.”

Jane’s life hasn’t been all celebrities and heart bubbles.

“The fact that I’ve been able to do what I do belies how hard it was and all the sacrifices that went into it.” The pace of her patter slows. “I went through a period that people don’t know about around the time I left Jane magazine,” she says. ”It was very weird to go past a newsstand and see a magazine with my name on it that someone else was putting out. That also went hand in hand with miscarrying twins I had conceived through in vitro.”

For all of Pratt’s legendary forthrightness, she’s held her most personal cards close, including her experience hiring a surrogate to carry a pregnancy. She assures me all will be revealed in her upcoming memoir, which at this point (spoiler alert!) ends happily. “As the single mom of an only, cool-ass girl,” she says, “I ended up with exactly what I always wanted.”

*******

This isn’t the end, of course.

If there’s one thing I glean from our short time together, it’s that Jane’s gonna Jane. She has walked through the fire and is clearly ready to let it rip again. What might that look like? Sassy magazine, rising from its decades-cold ashes like a phoenix in print.

“I have never actually thought that it was a viable idea to restart a print version of Sassy magazine,” she says, “until today.”

My inner “squee” returns. Because Jane has the rare gift of making people feel seen, understood, and valued. That’s what Sassy did for me and untold uncomfortable others who didn’t quite fit the mold. If she can do it again, I’ll be the first to subscribe.

Geezer magazine

Geezer is the only print magazine for Gen X. We explore the agony and ecstasy of aging—because midlife is weird in ways no one warned us about.

By Laura LeBleu

Paid annual subscribers to Geezer’s Substack get Geezer print mag delivered to their mailboxes 3x/year. Anyone else on Substack doing that? Bueller? Bueller?

I can’t stop thinking about this article I read by Robin Levine Shobin on middle-aged women who don’t exist.

It’s a surgical takedown of the lie being sold on social media to women in their fifties. The broad outlines are: I had a crappy husband, I dumped him, I “glowed up,” and now at 57 I’m hotter and happier than I’ve ever been.

It didn’t take too much digging for the author to discover that these were AI-generated women telling AI-generated stories emotionally engineered to sell a host of expensive wellness products. I have an unending stream of spicy words for this predatory bullshit. As if our generation wasn’t damaged enough by diet culture. Now “wellness” vultures circle our aging bodies, stoking midlife insecurities to feed their own dead-eyed grift.

But then I thought to myself: Wait. Am I guilty of the same thing?

Not that I am AI generated or that I’m hawking NAD+ products, but have I been sharing a similar story: Turned 50, left a long-term marriage, cashed in after decades spent writing for other people and founded a print magazine that let my creative light shine.

All of this is true. None of it is simple.

My “midlife transformation” looks nothing like the before-and-after images on social media. It looks more like a house in the middle of demolition: drywall exposed, naked wires dangling, decaying appliances lingering awkwardly in the side yard. The neighbors are over it and so am I, but the contractors are sketchy and the job may never be complete. It’s uncomfortable for everyone.

The Jung and the restless

Back in 2022, when I started rethinking every aspect of my life—as you do—I instinctively turned to storytelling.

I devoured books like Glennon Doyle’s Untamed and Kimberly Harrington’s But You Seemed So Happy. I processed endless podcasts while running the trails behind my home, seeking guidance, yes, but also searching for a hopeful outcome. I wanted to hear the same stripped-down story I’ve been guilty of telling: she leaves, she succeeds, there is much rejoicing.

The book that really did it for me, though, was The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife by Jungian scholar James Hollis. This I could dig my teeth into. I read a chapter or two every night looking for permission to detonate the life I had painstakingly crafted over a quarter century.

Here’s the passage that gave it to me:

“A very effective instrument when in the face of blockages and difficult choices is to ask the very pragmatic question: Does this choice enlarge me or diminish me?...We should choose the path of enlargement, not service to wealth, power, fame, or the accolades of others, because it is what is asked of us by the soul. When we choose the small, we don’t have to step into the large, which is quite comforting until we realize we are living small, diminished lives.”

This made sense. To stay would extend the slow drip of self-diminishment I’d felt over decades of choosing my family’s emotional, administrative, and financial support over my own desires. To leave was to take the much more exciting path towards enlargement.

My husband, no doubt freaked out by my new penchant for bawling during kids’ movies and sad commercials, retreated into his garage. I was left alone to run, work, and weep. I drank too much and listened to Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters on repeat. It was all very perimenopausal, though I didn’t know it then. Sadly, my unraveling took place a few years before the term “estrogen cliff” claimed space in our vernacular.

I had soon crawled so deep into the cannon of my heart’s three-ring circus that emerging quietly was not an option—I would have to be shot, screaming, into the unknown. All it would take was one errant spark.

The catalyst came in the form of an ex-coworker. He was hot and smart. I was alone and vulnerable. The fuse was lit and I cannonballed out of my old life and into the unknown without a plan or an inkling of what was to come.

This is where the Insta-perfect midlife glow-up falls apart. What I did was dumb and destructive and what came next was a goat rodeo of epic proportions. There should be no “like and subscribe” for the terrible conflicts, financial devastation, and emotional agony that ensued. This is the shit that does not sell supplements.

A divine tragicomedy

It’s been almost four years since I caught fire. Just enough time to begin processing the experience with a bit of detachment.

The catalyst relationship was a slow-motion flop—another outcome that doesn’t fit nicely into the narrative. Looking back, the worst thing about it is the headline’s cliché: “Wife leaves good but checked-out husband for alluring but unavailable man.” To quote Goethe: Ew. Gross. Gag me with a spoon.

So, was taking a battering ram to my well-constructed life, destroying my marriage, disrupting my kid’s childhood, and flinging myself into the abyss worth it? My answer thus far is a solid “maybe.”

Because somehow, in the midst of the mess, my life dances on the edge of divine. And it only does that because I reclaimed and resurrected my own creativity. That was the vital part of me that had been diminished over time—and when it got the chance, it came back with a decades-delayed ferocity.

Case in point: If I hadn’t left my old life, I wouldn’t have created Geezer magazine. And if I hadn’t created Geezer, I wouldn’t have met Jane Pratt, creator of Sassy magazine and lifelong inspiration. And if I hadn’t met Jane Pratt, whose profile I wrote for issue No. 3, she wouldn’t have sent me this text that I will cherish forever:

That feels like a high-five from the universe for believing in myself enough to take a risk.

Am I lonely? Sometimes. Would I like a partner to hang out, get naked, and do fun stuff with? Absolutely. But, amazingly, my lifelong fear of aloneness has dissipated. I’m oddly content with walking my dogs, working out, chilling with friends, and making my magazine. I don’t even keep hard alcohol in the house anymore, so no more late-night languishing over a gin and tonic.

All signs are pointing to a healthy, happy ending—but that’s no guarantee. There’s a ton of potential fuckery between here and there.

The midlife reinvention trope is pure, uncut Gen X catnip. It’s also an awkward, hormonally addled return to adolescence, but with so much more at stake. So let’s not kid ourselves—every transformation comes at a cost, every growing thing cracks the seed that contained it. You’re not going to want to put this on your Insta feed, no matter how good you look by the end.

Friends, if you’d like to support Geezer magazine, subscribe below. Paid annual subscriptions get the Geezer print mag delivered to their mailboxes three times a year! Does anyone else on Substack do that? Bueller? Bueller?

Geezer magazine

Geezer is the only print magazine for Gen X. We explore the agony and ecstasy of aging—because midlife is weird in ways no one warned us about.

By Laura LeBleu

The second in a series on how Geezer came to be. Have a question about what it takes to launch and run an independent print mag? Leave it in the comments! But first…Go to Geezermagazine.com and use the code SUMMER15 by midnight tonight for 15% off your annual subscription!

It’s 9:27am on Wednesday, July 15.

I’m two lattes in and just finished the final proof of Geezer’s third issue. Every punctuation mark, photo credit, layout choice, and pull quote has to be checked and rechecked. Because this is print—there’s no going back once the ink hits the page.

Issue No. 3 completes my first full year of Geezer magazines. (We publish triannually: November, March, July.)

I’m proud. I’m terrified. I may very well go broke. But I’m making a magazine, dammit. And ask anyone who knows me: Once my blinders go on, it takes an act of Congress to get them off. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s commit to a bit.

One year ago

This time last year I was getting the website up, working on the first editorial calendar, and talking with people who knew the print magazine world. I reached out to people like Kade Kritchko, creator of Ori magazine, who connected me with our wonderful art director, Jessie Gallagher.

This time last year I was doing this with a partner. Part of the reason I created Geezer was so that we could make something fantastic together. That didn’t work out.

This time last year the stock I earned over a decade of selling my soul to the tech industry was worth about twice what it is today.

This time last year I had a full-time job. As of a month or so ago, that’s no longer the case.

So, circumstances have changed. But one thing remains—my stubborn belief that people want and need a print magazine like Geezer.

Mistakes were made. Expensive ones

Before the bottom fell out of the software industry stock (a phenomenon dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse”), I was feeling pretty flush. Sure I was a divorced single mom, but my ability to adapt as a writer working in technology left me with a financial cushion rare for someone with a theatre degree from a state university. So I did what any rational person would do: Sell a chunk of stock and sink it into a print-only magazine for Gen X called Geezer. What could go wrong?

BWAHAHAHAHAHALOLOLOLOLOLOLZZZZZZZ 🫠🫠🫠

Friends, mistakes were made. Costly ones. Here are a few of them:

1. We printed 5,000 of issue No. 1 to the tune of about $40,000. It made sense at the time, economies of scale and all. Today, about 4,000 of those magazines sit in a warehouse in Wisconsin, waiting to be called up. Some day, little buddies, some day! Until then, I pay for the storage on a monthly basis.

2. We launched the magazine, but had no marketing plan to speak of. So I paid a publicist $15,000 for a three-month PR push. We got a few bites, but nothing close to approaching an ROI.

3. Shipping costs and taxes show up like sand fleas at a nude beach, accruing stealthily until you’re rife with tiny, itchy, expensive welts.

