“Mom, is it true things happen for a reason?” Casey’s green eyes fringed by impossibly curly brown lashes widened with anticipation at the possible confirmation that some benevolent force is at work that can explain why bad things happen to good people.

“Who the fuck said that?” I snapped. Okay, I didn’t really say fuck, but I wanted to.

This pithy, saccharine saw lodges in my ears like the stinking turd of stupidspeak that it is. And whenever someone says it, whether the person is my friend or not, I cannot suppress my outrage that anyone dare to explain away the immoral, indecent, unfair and—in many cases—avoidable crap that rains down on perfectly lovely people and takes their lives, their health, their finances and even their children in directions that should only be reserved for those whose full names end in Cheney, Bush, Wolfowitz or Rove.

Worried that the BP oil leak is leading to the end of sea life as we’ve known it? Not to fret, everything happens for a reason, ya know. No. I don’t know. What could possibly be the reason, smarty-pants? That this horrific event is the only way Americans can grasp the message that an oil-based energy system is bad? That assumption gives Americans’ collective intelligence way too much credit considering that this point has been driven home to us about once every five years since 1910, when more than nine million gallons soaked into Kern County, California, permanently despoiling hundreds of acres of once fertile farmland.

Your child was diagnosed with autism? No use being upset. After all, everything happens for a reason. Oh, yeah? Maybe the reason one of every 60 boys is now diagnosed with this disease is that the big shots in multi-billion dollar chemical corporations just don’t want the world to know that while they’re shoveling their obscene profits into offshore bank accounts, their products are melting the brains and gonads of generations of children all over the world.

You just lost your job? Well, you’ve always said you wanted to try something different, maybe now’s the time. Just remember, everything happens for a reason. Oh, I’ll remember all right, just after I remember to write down all those items that job I just lost was going to pay for—my children’s college education, my mortgage, my health insurance, my car payment…did I forget anything? Oh yeah, food, medicine, gasoline, clothes, my phone bill, heat, water, air conditioning and the kids’ braces.

The everything happens for a reason homily is right up there with things always work out for the best.

No they don’t. Tell me, please, what is working out about the war the U.S. is waging in Afghanistan. I really want to know. And so do thousands of families on both sides of this manufactured and uncalled for conflict; families like yours who have lost their children, fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers in unspeakably, bloody and painful deaths that would melt the rose off even Pollyanna’s glasses.

And how is firing thousands of teachers working out for tens of thousands of children whose families are one step away from illiteracy, actual and cultural, and already believe everything they hear on Fox News?

How is this upcoming generation of youngsters who confuse true leadership and intelligence with looking like cheer-leader-Barbie and hairspray-helmeted-Ken? How are they going to vote? For the candidate with the biggest hair, the whitest teeth and the highest cheekbones? God help us all.

The next time someone tries to embroider a shitty situation with platitudinous drivel, please forgive me in advance if I throw up all over them, preferably as they walk out the door to a black tie gala. And then, when their designer duds are drenched in stinky vomit, I dare them say, “Oh well. Everything works out for the best!”

So what horrific circumstance was Casey trying to rationalize? The gulf oil spill? Global warming? His own brain damage caused by a hospital error at his birth?

Casey explains: “That’s what Oogway says.” (For the uninitiated, Oogway is the kung fu master—who happens to be a tortoise—in Kung Fu Panda, a feature cartoon that takes place in China.)

Brilliant. Pre-packaged wisdom straight from the beak of a spokes-tortoise for a country that—intentionally or not—is overtaking ours on every front, profiting tremendously from our own willingness to swallow, whole-hog, idiotic platitudes like everything works out for the best.

If our children’s children are curious enough to question why they’re still paying interest to the Chinese for the money we borrowed to launch a war that accomplished nothing but the destruction of our own way of life, we can direct them to the golden tablet dug from a pile of bullshit, guarded by magical salamanders from the planet Xenon and upon which is written, Everything happens for a reason, stupid.

Prudence Baird paints a picture of mother and daughter—in roles rarely revealed

Two figures move as one under a hot January sun across the steaming asphalt of a medical building parking lot. This is the kind of day that brings hordes of winter refugees west following the televised New Year’s Day Rose Parade in Pasadena, California.

One of the figures is a frail old woman collapsed in a transporter wheelchair—a conveyance with four small wheels, made for transferring from place-to-place those whose self-propelling days are history. The other is a middle-aged stick figure; her veiny hands grasp the heavy rubber handles of the transporter, pushing her load gently in the unseasonably warm mid-morning air.