4. Canada, I love you—but you’re killing me. I was interviewed on the CBC show The Current, which was a wonderful experience (and a successful placements from the PR push). I didn’t realize that shipping to Canada would cost more than the magazine—currently $28 per copy. I lose money on every Canadian order, even after charging $70 US for shipping on an annual subscription.

5. We paid $7,500 to a content consulting company that still hasn’t helped sell one single, goddamn issue.

Why I’m (mostly) OK with all of this

Listen, I realize I should have gone into this with a business plan somewhat more robust than: AARP sucks, Gen X needs a print magazine, I’m going to make it.

But I didn’t. And that’s OK. Which I realize is a ridiculously privileged thing to say, but it’s true. Because I have made something that people fucking love. I get notes from strangers telling me that Geezer is exactly what they needed to feel some joy in this world. So if I have to keep hustling all by myself to make this venture successful, that’s what I’m going to do. But I’m going to do it in a much more fiscally responsible way. Obvs.

Here’s what I’m doing now to keep the dream alive:

1. Slashing printing costs by reducing quantity and moving from offset to digital printing. The quality is apples to apples, and I’m only printing 600 (with the option to print 250 more should I need to). The total run cost this time is $14,200.

2. Using Insta and Substack (oh, hai!) to market Geezer like a mofo on my own.

3. Working with people like John Brewton of Operating by John Brewton who get what I’m doing, love the magazine, and genuinely want to be a part of its success.

What I won’t skimp on? Geezer will always be large format (11 x 15), as the size is integral to the experience. And it will alway be a 100% AI-free zone. I refuse to serve up slop. I will continue to pay contributors whenever I can, as much as possible. If I commission a piece from a professional writer who has spent their life honing their craft, that person deserves to be compensated. I agonize over not being able to pay more.

OK, y’all. It’s now 11:31am and time for me to scram. I’ve got a meeting with a web designer who is going to help make Geezer.com a better experience.

The “fun” part of magazine making is over, and now the real work begins. That is, until August, when I kick off editorial for issue No. 4. That’s when the intense, challenging, and addictively creative work begins.

Geezer, I just can’t quit ya.

ANNUAL GEEZER SUBSTACK SUBSCRIBERS GET THE GEEZER PRINT MAGAZINE. Sign up before some business person tells me it’s a bad idea!

I wrote this for Geezer issue No. 2, way before the NY Times covered the communal sauna phenomenon. But here’s the bigger scoop: Issue No. 3 is almost here and you can get 15% off your annual subscription! Go to geezermagazine.com and use the code SUMMER15—but do it fast because the offer expires at midnight on July 15.

A snowstorm looms as I blaze a trail through New York City’s Flatiron District.

I’m late to meet friends at Othership, a newish entry into the city’s spa-industrial complex. Othership’s wellness proposition takes the form of guided sauna and cold plunge sessions. “Who needs a sauna sherpa?” I scoff to myself as I pass through Madison Square Park. “The kids. Of course. Whatabuncha pussies.”

I know the word “pussy” as a pejorative isn’t cool, even if only in my internal monologue. But today it feels subversive and satisfying and against everything Othership stands for. I’ve watched the intro video—in which co-founder Harry Taylor, a well-constructed Canadian with a next-level man bun, admits that saunas and ice baths can be “scary.” His vowels are round and empathetic as he holds space, in the vernacular, for those who find cold water intimidating.

I am feeling trés Gen X, so this sounds like pussy territory to me. I knew how to fix my bike’s flat tires, code rudimentary video games, and navigate the public bus system by the time I was 8.

Subscribe now

The wind picks up as I turn onto 20th Street and enter the Othership, where the soft amber lighting, cedar incense, and Zamfir-ish music serve solid spa vibes. A group of pretty young things in the lobby confirm my thesis: This is, indeed, a wretched hive of millennials and Gen Zers. I must be cautious.

A fresh-faced girl named Kat checks me in. She hands me a green rubber bracelet that indicates I’m a first-timer and gently assures me the guides will be happy to jump in should I need special assistance. Whether she means the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” kind of assistance or the “cold water is scary” kind, I do not know.

***************

The only thing I’m scared of is the class we’ve booked: a guided experience called Emotions A to Z.

The class is described as “a transformative 4-part series designed to explore the rich tapestry of human emotions.” The description says I should “expect a sauna to sweat (duh), an ice bath to drop-in (into what?), towel waving (WTF), aromatherapy (OK), self inquiry (um…maybe), sharing (no) and self expression (HARD NO).”

But I am here for the experience. And although I can’t entirely check my generational skepticism at the door, I don’t want to be that lame-ass old person who hates everything young people love. So I open my heart, my mind and, eventually, my locker, which I can’t quite figure out how to work without my glasses on.

Swimsuit on and stuff secured, I head to the communal tea room.

***********

Seeing Linda and Kristin fills me with relief. We have known one another for decades, through the milestones of marriage, kids, death, and divorce. We perch on the padded benches and catch up as the space fills with fellow voyagers. The crowd is diverse in every way except, I’m assuming, financial: A single class is $64 and an unlimited membership is $333 a month.

A large, flying-saucerish light fixture emanates a forgiving glow as we chat about the fact that we haven’t been publicly seen in our bathing suits for—ahem—quite some time. That’s when our guide appears, wearing a branded Othership sauna hat that reminds me of either a Keebler elf or Crackle from the Rice Krispies crew. He is rocking a dad bod, and later, when we are deconstructing our experience, the three of us agree that this is a source of comfort.

Keebler and Nicole, his chipper, ponytailed assistant, usher us into the large rectangular sauna. He shares a couple of instructions and a warning: Sit on your towel. Hydrate. The higher you go, the hotter it is. We choose the lowest of three long wooden benches and breathe in the pleasantly warm air. The lights dim and the show begins.

******

Music plays softly as we settle into the sauna vibe. Through his waterproof headset, Keebler downshifts into a lilting, meditative voice, inviting us to “find the emotion we are with.”

The only thing I can conjure with honesty is “fucked up,” which I know isn’t an emotion, but it feels right for our times. And then, with unexpected theatricality, our guide and his helper chuck two fist-sized aromatherapy snowballs into the heated rocks. Sweet, orange-scented steam rises as the lights change and music shifts—it is synchronized and theatrical, like sweat therapy with jazz hands.

And then, the waving begins! Keebler and Nicole whip their white spa towels vigorously overhead, wafting the wet, aromatic air our way. They are so into it—the flailing, the flair—each with their own technique. Their unfettered enthusiasm amuses me greatly.

The excitement of the sauna semaphore subsides and Keebler’s soothing voice returns. “Let’s explore the emotion of joy.”

Much to my surprise, I start crying. Quietly. Yes, I am crying during joy. How do I connect with joy when there’s so little of it in today’s world?

“Maybe it’s something from your childhood,” Keebler says. “Like the first time you tasted ice cream.” My childhood feels so far away. That also makes me feel sad. And old. Then, with yet another theatrical flourish, the lights and music change and a rich, rose-scented aromatherapy ball explodes.

The pitch of Keebler’s voice lowers. “Now, we’re going to explore shame.”

Oh, are we now? Delightful.

This time, I chuckle. Just a soft snort born of the absurdity of this communal, sweaty-ass therapy session. “Shame,” Keebler says, “often shows up as ‘should.’” This little truth nugget legitimately hits, yet my skepticism remains. How much self-transformation can one achieve in a sauna? By the time you’ve made it to middle age, a towel-waving Keebler elf ain’t gonna do the trick.

Once again, lights change, balls burst, and towels wave. Sweat rolls off my nose as the sound of chirping birds fills the increasingly steamy hot box. Keebler’s voice lightens. “And now, let’s move through the emotion of self-compassion. What does that feel like for you?” While I appreciate this emotional denouement, my self-compassion generally centers on having lasted this long in a 175-degree sweat fest.

Having properly forgiven ourselves for being dumb, fallible humans, it is time for the true challenge: the cold plunge.

******

We are divided into groups and led into the cold plunge room.

There are two square-shaped in-ground tubs and three coffin-shaped ones, ranging in temperature from the mid-30s to the mid-40s. Before we begin, our earnest assistant asks if anyone is new to the cold plunge experience. My friends raise their hands, and she chirps, “Your fight or flight response will be activated! Just breathe! You’re going to crush it!”

We are assigned to a larger bath on the warmer end, 44 degrees. When our turn comes, we make the plunge—Linda and I up to our necks, Kristin up to her boobs. In Kristin’s defense, the tits are absolutely the hardest part of the plunge for us ladies. We breathe through two minutes of frigidity and emerge like watery goddesses amongst the shivering children.

After an odd interlude in which the assistant tinkles a chime-like device, ostensibly to help regulate our nervous system, we’re herded back to the sauna.

Happy in the heat after our icy baths, we close our eyes, breathe in, and exhale a throaty “ahhhhhhhhh.” And that’s when Keebler takes us on an interstellar adventure.

He asks us to imagine that we are floating up and out of the sauna, above the city and into the sky, gaining speed as we rise through the atmosphere until we are weightlessly drifting through outer space. “You see an alien being,” says Keebler. And then…plot twist! “You are that alien being. What do you look like?”

My form immediately manifests as one of the octopus-like space creatures from The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horrors episodes. I see myself, green tentacles flailing, cackling maniacally under my glass helmet as I plot mankind’s demise.

I suspect this was not the alien the Othership creators anticipated.

Keebler continues. “A white ball of light appears. This is the universe. The universe asks if you want to land back on planet Earth.” The catch, he tells us, is that if we go back, we will experience a range of unruly emotions. Assuming the answer is yes, Keebler guides us back through the cosmos and into our bodies, where we land, safe and serene. I miss my alien form almost immediately.

I open my eyes and take in the satisfied half-smiles of my fellow space travelers. They’ve had a good trip. I’m still waiting for the “self-expression” portion of the journey. What exactly do people want to share? In a sauna? With strangers?

Sadly, I did not find out. “We’re short on time,” Keebler apologizes. “So we won’t be able to do our group share. But if anyone wants to talk, I’ll be outside.” Wah, wah. Sad trombone. Slightly disappointed, I shower and make my way to the locker room, where just remembering my locker number and code feels like a significant victory.

************

Over lunch, Linda, Kristin, and I debrief.

We agree that our Othership experience was less cringe than originally expected. Kristin was “surprisingly into it.” She likens it to “Bikram yoga, but for emotions.” Linda agrees. “People were there to sweat and deal with their feelings. It felt very human.”

Both are trained actors and professional voiceover artists, and Linda nails it when she says, “It was as if a TED Talk and a voice and movement class had a baby in a really dimly lit, scented room.”

We appreciated that the vibes at Othership were open and accepting. Regardless of our age or the state of our bodies, none of us felt judged. And that, for a group of Gen X women raised to be hyper-aware of our thigh size, is saying something.

Somewhat to my chagrin, we came to the conclusion that it was a positive, lovely experience. We’d even do it again. Which, for me, raised the question: Is Gen X just a bunch of assholes? Did growing up latchkey translate into an unshakable emotional sharpness?

There was no one out there protecting us as kids. And now the younger generations, raised by helicopter parents, are dealing with the opposite. When life doesn’t hand out participation trophies, disappointment follows. So if they need to kumbaya in a sauna, who am I to tell them they shouldn’t?

Also, if we’re honest, most of us wouldn’t spend two minutes in a cold plunge without someone cheering us on.

*****

The blizzard churns up the East Coast, on its way to consume New York City. So it’s no surprise when a text from Southwest informs me my flight is canceled. I’m stuck in the city, which I can’t say I’m too sad about: The extra day means I can go back to Othership.

I snag a sweaty seat at—I kid you not—comedy night in the sauna.

This is one of a handful of alternative Othership events. There’s couples night, friends night, singles night, and a DJ takeover. There is the unfathomable Death of Rasputin experience, an “immersive theatre journey” that promises to “transform performance into something you feel in your body.” (As a former actor who has performed in unconventional places, I die inside a little reading this.)

I slosh my way back to Othership to catch a handful of comedians performing in a 170-degree wooden box.

Most of the city is shut down, so I am stunned to see packs of friends and several couples stream into the tea room. There are a few singles like myself, looking a bit sore-thumb-ish but generally game. A 30-something dude in a knit viking hat joins the crowd, along with a guy I assume is from New Jersey who refuses to remove his full-body track outfit. (Later, when a comedian interrogates him, he admits he’s just a “venture bro” trying to “cut weight.”)

The festivities begin with the cold plunge. Roots, a spritely Black man with spectacularly unruly braids, takes us through the routine. He beats on a drum and counts down the time, affably urging us to get our asses in and out. When we go back for a second round, I am one of the few remaining participants. Not because I want to be—but because I’m a Gen Xer and, dammit, if I say I’m going to cold plunge, I am going to fucking cold plunge.

The performance itself is surreal. Seventy humans packed into the sauna. A sold-out show on a night where most everything else in NYC has been canceled. Our host is a comely 30-something with solid, if not memorable, patter. At one point, the rigged-up spotlight goes out. One comedian is obviously uncomfortable with both her headset and her bathing suit. Who can blame her?

A total of five comedians take the stagesauna over the 90-minute session. I’m hesitant to critique their comedy. Because you know what would have made them funnier? Air conditioning and a double vodka on the rocks.

I leave Othership the same way I entered: perplexed and in need of a drink.

*****

The moral of the story, if there is one, is that there is value in sitting with your emotions—even if a crowd of sweaty 30-somethings is sitting alongside you. That if you need help getting in and out of a really cold tub of water, go for it. It’s better than not doing it. And that Gen X would do well to release a bit of our blistering skepticism and let our guard down, for once.

But that, friends, is where I draw the line.

There are some things our generation got right: For one, comedy should be in a dimly lit club with table service, where no one can see you laugh or cry. Therapy should be between you and a trained professional. And if a millennial tries to lead you through a thought experiment about becoming an alien, don’t be surprised if The Simpsons show up to save the day.

Plowing through the final edits of Geezer’s third issue, I’ve had a few songs on high rotation in my head. Here’s a sample:

Here’s Where the Story Ends by The Sundays

Punk Rocky by A$AP Rocky

Catch These Fists by Wet Leg

But the tune playing on a relentless loop in my brain is I Want Everything by Cracker. It was written in 1993 by David Lowery, whose previous band Camper van Beethoven was known in cooler circles for wry tunes like Take the Skinheads Bowling. (Note: I still don’t know where the hell Bill is.)

Unlike my other favorite song about wanting it all (Veruca Salt is in my DNA), I Want Everything is a slow meditation on loss and longing:

You call us with your silent seas

You call us in our tiny boats

Gather us up with the storm

And cast us out upon the shore

All things beautiful, all things beautiful

I want everything, I want everything

The lyrics, languid and dripping in loss, circle magnetically around that simple refrain: I want everything. It leans hard into melancholy, acknowledges we’ve been tempest tossed by life, yet clings defiantly to the unshakeable yearning for “all things beautiful.”

Could there be a more truthful midlife anthem? The standard patter is that middle age brings with it concessions; lowered expectations of what’s possible, what we deserve, what we should have achieved. But I Want Everything refuses to back down. However battered we may be, the desire for a full and vibrant life persists.

Geezer issue No. 3 taps deep into this theme. For all its joy—sex, friendship, extreme badasses doing extremely cool things!—the stories examine the flip side of experience, the inevitable scar tissue accumulated by this time in our lives. We celebrate the broken bits and the lucid grief that comes simply from having existed for this long.

I know this probably isn’t what’s on people’s minds the day before July 4th (which also happens to be my son’s 16th birthday! Happy birthday, Squiddo!). But it’s what’s on mine, so I thought I would share. Because—and even with the understanding of the Buddhist belief that wanting is the cause of all suffering—I still want everything.

And with that, I leave you with the one nod I will make to this, the 250th birthday of this here United States of America. I picked this record up last week when I thought I might write about our country, before realizing that most others are doing the same and probably better than I.

Behold the glory of the Bubble Gum Singers and Orchestra homage to America’s 200th!

However you are celebrating this weekend, I truly hope you get whatever it is you want.

I’m not supposed to be writing about this. My calendar is overflowing with Geezer-related to-dos: articles to edit, a new subscription service to onboard, social media to post. But my heart is somewhere else.

It’s not with my dad who died when I was 2-years old. Or with either of the two men who I called “step-dad” growing up: Wesley (he lasted a year), and then Dan, who made it a decade (and who is, strangely, more brain fuzz than actual entity; a blurred out image in the photo of my adolescence).

Today, my thoughts are with the man who stepped into my heart and stayed there. His name is Bob.

Bob is the best of the steps. He and my mother married when I was a senior in college, and although he came into my life relatively late, he’s been a consistent presence since we met in my mom’s kitchen back in 1993. He became the adult male ally I never had; a man who was always on my side. His presence filled an empty space. Not overnight, but over decades.

When it comes to being a step-parent, thar be dragons. The map is ambiguous and studded with uncharted pitfalls. But thar also be joy and healing and love. And the chance to unbreak a little girl’s heart just a bit.

So, thank you, Bob, for being my step-dad. I love you very, very much. And if you are a step-parent who stepped up, you have my applause. Someone once told me that a kid can never have too many loving adults in their life, and they’re right.

Back soon with some Geezer updates—including how Geezer got its name, what it costs to put out a print magazine, and a behind-the-scenes look into what goes into a great Gen X story. Until then, rock on my friends! And have a lovely, lovely day.

But even with a president who blends Caligula’s blithe depravity with Sir Topham Hatt’s managerial ineptitude, it’s the unexpected indignities that chap my hide these days. (Note: Sir Hatt is the imperious railway manager in Thomas the Tank Engine—and, seriously, someone needs to write their MBA thesis using him as a paragon of toxic leadership.)

Granted, my complaint is nothing compared to being kidnapped by toy-soldier thugs trained on Halo and powered by erectile dysfunction, but it does include a botched IUD extraction, so hear me out.

A few weeks ago I drove 45 minutes to the only OB-GYN in my area who prescribes hormone replacement therapy. That in itself is maddening. But during what I assumed would be a routine IUD removal (take a deep breath and cough!), one arm of the t-shaped contraption declined to extract. What can I say? I have an unusually cozy uterus, where I imagine the small metal shard wrapped in a quilt, sipping cocoa by the warmth of my cervix.

This, of course, set up a series of medical hurdles, starting with getting an ultrasound to pinpoint exactly where my copper squatter is located. So my doc put in the order and I booked an appointment at the local hospital.

The day before the ultrasound, I received an intake call. The man asked a series of routine health questions, concluding with how I’d like to pay. Because I have decent insurance whose monthly cost of around $850 I share with my employer, I assumed this was a co-pay of, say, $50? But because I was curious, I asked what the damage would be.

2,000 bucks. A ton of smackeroos.

My scoff was so full-bodied, I’m surprised the recalcitrant shard wasn’t evicted right then and there. I paced my kitchen and grilled the poor admin for info: Why so much? (I haven’t met my deductible). Why wasn’t this covered the same way the ultrasound I had two years ago was? (Don’t know.) What the everloving fuck is wrong with this country? (Crickets.)

I cancelled the appointment out of principle and drummed my fingers on my desk. Then I called the little stand-alone imaging business where my last ultrasound was done. I told the pleasant woman which procedure I needed and asked how much it would be. She asked for my insurance info and I said, no, let’s not go that route. How much is the procedure out of pocket?

“Hold on a sec,” she said. “It’ll be $354.”

At that exact moment I was teleported into an absurd dimension of the healthcare kind. I spent the rest of the day on a low boil, fuming about the asinine state of our sick-care system while acknowledging how privileged I am to have coverage in the first place.

Same town. Same procedure. $1,650 difference in price. And I would have never known if I had just accepted that first appointment.

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A low-grade indignity

Maybe my frustration at this relatively low-grade indignity reveals the luck I’ve had as an American with no health issues and consistent health insurance.