When the conjoined pair reaches an unwashed silver Volvo, the ambulatory woman expertly backs the transporter into the space alongside the passenger side of the car and stops. The middle aged woman—who, if you haven’t guessed by now, is me—rummages for her keys in a worn black backpack hanging by the handles of the conveyance.

A click of the medallion, and a few moments later, my mother, for that is the skeletal old woman in the transporter, is expertly pivoted and strapped into the front seat. Because of the heat, I leave the door open wide while, in an oft-rehearsed routine, I roll the transporter to the rear of the car, open the trunk gate, kneel to swivel and unhook the removable foot pads, unlock the frame, and collapse the chair into a manageable 12-pound package of chrome steel, rubber and vinyl, ready to be loaded into the trunk.

While hoisting the chair, a shiny new maroon Cadillac Seville with tinted windows pulls alongside. The passenger side window silently descends and a tawny faced woman of about 60 leans across the gleaming leather front seat. Her hair, a shade of orange unknown to nature, sticks up in unraveling, dehydrated curlish clumps and her red nails rap nervously on the steering wheel.

“Is that your mother?” she demands.

I nod, wiping a trickle of sweat from under the nose bridge of my sunglasses.

“How long have you been doing this?” she jerks her head in the direction of the chair now on its side in my trunk. We both know what she means.

I pause, counting not the years, but instead seeing multiple images unfold, all etched in needle-sharp pricks against the backdrop of my forties. And with each piercing, I feel again the juice of vitality bleed from my veins, leaving me a pale shadow of the apple-cheeked woman I had been at 40.

Although I know that each moment of maternal care and gentle handling scoops from my life a nourishing drink I would rather bestow on my children, my husband and myself, I cannot stop myself from giving. Each smiling moment and lingering touch, whether a softly delivered sponge-bath or an outing to the pet store to hold small animals, crafts black moments when I am neither wife nor mother, but caregiver to a departed woman who lovingly, distractedly and, at times, somewhat misguidedly, raised me and whose ghostly, guilty presence is more of a draw and more of a drain than anyone who has not been here can understand.

“Five years,” I reply in a mechanical voice, suppressing whatever feeling might come with the confession that I have let pass five crucial years of my children’s lives while the unforgiving and ungrateful chasm of my mother’s need has grown wider and wider still.

The rear window of the Cadillac now descends revealing an equally orangish, shriveled crone, her mouth agape, strapped into the back seat. Her sunken cheeks are crisscrossed with lines and her eyes have a frantic wildness I see in my mother’s.

As we near death, I wonder, do we try to see it coming with these widened eyes? Or are those bulging eyeballs simply more evidence of the gruesome, drip-by-drip drain that empties our corporeal vessel, rendering improbable—to those who meet us in these last stages of our lives—the very idea that we were once full-bodied, beguiling maidens whose organs, hard parts and soft orbs were suspended in a fertile sea?

The driver jerks her head towards the withered woman in the back seat. “Ten years!” She gasps, looking at me in horror. “Ten years!”

I stare into the car’s interior, not sure if a shadow of pain doesn’t flit across the parchmentlike forehead and yellowed sclera of the elder figure in the back seat. Silently as they descended, the windows rise together and the two orange women are gone with a screech of wheels on the hot pavement.

I close the trunk, open the driver’s side door, lean inside, start the engine and air conditioner. My mother looks at me, silent as usual but her eyes hold a question I dare not answer. I squeeze her bony elbow, “Somebody just asking a question, Mom.”

I trot around the front of the vehicle so that, if she wishes to, my mother can see me and not fear that I’ve again abandoned her. I lean inside, making some inconsequential last adjustments of her seat belt. I smile into the face of the person I first loved and whose life was devoted to me, my two sisters and her husband.

“Hi Momma,” I coo, trying to make up to her for a world of wrongs and hurts that have long been relegated to her own forgotten history. A pair of bloodshot light blue eyes follow me and a faint smile plays across lips thinned by age.

Just as they couldn’t send us, when we were incorrigible teenagers, to Moscow with a note pinned on our sweaters, we cannot now abandon those who gave us life but who, in their decrepitude, puncture our very beings with unquenchable need.

I cannot but give, even though the very act robs me and my family of breath. All is forgiven, Mama, I whisper to myself, as I fasten my own seatbelt. And I wonder as we head home, when the hourglass turns, will those who render my care forgive me as well?