There are so many less fortunate folks out there who have had to make negotiation with insurance companies an unpaid, part-time job. Meanwhile, people I know are losing their coverage because Republicans would rather spend my tax dollars on locking up kindergarteners and deporting people who have lived peacefully in this country for decades.

That our leadership has sacrificed humanity for profit is old news. The decency train left the station years ago. But we know in our bones that something has got to give. Our healthcare, our politics, our inability to agree on the basics of reality—it all adds up to a dark and, ultimately, unsustainable existence. At least for those of us who aren’t in the ruling 1%.

A tiny bright spot

I’m tempted to close with some sort of bromide about how eventually we’ll unite as a people to dismantle the flawed foundations our healthcare system—and country—is built upon. But, yeah…not putting my money on that.

I can, however, share a hack for watching the Olympics for free!

If you don’t have Peacock, you can sign up for a free, two-week trial to Instantcart and it will come with a complementary Peacock subscription. That’s all the sporty bits on demand, sans cash, while giving an itty-bitty finger to the man (just don’t forget to cancel your subscription).

Because no one should miss Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski’s exquisitely colorful ice skating commentary. That is one American tradition I continue to be proud of.

It dangles ideas like cat toys and we jump.

Well…I jump.

Sometimes I’m rewarded with a shiny new adventure. Other times I thud to the ground, claws empty. Sometimes I get the prize, but only after an asses-and-elbows free fall.

Yes, the universe is tricksy, so I shouldn’t be surprised when, in asking for guidance, it cracked its knuckles and had a bit of fun.

The Witches of Insta

As the founding editor of Geezer magazine, promotion is one of my main jobs. This means hacking through the bewildering thicket of social media.

I find Instagram particularly vexing—posts and reels and threads, oy vey!—but in the process of experimenting with the platform, my personal algorithm has taken on a life of its own. Which is why, between the pop psychology and never-ending menopause posts, something or someone will catch my eye.

This was the case on December 22, the winter solstice, when a charming Scottish witch dropped into my feed.

Insta can apparently tell I’m a sucker for an authentic Scottish accent (whenever I try to do one, I sound like Groundskeeper Willie from the Simpsons). It also knows I’m open to a bit of Wiccan influence.

I took the bait and clicked.

Lucky number 13

Her voice, smokey as a single-malt scotch, beckoned me to use the solstice as an opportunity to set an intention for the New Year.

She told me that to do so, I should write 13 wishes, wants, or dreams on small bits of paper. Don’t overthink it, she lilted, her soft, round face warmed by candlelight; just capture whatever comes to heart or mind and jot it down.

As a lifelong overfeeler/underthinker, this was not a problem.

Next, I was to fold the papers up and mix them all together. Then, every evening between now and January 1, I was to burn one without looking at what it said. Each torched offering would convey my request to the universe, thereby allowing me to let go and trust in the fates.

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The last remaining bit of paper, lucky number 13, was mine to open on New Year’s Day. This, said the biddy witch, was my own intention to focus on for the year. The most important one. The one I needed to handle on my own.

12 softballs, one hardball

I can’t remember most of what I wrote down. But they were simple aphorisms such as: “ground yourself in yourself,” and “surprise yourself with joy.” Softballs scratched hastily from the top of my head. I mean, how hard is it to surprise yourself with freaking joy?

But there was one that almost stopped my hand as I scrawled. And I would be lying if I said it came out of nowhere. This was the one that set my stomach churning:

“Allow love to take a new form.”

You can guess which paper I unfolded on New Year’s Day.

I wrote it reluctantly because it had become clear a relationship with someone I loved would not be the relationship I envisioned. After a long and protracted jump at the cosmic cat toy, I had hit the ground hard. The twist is that it seems this person will remain in my life.

By writing it down, I set myself up. I subconsciously conjured the toughest challenge I could think of—and the wily universe smacked it right back in my court.

I am now tasked with allowing love to take on a new form.

What does that even mean?

I was up most of last night thinking about this challenge and pondering love in the many ways I have experienced it.

There’s long-term romantic love, threadbare and comfortable. There’s my ever-evolving, eternally consistent love for my son. There’s my low-key drumbeat of love for friends and family. There’s love that ebbs and flows as you shed your skin. There’s white hot love that leaves you singed.

And I wonder: If love is energy, and energy cannot be created or destroyed, what shape will this incarnation take? And am I strong enough to accept it in its new form? Late at night, it’s hard to know. In fact, and I get that this sounds hyperbolic, perhaps learning to accept a love transformed is the greatest, most uniquely human, challenge of all.

The easy thing is to cut bait and run.

To tell the other person to take a flying fuck at the moon. Turn love into a zero sum game where pain and anger call the shots. Transform your grief into armor, your sadness into a sword.

But in my case—and in the case of so many other people who have loved and hurt each other—I think the kinder, wiser, much harder thing is to accept love in its new form, however much it hurts to see the old shape dissipate. By allowing love to change, we make space for it to someday show up better. Maybe in the way it was supposed to from the beginning.

I don’t know. It’s all getting a bit woo-woo. But when a Scottish witch tells you to do something and the universe corroborates, you pay attention.

Consider your advice solicited

“The course of true love never did run smooth.”

This line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been rattling around my heart for months. Today I add to it, “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds” from Sonnet 116. That is to say, true love remains, even in the face of change.

But, friends, as you know, this is easier said than done. And as I enter my mid-fifties, after a lifetime of confidently steering the ship, I find myself a beginner in so many ways.

So consider this an invitation to share your stories and advice. Do you have a love that took you in a direction you never imagined? Or a trick for calming the heart? Please share. Your experience would be deeply appreciated.

I’ll sign off by wishing you a New Year full of love, in whatever form it takes. And may your witchiest of intentions hit the mark in 2026.

This essay appears in the first issue of Geezer magazine. But because Geezer is a print-only affair, I thought I’d share it here as well.

You can find essays like this one and ooooooh so much more in Geezer! And for my lovely readers, I’m offering 15% off an annual subscription through December 24. Just use the code LLB15. And away we go…!

My mom purchased a hot tub when I was in fifth grade. It seemed exotic and fancy. In reality, it was a mosquito breeding ground that demanded much more than it delivered. And yet, the seed was planted.

Over the years, my hot tub envy percolated. Whenever I searched for an Airbnb, you bet I clicked that “hot tub” button. At one point, my then-husband and I had an opportunity to buy a hot tub from a friend who was upgrading to a better one. I was hoping yes, but he leaned no. In his eyes, it was a boxy, watery albatross—fun at the beginning, but with rapidly diminishing returns.

Then I turned 50 and got a divorce.

When I moved into my tiny, temporary rental house, I was hell-bent on creating an outdoor space that gave me some solace. But finances were tight and I was single for the first time in 25 years. No man to do the heavy lifting and string up the twinkly outdoor lights.

Undeterred, I dropped a few hundred bucks on the ultimate sad divorcee item: an inflatable hot tub.

It was serviceable, but not satisfying. So, when I finally bought a new home, I set out to upgrade. This time, my electrician, Sam, offered to sell me an extra hot tub he had for $1,000—a bargain! Except that it leaked continuously, the victim of an undiscovered rodent evisceration. After multiple drainings and hours of repairs, Sam and I surrendered. Our efforts were no match for its state of decay.

And then it happened. I met my perfect match: the dead-sexy Aquavoss Model 2. I love it—and I can’t stop talking about it.

The Aquavoss Model 2 slid into my algorithm when I started searching for a new hot tub that looked good and was unmolested by mice. I had also wondered whether something existed that offered more than just a long, hot stew. Surely, someone had come up with a hot/cold combo by now? That’s when I found my new watery obsession—and, after a proper amount of online stalking, I couldn’t help but swipe right when it went on sale for $10,000 (down from $14,000).

Like all good lovers, the Aquavoss Model 2 has variety built in. On one side, a four-person hot tub cradles my ass and massages my back with intensely focused blasts from 24 jets; on the other, a two-person cold plunge can drop to as low as 39 degrees. Now you can find me most nights, especially after a workout, slipping seal-like between my 104-degree bubbly brew and the stoic embrace of a 50-degree pool.

Someone told me that my new habit is probably adding years to my life. That may be hyperbole, but the benefits of hot-cold therapy are well documented. So, if you’re in the market, maybe RFK Jr. will foot the bill for you.

While the health benefits are dandy, I am happy to finally have gotten something I have long wanted, sans compromise. My Aquavoss Model 2 is functional and gorgeous, and it takes care of me. If it came with dinner and a movie, I’d never leave the house again.

Tori Amos recently kicked this bit of wisdom to a crowd of adoring younger fans, and I’ve been feeling Little Earthquakes ever since. Because she is 100% correct. My 50s have been on fire in remarkable ways—both good and bad.

My 20s? Messy and meandering, as I tried to figure life out. My 30s? Yeah…some good stuff there. Started a theatre company in NYC and worked with a group of amazing women to produce cabarets and plays I am very proud of to this day. My 40s was dedicated to my career and my kid and supporting my family. Easily the hardest decade of my life.

Which is why I kind of lost my mind when I turned 50.

I know I’m not the only woman who woke up in her fifties and started thinking: Is that all there is? After decades of taking care of and writing for other people, I felt a burning urgency to make something that was my own. The heat became impossible to ignore.

I finally understood fire.

When I look back, I can see myself standing over my life, a bottle of lighter fluid in my hand. My visceral need to create something of my own grew until I felt like I had no choice but to tilt my wrist and pour.

Out of the flames springs a magazine!

Did you know that ashes make a great fertilizer? Creatively and metaphorically speaking, at least. Once the dumpster fire I’d created of my life raged a little less dramatically, I got the idea for Geezer magazine.

Geezer was sparked in part by conversations I’d been having with my colleague who created his Substack a little over a year ago. The more we discussed ways to get better as we get older, the more obvious it became to me that Gen Xers needed a magazine of their own.

I mean, there’s a place for AARP—but I don’t know anyone my age who didn’t want to take a torch to that first mailer with their name on it. I remember thinking they could take their free cooler and shove it up their wazoos.

There’s a massive generational void when we talk about aging today. Gen X is dealing with shit Boomers never had to: Housing cash-strapped adult kids and parents with dementia; navigating increasingly precarious politics and economics; being shoved out of the workforce just as we’re coming into our full power.

So I got to work telling the stories I wanted to hear about the people I think are interesting. And the result is Geezer!

Creating this magazine—which is really a mix tape from my heart to the world—has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. And, unlike theatre (or the glut of empty calories that is digital content), I can hold it in my hands. I can savor its new magazine smell. And I can leave my son something I hope he’ll be proud of someday.

I’ll need the help of fellow geezers to keep Geezer going! So if it sounds like something you’d like, please subscribe.

I promise to keep creating it for as long as I can, with all the passion that I have—especially now that I understand what fire is.

When I was six, my mom was going to marry a guy named Bob Morrison and we were going to move to San Antonio, Texas, and have a house with a pool. (And stairs…which I also considered trés fancy.) The wedding didn’t happen, and while I didn’t miss the man, the promise of a pool had been broken.

By elementary school, I was spending entire summers at the neighborhood pool, or “The Pool,” as we called it.

I’d leave in the morning with a ratty towel and enough change to buy a Cherry Coke and a Nutty Buddy from the vending machine. A group of us would gather on the deck, our Coppertone-drenched skin frying softly in the sun. The teenage lifeguard was the only accepted authority figure. It was the Gen X equivalent of summer camp.

The pool was a place of belonging. Of casual joy. A place where the disparate tribes of my young life gathered and relationships grew.

Now, after decades of longing, I am finally getting my own pool. Right in my own backyard.

Last week, after much digging and prepping, the concrete shell was poured. It was a big day, with multiple workers and heavy equipment and hoses blasting out steady streams of ash-colored putty. Within hours, the rebar skeleton assumed the muscular contours of a 55-foot lap pool.

Once it was done, I was told it was my job to water the concrete, twice a day, for the next ten days. So I’ve been dutifully tending to my own grey garden in what I have since learned is called “wet curing.”

Watering concrete is like watering a flowerbed, except you’re dousing what looks like a concave fortress. As I stand with hose in hand, I have time to ponder why I must water something that already seems so strong, so formally established. After all, I can walk along the walls. My dogs have already scampered down the steps, leaving their paw prints on the curved bottom of what will soon be my pool.

To look at it, you would never guess it needed anything. But without the water, it will weaken and crack. At least in the beginning, while the agitated molecules of cement, sand, and gravel are still seeking a place to settle.

Even the toughest things require softness to stay strong.

So I’ve been thinking about how stuff that looks solid will crack without tending. And how strange it feels to be watering concrete like flowers—not to sprout, but to remain in the shape asked of it. Fissures unformed don’t reward in the way of buds in bloom. I am nurturing the invisible growth of enduring strength.

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Too often, we pour our love and energy and attention into the mold of our lives, molds we have spent years building out of our own dreams and desires. We construct them carefully, elaborating on the design, removing the elements that no longer serve. And when we finally feel the framework is in place, we pour and pour. We do our best to set our vision into stone.

And then…we neglect to water the concrete.

We get busy. We have setbacks. We make the mistake of assuming someone will water it for us. We forget that the absence of pliancy leaves things prone to fracture. What was solid weakens. And, eventually, what was whole, breaks.

Now that I’m in my 50s, I can look back at the cracked, untended concrete of my own life. The times I should have watered, but didn’t. The times I desperately wanted someone else to do the watering for me. The times when I watered, but it just didn’t sink in. The times when the job felt like my sole responsibility and the hose was too heavy to carry.

On the incredibly small chance you’re not following the metaphor, the concrete is our relationships: with our friends, family, lovers, children, ourselves.

In my life, and probably yours, there’s a good chance some things are cracked beyond repair, regardless of how long they lasted and how strong they seemed. Because with relationships, the concrete never dries. Not entirely. And the process of “wet curing” is ongoing. There is no such thing as settled.

So my unsolicited, and admittedly obvious, advice is to just water the damned concrete. Soak it in appreciation. If a crack appears, flood it with understanding or amends—whatever softness you can offer. If your well feels dry, say something. In a drought, a few deliberate drops can make all the difference.

You probably already know this. Tending to what is important is not a new concept. But, honestly, how many of us have let something fall apart because we were unable to soften to its needs? So accept this as a public service announcement from someone who is literally, and figuratively, doing her best to water the concrete of her own rebuilt life. Now complete with a pool.

Tom LeBleu, my real dad, died in 1974 at the age of 38 after being involved in a hot air balloon accident.

Being “involved” means he was a passenger in the hot air balloon when it hit some power lines, shearing the basket from the balloon and sending him and two other men plunging to Earth. But he didn’t die instantly. He was alive for two weeks until an aortic aneurysm got him.

Legend is he was singing opera to the nurses when he died, mid-aria. Not a bad story to leave behind. What he also left behind was a cornucopia of books and records. Over the years, I picked them up like puzzle pieces that could be assembled into the personality of the father I never knew.

There was the lewd, puffing pink face on the cover of The Vulgarians, still vivid in my mind. In junior high, I got my hands on his copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. And I artfully finagled his full set of Great Books of the Western World after I left for college—it sits next to my desk as I type.

But because he died before I could read, his books weren’t immediately accessible. Thankfully, his records were.

My father’s record collection lived in an octagonal cabinet in the corner of our living room, where my older brother and I would occasionally set up camp. The intense desert sun would stream in as we spent languid hours pawing through my father’s musical legacy.

The cadence of his collection went something like this: opera, opera, opera, opera, opera, NOT OPERA! And Julie London’s alluring, cut-diamond face would emerge. Then more opera, until Errol Garner’s Concert by the Sea bubbled up like a tonic through the classical oeuvre. But it was Tom Lehrer’s recordings that put a hard stop to our analog scrolling. He wasn’t operatic, classic, or jazz-ic…Who was this strange, smirking creature lurking in the land of my father’s record collection?

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My brother would carefully unsheathe his record and set it spinning, catapulting us from the monochrome of childhood into the beguilingly garish world of adults. Listening to Lehrer was like pretending to fall asleep under the table during a grown-up cocktail party while secretly absorbing all the scandalous, perplexing language of adulthood. There were words I didn’t understand, but his voice, bemused and a bit leery, made their meanings easy to catch.

On highest rotation was a live recording entitled An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer. It starts off with a bang (Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, a light and airy pean to avian homicide) and ends with a banger (the cheerful ode to nuclear annihilation, We Will All Go Together When We Go).

What really stuck with me, though, was the patter in between songs—his deadpan delivery and nasal tone melted like wax into the fabric of my childhood. And somewhere in my little kid brain, Tom Lehrer’s voice became my dad’s.

Looking back as an adult, the idea is laughable. Outside of music, the two men had little in common—my father grew up in a traditional Christian household of modest means in Corpus Christi, Texas, while Tom Lehrer was an erudite product of Manhattan’s Upper West Side Jewish enclave. But in my little kid brain, it made a certain sort of sense. While I didn’t think Tom Lehrer truly was my father, he came to life in my mind as a kind of proxy parent. He made me laugh during what must have been a scary and confusing period of my childhood. His songs made me feel a part of something my father had been a part of.

And as far as proxy parents go, damn, did I choose well. His political satire lodged in the landscape of my psyche and laid the groundwork for my sense of humor.

Tom Lehrer poked merciless fun at life’s unending supply of daily idiocies. He slyly articulated the absurdities of the world without ever being mean or crude (though his tongue-in-cheek lewd streak was legendary). He was a brilliant jester, in a constant state of chagrin at humanity's inability to look in a mirror every now and then.

Consider his delightfully droll deadpan intro into National Brotherhood Week:

“During National Brotherhood week various special events are arranged to drive home the message of brotherhood. This year, for example, on the first day of the week, Malcom X was killed, which gives you an idea of how effective the whole thing is. I’m sure we all agree that we all ought to love one another, and I know there are people in the world who do not love their fellow human beings and I HATE people like that.”

That cracked my brother and me up every damned time. Still does.

I know most of what I know about Catholicism to Vatican Rag and was probably the only first-grader to entertain/mortify the nuns at my private Catholic school with my favorite song and dance:

First you get down on your knees,

Fiddle with your rosaries

Bow your head with great respect and…

Genuflect! Genuflect! Genuflect!

And my favorite part:

Two, four, six, eight

Time to transubstantiate!

The wordplay! The rhymes! They rhythm! From Poisoning Pigeons:

When they see us coming

The birdies all try n’ hide

But they still go for peanuts

When coated with cyanide

There’s a line from his faux-nostalgic college tune, Bright College Days, whose imagery will live with me until the end:

Oh, soon we’ll be out amid the cold world’s strife

Soon we’ll be sliding down the razor blade of life

OUCH.

As a parent now, I have tried (unsuccessfully) to pass down some of my musical tastes to my kid. The only one that landed was The Beastie Boys, and that has morphed into something my son listens to called, I don’t know, Shitty Murder Rap? It’s as melodious as a melee of crack-addled raccoons. But I digress.

My dad gave me Tom Lehrer, and Tom Lehrer gave me a connection to my dad. He wrote songs that brought me joy then and still do now. (He’s also the reason that anyone under 60 knows who Wernher von Braun is.)

Cheap sentimentality was not in Tom Lehrer’s repertoire, so I’ll stop before a whiff of the maudlin pervades this piece. Instead, I’ll leave you with a classic Tom Lehrer love song.

Farewell, fake dad. Thanks for sharing your twisted mind and impeccable rhymes. You will be missed.

*From Smut…Tom Lehrer’s itching, morbid, lewd and lascivious take on free speech.

My journey from California to Germany has progressed as such: car→ airplane→ bus→ Iceland → bus → airplane → car → ferry → Sweden → golf cart → ferry → car → ship → Germany → rental car → Hamburg → train → Stuttgart → train → Trier → train → HERE.

I’ve done this all in the company of my almost-15-year-old son, Cody. Today is our last full day of a two-week vacation, and I am a mix of surprise, relief, elation, and exhaustion. What could have been a mother-son travel debacle has been a delight. Mostly.