For Prudence Baird, dusty eggs, puppy love, and baby crack make a wicked brew with the potential for world peace

When our Irish twins*, born a mere 22 months apart, reached toddlerhood, my husband reports that I got that misty-eyed look that says, “I’ll trade you a month of blow jobs for another baby.” Able to see the writing on the wall (much of it in red ink), my intrepid partner did what most sensible men would do—he rushed out and got himself a vasectomy.

Even so, I hoped and wished for another child. With my breastfeeding years fast receding to the realm of “remember when” and sentimental boo-hoo sessions alone in my room, having a third child became my holy grail, my Turkish delight, my must-see TV.

I refused to pass along cherished baby clothes. I squirreled away cutsie bibs and blankies. Intuitively, I knew that as long as my ovaries were pumping out eggs, there was a chance—even if it meant reattaching my husband’s pipes myself using an emery board and tweezers.

Now, thanks to new research, I realize I wasn’t insane any more than Tiger Woods, David Duchovny or Eliot Spitzer are. No, I wasn’t nuts—I was an addict. I was hooked on oxytocin.

Also known as baby crack, oxytocin is the hormone released in pregnancy, orgasm and most titillating, when nipples are stimulated—a key component of breastfeeding.

Oxytocin plays a big role in all things tender and maternal: from fertility and bonding, to trust and love. Of course, baby crack is not the only one reason we mothers love our babies, but oxytocin certainly plays a central role in our willingness to undergo childbirth more than once. Like a good dose of morphine, baby crack makes all of life’s boo-boos go bye-bye.

But eventually, my jones for mo’ baby crack waned along with my fertility. I resigned myself to going through the boys’ teenage years with only memories of adoring glances, small arms reaching for a hug, and wee hands wriggling themselves into mine.

Following the advice of Nora Ephron, who encourages parents of teenagers to get a puppy so that at least one creature in the house will love them, we acquired Eddy, a nine-week-old Welsh terrier, all sweet-smelling puppy fur and alimentary canal functions. As he squirmed in my arms, his big brown eyes adored me. His wet nose nuzzled me. At night, he slept pressed against my body.

And then, hullo! I felt the stirrings of my old friend, oxytocin. How else could I explain the sudden, shall we say, slip-n-slide qualities of my naughty bits?

“Nope!” laughed my doctor, “Your eggs are dust!” She scheduled an ultra-sound anyway, offhandedly remarking that sometimes these symptoms could be explained by cancer.

The next day in radiology, I noticed that the technician seemed to avoid my eyes as she carefully cleaned the wand of KY jelly and handed me a towel.

I gulped. “Did you see, uh, anything?”

She answered with a question, “When did you say your last period was?”

“August, 2007.”

“Interesting,” she said.

“Just tell me,” I pleaded, skipping ahead to the worse case scenario—having to rush home and finish my 2009 taxes before I succumbed.

“I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but you have several mature egg follicles. Three on each ovary. You should definitely use birth control.”

I left the hospital in a daze. In the dead of winter, literal and figurative, my ovaries flowered for one last time in a grande finale session brought on, no doubt, by the oxytocin generated by puppy love.

New studies point to oxytocin’s ability to help individuals form intimate relationships, feel at peace and care for one another, which is why some doctors are prescribing it to their patients with autism. Why spend hundreds of hours teaching rudimentary, robotic greetings to children who fail to thrive socially when you can get them to care about—to empathize with—their fellow human beings?

And why not take it one step further? Why are we dropping bombs from drones when we might achieve more by spraying our so-called enemies with oxytocin? If dusty eggs can suddenly spring back to life in the presence of puppy love, why can’t we make love and not war America’s chief export?

Is anyone with me on this? Baby crack for everyone! (Let’s start with Dick and Liz Cheney.)

*Children born on each other’s heels are called “Irish twins” and are not only an Irish phenomenon, but a result of marrying at an advanced age on the cusp of menopause.

Ana June is a family and child photographer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The photo of a very happy little Quinn Densmore, has been used to promote breastfeeding in several countries.

Like a sign post that screams Watch Out!, Prudence zooms in on one of midlife’s challenges.

Falling. It happens to the best of us. One minute you are putting one foot in front of the other, and the next you’re on your ass. Or your face—with absolutely no idea how you got there so fast.

When young, falling is funny; slapstick even. Occasionally falling is painful, but having friends sign your cast or getting out of P.E. makes it all worthwhile. In fact, there’s a notorious t-shirt that mocks falling:

“I don’t have a drinking problem. I drink. I get drunk. I fall down. No problem.”

Ha-ha. Try that at age 54.