Cody is a dedicated homebody whose sense of adventure extends mostly to world-building video games, so when he told me he wanted to go to Germany this summer, I jumped on it. This was my chance to give him a taste of the adventure I had as a nineteen-year old backpacking solo through Europe.

But as I pestered Claude (my AI BFF) for “fun things to do in Germany with a teenager,” little drops of dread pooled in the back of my mind. Travel has taught me that things break down, trains are missed, and plans go pear-shaped. You may find yourself sweaty and stranded, saying things like “EET EES KAPUT. NO GO.” Add a sarcastic teenager into the mix, and the chances for extreme unpleasantness, if not outright mutiny, spike considerably.

I found myself clicking from one travel site to another, only to abandon the planning session entirely. I poked around and procrastinated until I was struck by an uncomfortable realization: His age-appropriate surliness was just the fringe on the larger tapestry of my apprehension. What was really keeping me mired was our relationship itself.

My son and I are very different. A simple, but fraught, truth. One I have been navigating with various levels of success for years.

When Cody was born, I called him “my little skeptic.” He was slow to smile. Never naturally bubbly. His voice would soar in an arcing “moOOmy, nooooOOOOOoooo” when I sang to him. By six, he began referring to our mild nature walks as “death marches.”

Still, we had moments of supersaturated sweetness.

“I love you more than all the leaves on all the trees in the whole wide world,” I once told him. He turned his cherub-cheeked, Goldfish-dusted face to mine and replied, “And I love you more than all the blood coming out of everybody, everywhere.” Adorable.

Now that he’s older, my rainbows-and-jazz-hands agenda is officially kaput. No go. And, aye, thar be dragons.

Theoretically, I am still the boss of him. In practice, I can do little more than model the behavior I’d like him to emulate. These dueling realities leave me in low-key agony. He spends 12 hours online? I’m a failure. Hasn’t eaten a fresh vegetable in three days? Same. (It doesn’t help that the one thing he did inherit from me was a picky palate.)

I careen back and forth from radical acceptance to parental panic. How would this dynamic play out as we navigate multiple time zones, three countries, and two weeks of togetherness?

As the trip approached, trepidation bubbled in my gut. Still, I dug up our passports and managed to build out our Jenga-like itinerary, knowing that if one block were dislodged, the whole thing might collapse.

**********************

We took a redeye to Boston and slogged through a six-hour layover. The flight to Iceland was followed by an hour-long bus ride to Reykjavik. Not a word of complaint from my son. I was encouraged. Had I given birth to a traveller after all?

The next day was spent soaking in Reykjavik's considerable charm. On a languorous stroll, we discovered something in common: thrifting. “This place is fire,” he said as we rooted through the musty bins like fashionista truffle pigs. His enthusiasm was a win. A little reminder that we had a whole lifetime to find things in common.

Then, back at the hotel, my coveted, pink, barrel-shaped hair dryer melted. Spectacularly. As the scent of burnt hair wafted into the bright Icelandic night, I realized my fancy new electronics adapter did not function as a voltage converter.

The Great Device-Charging Panic of ‘25 had begun.

The charging situation, already dicey given our lack of a converter, devolved further after Cody left that fancy new electronics adapter (which worked for our phones, but not for my hair dryer or our laptops) behind at a friend’s house in Gothenburg, Sweden.

She sent him a pic of the adapter with the text “are you deadass.” I interpreted this to mean “you have committed a punishable offense and as a consequence your mother is going to strangle you,” which was not too far from the truth.

Evening found us on an overnight ship to Germany, internet-free in the middle of the North Sea. Cody moaned and my vagus nerve bristled. I shelled out an obscene amount for a basic iPhone charger we could jack into the TV.

“Ghetto charging,” Cody called it, and there was temporary peace in the land.

But on our way to Stuttgart, we arrived at the narrative’s inevitable destination: alone on a train with our phones and laptops drained.

Cody slumped onto himself like a neglected marionette. I looked out the window, thinking of the hours I had spent on these very trains years ago, listening to The Doors on my Walkman, scribbling away in my journal. Just me and my thoughts, and the paper and the pen.

I reached into my bag and tapped into a different power source.

“Hey, Squiddo…you wanna play hangman?”

Cody slowly reanimated, unfurling his 6’1” frame and running his hand through his impressive head of hair. “Sure,” he shrugged.

I flipped to the back of my journal and scratched out a linear gallows along with six blank spaces. The word was TOILET. He guessed and lost.

My turn. His word was REPETITION, which I recognized as a jab at my tendency to repeat myself. Back and forth we went. SPAGHETTI. YOUTUBE. FOOTBALL. PHOTOSYNTHESIS.

The next train ride, we switched gears. Now it was swear words. SHIT STORM. ASSHOLE. BITCHBOY. GLAZER. At his insistence, we moved into F1 racers or racing teams—JUAN MANUEL FANGIO, NIKI LAUDA, TYRREL, SPYKER, TORO ROSSO. He chided me for not getting Alfa Romeo. I razzed him for changing the rules.

Win. Lose. Every guess a little connection.

As we rolled through the German countryside, something shifted in the story I tell myself about my son, and me, our relationship and our differences. I looked at Cody—my incredible, antithetical child—and I saw him as the person he is today and the man he may someday become.

We fly home tomorrow morning.

The trip has been long for him. He misses his girlfriend and his friends. His tolerance for following me through foreign streets in search of random landmarks has dwindled. I want to sleep in my own bed and cuddle with my dogs.

So we are ready to return. And if we make it home without a major travel snafu, I’ll feel relieved and triumphant. I will have introduced my son to the art of travel, and, hopefully, some of the lessons travel taught me when I was only a few years older than he is now: self-confidence, competence, asking for help when lost or confused, keeping eyes and heart open to new experiences.

For my part, the great joy of this adventure has been the new lessons travel has taught me: To see my son through a wider lens. To appreciate his evolution into adulthood. To stop self-flagellating over who he is not so I can appreciate who he is.

I hope he remembers the summer I dragged him onto an endless parade of European planes, trains, boats, trams, and cars. Maybe the connections we made will allow him to see me as the loving but imperfect mother I am, too. And maybe, someday, he’ll even travel with his own kids and teach them how to play hangman on a train.

The Backstory

Back in 1996, my aunt tried to baptize me in her swimming pool. I was almost 25 years old.

Five years later, I turned my experience into a story and sent it to Jane magazine. I figured it would be the perfect It Happened to Me article—because “coerced adult baptism” is a pretty rare square on life’s bingo card.

I was only slightly crushed when my article was returned with a short, handwritten note. As far as rejections go, it was as good as it gets: We can’t run this right now, but please don’t hesitate to send something else.

I did not send something else.

That rejection, kind as it was, confirmed what I always suspected—that I didn’t belong in a world any better or cooler than the one I was born into. (Middle class, Texan, white, boring. Somewhere north of mediocre.) Jane was that better, cooler world. A stingingly familiar voice told me I could read about it, but I couldn’t be a part of it.

It took two decades to realize that maybe that voice was bullshit. So I tipped over the box of my life and examined its contents. Every choice, every habit, every excuse, every insecurity, every compromise. Two years—and one epic personal reckoning—later, I divorced my husband of 25 years and set out to remake my life in my own image.

At some point during the fracas, I went to visit my mom. She handed me an envelope of old ephemera she’d held onto, and out slid a copy of the Jane article I thought had been lost to time and outdated technology.

I read it and thought, damn…this is actually pretty good.

Which is why, when Another Jane Pratt Thing came online, I submitted it. Again! Even though that voice, diminished yet persistent, still told me not to expect too much, that I wasn’t worthy of this shiny object of desire. So when I heard back directly from Jane within hours, it was the ultimate vindication. Take that, self-doubt, you incredible asshole!

This piece you’re about to read—and I really hope you read it—is as much about the stories we tell ourselves as it is a drive-by baptism. It’s about the stories that say we’re this or that or the other. The ones that hold us back.

Because, if it’s true that each of us writes our own books, I’m proof positive that if your plot sags and your protagonist gets lost, it’s never too late to do a rigorous edit on your own radiant narrative.

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It Happened To Me: My Aunt Tried To Baptize Me In Her Swimming Pool

By Laura LeBleu, Written (and Rejected) sometime in 2001

I found God and lost God, all on the same day, in the time span of about 15 minutes.

It began with a gloomy excursion to Corpus Christi, Texas. I had scraped together enough money to fly from my adopted hometown of San Francisco to see my grandmother who was on the verge of succumbing to pancreatic cancer. I was met at the airport by my aunt, an intelligent, well-traveled, robust woman who is also a speaking-in-tongues type of Christian. By the way, Corpus Christi translates into “body of Christ.” Lovely.

Aunt Susanne was my favorite relative as a kid. She remembered my birthday and sent me books (invariably with a religious theme), and told me stories about my father, who died when I was two years old. Aunt Susanne and my grandmother were my sole connection to a branch of the family that was largely a mystery to me.

From the time I arrived, Susanne scrutinized me in the way a birdwatcher studies a rare bird they’d only seen before in books. By this time, I had been living in San Francisco and cavorting with drag queens and having all kinds of debauched fun. I got a sense that my heathen hair would make a fine scalp for her Charismatic Christian belt. Now I was a guest in her house—the prodigal niece on her doorstep.

It was going to be a long trip.

Sometime after my first cup of coffee on my second morning there, I looked down to find my aunt’s body splayed like a starfish on the living room floor, her face buried deep into the luxurious beige pile of the carpet. She explained that she began every day by lying prostrate before God, praying for her sins and presumably the sins of humanity as a whole.

My response to this was something akin to “Wow. Thanks.” I needed a lot more than one cup of coffee to deal with this sort of information.

On the third day, she shared a sample of her speaking-in-tongues language. It was a lilting, Polynesian sort of thing, which wasn’t particularly surprising to me seeing as how she had lived in Hawaii for a time. I kept this observation to myself.

On the final day of my visit, her son made a point of taking me out for a ride around town in his new Porsche. Now, my cousin is, for lack of a better word, a tool. He was one of those guys in high school whose shorts showed about an inch more thigh than necessary, with the collar on his Izod standing vigorously at attention while one tube sock slouched defeatedly onto his topsider. And now he had a fast, phallic car to show me just how cool he was.