This brings me to the other morning when I heard a crashing and thrashing sound coming from the bathroom.

I put down my cup of Fogbuster coffee and tiptoe to the bathroom door. “Honey?” I can hear the shower running; otherwise silence.

After a moment, I hear an aggrieved voice calling, “Could you come in here?”

Anyone who has ever driven with my husband knows how hard it is for him to ask for help. So, with trepidation, I open the door, letting out a cloud of steam, instantly fogging up my glasses and plastering my bangs to my forehead.

I peer through the warm mist. The shower curtain rod is at a 45 degree angle. The curtain lays half-in, half-out of the tub, efficiently detouring a cascade of hot water onto the floor, where it pools around the space heater. Not good.

And straight from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, protruding from the tub are several long, pink waving limbs of some giant thing, looking for all the world like Kafka’s poor traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who awoke one morning to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach. I cannot even tell if there four legs or six.

I turn off the shower, the fog rushes to fill the rest of the house, and I see there are four limbs—two arms, two legs—attached to a very pissed-off spouse who has slipped and fallen in the shower. Which, I recall in a moment of non-sequitoritis, is exactly how Katherine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post died.

I know my husband isn’t dead, because he has that look on his face which says, “I am trying hard to figure out how this is all your fault.” But, because he must rely on me to get out, he shelves this thought as I offer him my arm—and a towel.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 16,000 Americans die each year from falling—many of those in the bathtub—making falling the second riskiest activity of daily life, sandwiched between number one, getting out of bed, and number three, having sex. (Who knew so many people were having sex?)

Falling doesn’t merit a moment of thought until you either fall yourself or you care for an elderly parent who falls, which is karmic revenge for your naughty teenage years. And then, avoiding falling becomes all-consuming. Signs on bulletin boards for Tai Chi classes suddenly glow with meaning and you actually read those ads about walk-in bathtubs.

But, all this was far from my mind last week, as a new-fallen snow beckoned me—in my slippers—onto the front stoop to snap a photo of the front yard draped in sparking white. “This will look great on Facebook!” And that was my last thought before my elbow hit the cement.

How would your life have been different if you had seen this time-lapse video on the cusp of your own womanhood?

What if, as a young girl of 13 or 14, you had witnessed the impossibility of being that perfect face on the billboard? Would you still have lain in the sun to get that Bain de Soleil tan? Or, turned your legs (and Mom’s white sheets) orange with “QT” (aka Quick Tan)? Or stripped your hair with the spray-on Sun In, trying to look like those Nordic blondes in the commercials?

Would you have starved yourself to look like Twiggy or stretched your Dippity-Do gelled hair over soup cans to have Cheryl Tiegs’ smooth, waspy locks?

Me, I don’t think I’d have done anything different…I think I still would have broiled in the sun and sacrificed my personal development in order to please friends and boyfriends. I hope that I wouldn’t have, but as the philosopher Ouspensky said, “If it could have happened any other way, it would have.”

And, after all, what would be the point of being young if you listen to your parents’ wisdom and learn from their mistakes?

(If you are viewing this post in your mailbox, you must click on the title to get to the Fifty is the New website and view the video.)

After 15 years of marriage, and too many misplaced items to count, Prudence Baird insists her husband consider a new approach.

When I say I married a loser, I don’t mean that kind of loser. I’m talking about the kind of loser who loses things. Like keys, hats, sunglasses, cell phones, parking lot tickets, wedding rings—and most of all, wallets.

Like the clueless wife who finds that her husband has a gambling problem only after the repo man takes away the family Volvo, I found out that (let’s call him “Tim”) was a misplacer (nicer word, huh?) after we married. The first time it happened, I had no idea that this was merely Point A in an ever-lengthening trajectory that would arc across the time grid of our marriage.

I was in my home office churning out press releases when I heard the front door slam and heavy, frantic steps on the staircase. I emerged to see a man I didn’t recognize—a red-faced man, his salt-and-pepper askew; a man who hollered in my face: “My wallet is gone!”

Amidst the frantic turning-over of couch cushions and papers flying off of horizontal surfaces, I managed to discern that Tim was looking for his wallet in our house—even though he had left the missing item on the roof of his car a full half-hour’s commute from our home.

“Uh, why are you looking for it here?” I asked logically.

Tim’s eyes were now pinwheels spinning in opposite directions and his hair was sending out sparks. “Because!” he foamed.

Okay.

And thus began a routine that is now as familiar to us as the three-quarters-time box step was to Fred and Ginger.