We were making our way toward the outskirts of town when he really started putting on speed. I’m not squeamish about pushing limits, but my gut told me that his driving abilities were more suitably matched to a late-80s Yugo. I could tell he was coming into the corner too fast. Sure enough, the back of the car started to slide out from under us as we took the curve.

That’s when I did a strange thing. I prayed directly to God: “Please, God. Not here, not now, and not with him.”

We swung off the side of the road, sliding sideways toward a bank of trees before he overcorrected and whipsawed the car back onto the asphalt where the fishtail continued in the opposite direction. Eyes closed, I clutched the seat until I felt the sweet mercy of tires grabbing the road. We came to a silent stop before he sputtered something about how the low center of gravity and turning radius in a Porsche allows for maneuvers like that. I asked him politely to take me back to his mother’s house.

Shaken, I walked through the garage into the back entrance, and there was Aunt Susanne standing cheerfully by the washer and dryer. We made small talk. How was your evening? Oh, it was fine until your dumbass son tried to kill me.

And then she hit me with the proposition she’d been dying to ask all along: Don’t you think it's time to take the Lord Jesus Christ as your one and only savior in your heart? We can do it right here. Right now. I can baptize you in my swimming pool.

I was silent, my head, well, swimming. She asked the question again. And I’d like to say I told her calmly that I simply couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy I saw in organized religion. How I never forgot that after my father died my mom’s church friends stopped inviting her to parties because she no longer had a partner to come with. But all I could do was say, plainly, “no.”

She asked me to accept Jesus. I turned her down. It was that simple.

When I got back to San Francisco, I told my friends what had happened and we all laughed. Oh, yes, Laura and that kooky Texan family of hers. But once the novelty wore off, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What, exactly, had I done?

My grandmother died shortly thereafter and I found myself back in Corpus Christi at a memorial service in the church where she had played the organ for decades. Within seconds of the pastor speaking, my throat tightened and the tears welled. I started crying. For all my non-religious beliefs, I had always felt a connection to something larger.

But that feeling was gone. I had denounced Jesus, the church, and, by extension, the spirit of my father—to me, they were all intertwined. I sobbed through the service and, to this day, I cry when I’m in a church.

I wonder sometimes if Susanne knows how that confrontation affected me. If she’s ever grasped the painful irony that by pushing me to accept God on her own terms, she forced me to deny him a place in my life. She has continued to send her Christmas cards wishing the light of Christ to shine upon me in the new year, but we have never discussed the day I said “no” to God. I doubt we ever will.

A coda to the story from the author today:

These days, I am thoughtfully agnostic, my spirituality solidly based in nature. I still cry when in a church. And, although my aunt sent a Christmas card a couple years ago saying she would be raptured by the spring and that we should give her a call if we want to be saved, as far as I know, she remains solidly earthbound.

P.S. Thank you to my Christian family members who have engaged with me on this topic in ways that have been unfailingly kind. Also — I was in a church a couple of weeks ago and I did not cry. So…progress.

Salty and expended after a tough workout, I started the shower and waited while the warm water made its journey from my tankless water heater to the upstairs bathroom. Once the steam rose, I stripped off my sweat-soaked clothes and slid open the door, only to find a spindly crane fly slowly disintegrating under the pelting droplets. One of life's infinitesimal brutalities playing out in real time on the slick, beige tiles.

It had been a rough week. Professional demands and personal strife left me tender and contemplative. And the sight of this insect’s abdomen draped lifelessly in the drain surrounded by swirling remnants of its long, fragile legs left me disproportionately sad. I had killed a living thing.

That’s when I noticed the small, black ball underneath the built-in sitting shelf. A spider defending itself against the deluge. Probably dead, I thought, as the body count in my shower doubled. Still, I adjusted the shower head to save the creature any more direct hits and quickly finished my business, leaving the carnage behind.

You might be wondering what kind of pest-riddled drama is playing out in my home, but it is a fact that springtime in rural NorCal brings all the bugs to the yard. If you long for fresh, crisp, unfiltered air, you’re going to have a bit of company indoors. And as a semi-feral creature of the 70s who ran barefoot through the Texas desert for most of her childhood, critters just aren’t a big deal. (Unless that critter is a tick. In which case, destroy at all costs.)

I returned to the scene of the crime the following day after another hard workout, habitually flipping the shower handle on. In the time it took for the cold water to give way to the warm, I scrutinized my body, harshly noting the uninvited bulges of what is now undeniable middle age. I sighed. Even with the endorphins from physical exercise, I still couldn’t shake my stubbornly somber mood.

I opened the shower and there it was: the same itsy bitsy spider, now on the brink of being washed down the waterspout. I watched as its waterlogged legs strained against the inexorable pull of the drain. This spider was a fighter, goddammit. And I was not going to have insectile blood on my hands. Not again. Not today.

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I shunted the shower knob off and grabbed an almost empty tube of shaving lotion, lowering the flat, ridged end down to the spider’s front legs. Without hesitation, it clung to the plastic life preserver, dragging its soaked and heavy body to safety. I cupped my hand under the creature, careful that it didn’t fall on our journey to my balcony, where I deposited it, wet and bewildered, back into the wild.

I watched the spider, unmoving in the sunlight, system shocked. It had been so vulnerable and fought so hard. I could have easily relegated it to a watery grave, drowned in the web of pipes that connect throughout my large home. Even the gentlest of humans harms other living things. Unintentionally or not, we hurt and are hurt in return. It is a terrible, existential truth; one I doubt I’ll ever quite square myself with.

But in this moment, at least, I chose not to hurt this insignificant creature. To save something small. As if by extending a bit of grace, I could find a hint of redemption from the week’s sturm und drang.

The spider moved, and a little glimmer of light cracked the shell of my gloomy mood.

They say that hurt people hurt people. We take offense or defend, depending on the conflict. Sometimes we do both simultaneously. Like the spider, we struggle to understand the origins of an unanticipated storm, our unchecked anger sucking us down the drain. Little do we realize that, often, the drain is our own pain.

Unlike spiders, we mostly survive. We drag ourselves to safety, damaged but alive. That is the gift of being human, I suppose.

There is a dangerous simplicity to “hurt people hurt people.” It makes it easy to assume that harming others is the only available option. If that were the truth, we’d all be lashing out and pummeling each other. Because who among us isn’t carrying around a wound or two, or twenty?

Sometimes, hurt people help people. And sometimes helping is the fastest path to healing. Even if it is only a little bit. Even if you’re only saving a spider.

The emphasis was never in accumulating objects, but acquiring experiences. “Your house can burn down, everything can be taken from you,” my mother would say as she tugged my rambunctious hair into a ponytail. “But no one can steal your memories.” You would think I’d been raised by a wartime refugee, not a middle-class English teacher from San Antonio, Texas.

But from the time I could trace the topography of veins on my mother’s chestnut brown hands, there was one object that transcended experience: a diamond ring whose shine was matched only by its size—2.28 carats. It is, as they say, a chonker. It is an octagonal cosmos of cuts and infinite angles. And it carries the weight of the women who have worn it through generations.

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The story goes that my ancestors were minor royalty (my grandmother Gertrude got a kick out of saying she was descended from a German baron) before they were forced to flee, driven out by the mostly bloodless German Revolution preceding the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919. At least, this is what I have reconstructed based on family lore and the timeline of my maternal line’s immigration to America. Also, thank you Ancestry.com.

As my mother tells it, the family was tipped off by a “loyal servant” that a mob was gathering to ransack their home and, I’m assuming, do them physical harm. To escape, the women sewed jewels into secret pockets within the folds of their dresses and set out as if on a pleasant ride through the country. They never returned, heading instead for the coast, where they boarded a ship and sailed to America. The diamond ring is the last of this legacy—handed down from one woman to the next until, eventually, it came to me.

I knot my fist and feel the thick gold band with the tip of my thumb and think of my grandmother. Gertrude, or Trudy as she was called, lived through the Depression. Her mother died when she was fifteen, so she canned spinach at the Del Monte factory in Monterey, California to help feed her brothers. Yet she held onto this precious jewel that told her: You are still worth something.

I do not know whose fingers carried this ring before my grandmother or how many women gazed into the blindingly bright universe of its Old European cut. But I can feel them, sometimes. They are young, running through the woods on skinny legs, halos of unpinned hair glowing in sunlight. They are rough diamonds, raw and wild, until the world demands they be cleaved, girdled, polished, and inspected—the same process the rock on my finger went through to become something of value to the world.

Was my grandmother wearing this ring when, at 63, she picked up a gun and ended her own life? I do not know. I do know she was in pain, both mentally and physically. I know she inherited a legacy that demanded resilience. I know each one of us is only so strong. And I know the weight of this ring rests more lightly on my hand than hers.

My hope is that the next woman to wear it feels less of the burden—and more of the beauty—than any who came before.

We rolled into the city around 4am, unwashed but exuberant, and spent the dwindling darkness downing coffee at a 24-hour chain restaurant. When the sun rose, we scouted the neighborhood around the university until we found a guy walking down the sidewalk. He wore a faded Led Zepplin t-shirt, lace-up leather moccasin boots, and what looked like a cravat but was actually a boa constrictor curled serenely around his neck. Bingo.

His name was Wenzel, and when we asked him where we should live he pointed to a building across the street. “They always have apartments open,” he said. We made our first friend and signed a month-to-month lease all by 4pm, twelve hours after we landed in town.

Just FYI: I am not exaggerating. This is how we rolled. It’s the same way my confident, 19-year-old self had backpacked solo through Europe the summer before with only a Let’s Go Europe, a journal, and a Walkman for company.

Cojones, y’all.

But this move to Minneapolis wasn’t whimsical. I’d taken advantage of a national student exchange program that allowed qualified candidates to attend any participating university for the cost of their current tuition—a screaming deal for a scholarship student from Texas paying dirt-cheap, in-state New Mexico State University prices.