I order the new MasterCard and cancel the old one. I arrange for replacement health insurance and car insurance cards. He makes an appointment for a new driver’s license, orders a new ATM card, and cancels any checks. Like the one for $1,750 that was in his wallet last June in New York City and he was carrying—in his hands—his wallet, his keys, his cell phone, his sunglasses and the Saturday New York Times.

Somewhere between the ATM, where he withdrew $200 and put it in his wallet, and the hotel (a mere three blocks away), the wallet managed to disappear from this assortment of hand-held items.

So after we added “cancel both Merrill Lynch accounts” to our usual to-do list because he couldn’t remember which account the check was drawn on, I gave Tim an ultimatum. And this time I meant it.

The time had come for a man bag.

We had tried the fanny pack and failed. (“Embarrassing,” he had said).

And we had tried the black leather zippy thing that was thicker than a notebook but wasn’t quite a brief case because “writers don’t carry briefcases.” This last item was purchased after the incident where Tim spent the last ten minutes of an important meeting groping for his missing car keys under the couch of a puzzled executive who might have otherwise hired him. But he lost that black leather zippy thing almost instantly. (“Too thin,” he rationalized.)

I’m not sure if Tim agreed to the man bag because not long after the New York episode we saw a Sean Connery look-alike with one, or if he was simply sick of losing things. But, I’m happy to report that he now has the man bag, and more importantly he is trying to use it.

I only say “trying” because yesterday, I saw in our driveway a familiar black square lying just outside the car door where you might expect something to fall if the bag it was in happens to be unzipped and then perhaps turns upside down. This often happens when you impatiently yank your man bag hard because its straps have entangled themselves with the gearshift and you already have your hands full with your sunglasses, keys and The New York Times.

A doctor’s prognosis brings Prudence Baird face to face with her “inner old lady.”

I love my town. What’s not to love about a place where the local doctor goes by his first name (Dr. Walter) and hand-writes notes to his patients?

Recently, one of Dr. Walter’s letters arrived in the mail. I recognized the familiar scrawly handwriting that could only belong to a doctor.

“What’s in the letter from Dr. Walter?” asked my husband.

“I have no idea.”

“Shall I open it?” he asked, ripping open the envelope. “Oh,” he paused. “You have osteoporosis.”

Surely my husband wasn’t talking to me?

I quickly looked around for Sally Field.

Moi, osteoporosis? A flying nun’s disease? An old lady’s disease? How could this be?

My husband handed me the note. Then I remembered the bone density test I’d had the month before—after my vitamin D count came back in the single digits. Standing in my living room, with the late afternoon sun streaming in, I held the letter in one hand and steadied myself with the other; I had one of those “this is your life” moments.

By that, I mean the realization of some absolute truths. Like the fact that I’m never going to win a Nobel prize, an Olympic gold medal or run in a marathon. I’m never going to have another child or a goat farm. And there will never be a day when the first thing I don’t do is reach for my glasses.

Of all the charges leveled at Baby Boomers—and there are many—the one I relate to most is that we refuse to acknowledge that our clocks are winding down. This isn’t because we’re creepy, like that guy in Death in Venice. No, we have mind-blindness when it comes to aging. I think that’s why so many of us didn’t remember to have babies until it was almost too late.

I remember when I was 39 years old, sitting in the obstetrician’s office for a consultation. The phone on the doctor’s desk rang in two short bursts. He held up his finger to me as if to say, “This will only take a minute,” and took the call.

“This is great timing,” said my doctor to whomever was on the other end of the phone, “I have a mother here with advanced maternal age.”

Oh, the poor old bag, I thought, looking around for a wrinkled crone with a baby bump.

Only after he hung up the receiver, did I understand that it was I who was the mother with “advanced maternal age.” My doctor had been speaking to the doctor who performs amniocenteses.

It’s not that I don’t know my age, and it’s not that I don’t feel my age, I simply don’t believe it. So when I overheard my yoga teacher explaining to one of the ladies in my Tuesday morning yoga class that she likes working with older women, I thought, “How lovely that she’s working with the elderly. They must really appreciate her efforts.” Driving home, the glow of admiration faded as I realized she had been talking about my yoga class. About me.

The good news is that there are drugs available to slow the ravages of osteoporosis. And there are yoga teachers who are thrilled to be teaching a class of creaky middle-aged women balasana, or child’s pose. And virabhadrasana, or warrior’s pose. And most of all, there are my children who are always happy to let me know that even if I don’t think of myself as aging, they certainly do. And they’ll make no bones about that.