I chose the University of Minnesota because Minneapolis was and is a theatre town. The Guthrie, The Jungle, The Penumbra, Theatre de la Jeune Lune (RIP). These were iconic, boundary-pushing theatre companies. I wanted a taste.

By December, my best friend had decamped for warmer climes, but a crowd of exquisite “just add drama” theatre friends had risen like magic around me. I also had a boyfriend, tall and gentle, whose soulful brown eyes lingered on me in a way that made me feel beautiful. He was an artist attending the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), which wasn’t for schlumps—he was talented. He was also childlike, sensitive, and incredibly self-absorbed. Bless.

When he shaved his head of wavy, chestnut locks in a quest to emulate a Buddhist monk, my eyebrow might have arched, but he had my support. His next step, however, was to live, monk-ishly, in the hallowed halls of MCAD, sleeping on a thin mat, not talking or leaving the premises for a week. For this, he also had my support—until I realized that, without discussion, he expected me to be his literal support, tasked with bringing him supplies and tending to his needs as he lived out his art-school monk fantasia.

I had no desire to be the lumbering pack mule for someone else’s vision quest, laden with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I both made and paid for. And so, after begrudgingly keeping him from starving alone in studio D, we broke up. And that was that.

Revolution gone wrong

I come from a generation of women steeped in a profoundly conflicting cultural brew.

We were the first to be raised with both the promise of feminism and the undertow of patriarchy. We grew up largely unsupervised, ridiculously over-sexualized, and before we knew it, we were expected to pay the bills—while volunteering as class mom and cooking dinner.

I’m fairly sure this is not what Gloria Steinem meant when she said “revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.” And while it is true this revolution resulted in something that never existed before, the joke was on us. Because who came out on top? Our generational male counterparts who found themselves with even more time to add to their Star Wars collections or debate the Snyder vs. Whedon #directorscut #JusticeLeague #Marvel #controversy. Ha, ha. Very funny.

But at some point you wake up and remember that if you look around the poker table and don’t know who the sucker is, it’s you.

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In my case, I had quietly morphed from unrepentant trailblazer into self-conscripted Sherpa, falling into the nauseatingly banal role of “cool wife.” Upon this realization, I asked myself what I imagine so many women in their 50s ask: WTAF? How did this happen?

The honest answer is that I wanted to be the cool wife—I mean, most people in good relationships want to make the other person happy, right? I wanted him to do the things that brought him joy and meaning. And while it never occurred to him to question if my support was unsustainable—why would he?—it turns out that being the cool wife is fueled by a finite resource: self-sacrifice.

By contorting into what I felt society and our relationship expected of me, I had become an unwitting architect in the slow demolition of my own marriage. Because, while that college sophomore who had things to do, art to make, and experiences to pursue was buried—she was still breathing. And once I heard her voice, she wouldn’t shut up.

A return to badassery

Lest you think I am not a feminist (I am) or am anti-men (I am not), allow me to share one additional quote from Ms. Steinem: “The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.” My sense is that we should all be in the process of unlearning because, frankly, the expectations we internalized over time are bullshit at best, destructive at worst.

My twenty-year-old self had boundaries before boundaries were a thing. She knew her time had value and her energy was to be protected. She was, simply put, a badass. So I write today with bushels of respect and a standing ovation for the young woman I was before society had its way with my psyche. The one who said “awww, hellllllll no” to the sweet, self-centered artist expecting to be supported, no questions asked, no discussions had.

Today I strive to follow her fiery desire to climb mountains without the weight of anyone else’s burdens. And so I say, let the sweet clanging sounds of her youthful cojones ring out across the land—and may she lead my middle-aged ass on many adventures to come.

Addendum: I was talking with my best friend—the same best friend who moved to Minneapolis for a spell!—and she reminded me of a monologue I shared with her from a play I just directed. It is from A Doll’s House, Part 2 by Lucas Hnath and it resonated with her, and me, on such a deep level that I wanted to share.

It is the end of the play. Nora, who left her husband and children 15 years prior, explains to him what happened after she walked out the door:

I found what was basically an abandoned shack.

And even though I was living by myself—

for everything I did—

every decision I made,

from what I ate to when I went to bed—

I could hear a voice in the back of my head

that either sounded like you or or my father or the pastor or

or any number of other people I knew—

I’d always in my head somehow manage to

check in with that person

to see what he thought,

even though that person wasn’t a person but

my thinking of that person.

And so, as long as that continued,

I’d decided that I’d live in silence,

not speaking and

Avoid the speaking of others—

and I’d live like this until

I couldn’t remember what other people sounded like—

until I no longer heard a voice in my head

other than my voice

or what I was certain to be my voice.

That was almost two years,

two years of silence.

And once I could hear my voice,

I could think of things that I wanted

that had nothing to do with what anyone else wanted.

It’s really hard to hear your own voice,

and every lie you tell

makes your voice harder to hear,

and a lot of what we do is lying.

Especially when what we want so badly

from other people

is for them to love us.

So I find that I’m best—that I’m my best self if I’m by myself.

…but it’s nice to sit with you.

The turnaround is jarring and complete—and, in my experience, neatly captures divorce’s disorienting leap from insider to outcast.

My journey to “apart” began with a slow burn of emotional stasis (mine) and benign neglect (his) within my marriage. We’d been together for 25, married for 15, and, for the most part, I was on the edge of happiness, if not in it. But when he left his job and I became the sole breadwinner, a corrosive, unaddressed inequity crept into our relationship. For years he took care of himself and his cars, leaving me to take care of us, financially and emotionally.

My therapist summed it up nicely: “He’s got your back, but not your front.”

When I turned 50 at the tail-end of the pandemic, I found myself wandering through a mental not-so-fun-house of mirrors. I told my husband I was reevaluating, well, everything. He later admitted that when I said “everything,” he didn’t realize it included our relationship.

Then, a year later on one mild fall afternoon, that smoldering ember of marital decay exploded into a blistering dumpster fire—sparked by my confession that I had fallen in love with someone else. A man who somehow managed to unearth a long-lost version of myself. A version who would never have allowed herself to become the burnt-out tow vehicle of an entire family. Once the dust was blown off, I realized she was the person I very much wished to be again.

And so I left my marriage to pursue a future built on my own autonomy and long-sublimated needs. The inferno that followed was primal, fueled by my husband’s raw fear of losing his single, dedicated support system. When he realized I wasn’t coming back, the narrative congealed: I was the villain, he was the victim. He burnt the bond between us irrevocably into ash.

We were no longer a part, but apart.

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I moved forward as persona non grata. No communication outside of perfunctory, child-related logistics. But divorce comes with sneaky, whiplash ways of catapulting you into emotional minefields you never knew existed.

This happened to me when my ex-father-in-law died quite suddenly 15 months after our separation. At least it seemed sudden to me because I hadn’t known he was ill. That information belonged to a family I was no longer a part of. When my teenage son broke the news, I fell into a rabbit hole of dissociation: The man who had stood in nicely for the father I never had was gone. And I was left to process his death on my own.

If he had died 16 months earlier, I would have had a role to play in the drama. Instead, I was left to imagine my ex-family in the hospital, crying as they said goodbye one final time, the same way we had done together years earlier when my ex’s mother passed away from Parkinson’s disease. I saw them gathered in the family home to mourn and drink wine and pack up the quilts and paintings and memorabilia each sibling had claimed for their own. Who got the autographed black-and-white photograph of Duke Ellington I coveted? Another detail I can no longer lay claim to.

To be clear: Being apart isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If nothing else, it means no longer hosting my ex’s entire family for Thanksgiving and Christmas—an expensive endeavor that consumed my precious vacation time with shopping and cooking and cleaning. I never have to stew in silence as I do their dishes again.

Even so, I miss being a part of a large family. I gravitated to the bigness of them. It was so unlike the mother-brother-me troika I grew up in.

My own father died when I was two years old, a loss that lives in me to this day in ways I am only now beginning to understand. My father-in-law’s presence had soothed the sharper edges of that pain. He was jovial and practiced his own brand of kindness. He had worked his way into the C-suite and was respected for it. He taught me the concept of “non-negotiated expectations” which, in retrospect, I wish I had applied to my marriage.

Even as our politics threw an ideological wedge between us, I trusted him enough to be honest about how I—and, by proxy, his son—felt about his Fox-fueled views. We argued and sparred. But ultimately the emphasis was on keeping the peace. At least, until I made the decision to divorce.

I can’t validate this because we never talked again after the separation, but I know my ex-father-in-law well enough to assume I had become the enemy. When he got angry, he would set his jaw like a boxer intent on landing the first blow. I can see him unconsciously activating that bulldog jaw of his at the thought of me leaving his son.

Before we were married, my ex and I moved from San Francisco to New York City. It was his parents who saw us to the airport, helping us wrestle our overstuffed luggage and my geriatric cat to the baggage check-in counter. Our suitcases tagged and tossed, we were about to make our way to security when the enormity of the move hit me. I turned and pressed myself into my future father-in-law’s chest, sobbing in his arms. It was only in that moment I realized with aching clarity the sadness I felt at leaving my adopted city and family. I was walking away from something I loved. Again.

I am trying to remember the last time my ex-father-in-law and I talked.

It was when he came to visit the summer before the break up. Our conversation was unremarkable. No fireworks, no politics. Just connecting on the simple things: how my son’s go-kart racing was going, what was happening at my work. I noticed the low-key lurch in his gait, his new habit of dropping the ends of his sentences, the wet eyes. But he would still get on the ground to wrestle with my dogs, laughing as they slobbered the sides of his cheeks.

With his death, being apart means not being able to say goodbye to a father figure who was there for half my life. I wasn’t given the grace of goodbye, and I didn’t expect it, either. I knowingly forfeited my place at the memorial, my name etched out of the family history along with the holiday pictures on Facebook. There is nothing I have to give that the remaining family wants.

But that means I must mourn in a vacuum of my own creation.

I knew that cracking the calcified shell of my old life would bring an end to this family chapter. And I have yet to wake up and regret my decision to prioritize myself over my past. Still, it doesn’t stop this wandering grief from bumping around in my heart, seeking a place to belong.

I chose to be apart. That doesn’t mean I don’t miss being a part.