by Lisa Congdon
Angela withdrew from composing and conducting for a period because she was unsure of the music community’s acceptance of her. In 1974, at age 50, she was convinced to supervise the music for the film The Little Prince, earning her an Academy Award nomination. She traveled to Los Angeles to attend the Oscars, and felt so welcome and accepted that she decided to relocate to California.
During this period, Angela experienced a renaissance of creativity as she focused on scoring popular television shows of the 1980s, including Dynasty, Dallas, and Wonder Woman, and was nominated for multiple Emmy Awards. She also collaborated, often uncredited, with composer John Williams, making significant contributions to film scores, including the iconic Star Wars theme. In the final years of her life, Angela retired to Arizona with her wife, passing away in 2009.
WHEN THEY ARRIVED
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My pajamas have handprints of banana smooshed onto the thighs. I can barely open my eyes while I’m waiting for the coffee to brew. The 2-year-old—awake since 5:30 and up twice in the night—is pulling on my shirt, asking for Elmo. I grab my phone to load up kids YouTube—screen time before Mama gets her coffee doesn’t count toward the total—and see a reminder flash on the home screen: 50th birthday five months away. Start planning the party!
I am 49 years old. I have a 7-year-old daughter and a just-turned 2-year-old son. And every day, at some point—usually before my second cup of coffee—I breathe a big sigh and think, “It’s possible there’s a biological reason I’m not supposed to have small children at my age.”
None of this was by accident. My husband and I chose this. You can have a surprise baby easily at 25 and sometimes at 35 but rarely at 45. These are children we willed into our lives. Danny and I met when I was 39 and he was 37, after a lifetime of awkward relationships and missed chances. The ones that didn’t work cut a bigger and bigger hole in our hearts. I thought I would never get married—I was planning my 40th birthday party as the “I’m marrying myself party!” It turned into a “Meet the Danny” party instead. There’s something especially sweet about finding the love of your life when you’re on the brink of 40. None of the clichés and traps of young love line up with the love we had. We forged our own way and fell into each other’s rhythms right away. Two months after we met, he asked me to marry him. Two years later, just before I turned 42, our daughter Lucy was born.
Her precipitous fall into the sterile beeping world of the ICU the first two weeks of her life forged us as parents. We’ll never forget holding hands over her Isolette, reminding her to breathe. Her nine-hour surgery at nine months old, to build her a new skull, was only endurable because we had experienced that land of unknowing together. Somehow, we crawled through the next four months, when she woke up every hour on the hour, crying, too scared to go back to sleep. We moved like zombies through our days, trying to figure out how to do our work (he as a chef, me editing our first cookbook) when we were just so tired. Somehow, the time passed, in giggles and discoveries through wide-open eyes. Slowly, time passed.
And through all that, we still wanted another child. Lucy brought a new light into our world. We wanted another light to reflect with hers. I adore my brother, one of my best friends in the world. Danny’s four older siblings are the bedrock of his life. Since we were already older parents, we wanted Lucy to have a sibling, someone else to know her story.
So we tried for another. And tried. And tried. The trying was fun. The failing was not. Our doctor told us the odds were long anyway—by this time I was 43, way past the Advanced Maternal Age stamped on my charts at the gynecologist’s office. We were into the place of thin possibility now. Within the year, we decided to drop the striving and adopt a child.
The next time you hear a well-meaning person try to console a woman who can’t have a child biologically by saying, “Oh, but you can always adopt!”—please tell her to stop. Adoption is anything but easy. It’s first a search for the right agency, then a pile of paperwork, then home studies and inspections. And then it’s waiting. And more waiting. And thousands and thousands of dollars. And if you find, as we did, after two years of waiting, that the agency you chose wasn’t ever really right for you, you start again, and spend more thousands and thousands of dollars. And wait some more.
Our son arrived when I was 47, three and a half years after we decided we would “just adopt.” His birth was one of the most joyful experiences of our lives. And one of the most deeply moving and sad, as well, since I sat with his birth mother and her loss for three days after he was born. Maybe that’s one of the gifts of being an older mother—I never worried about who the “real” mother was. I know I am my son’s mother, loving him fiercely, but lightly and kindly, too. He adores me, Danny, and his sister with a devoted sweetness I’ve rarely seen. And he has another mother, too, one he might know more and more as he grows older. Since I am a full twenty-five years older than his birth mother, he might come to rely on the relationship with her in a different way as I grow older. I don’t know yet. It’s only speculation right now. But it gives me hope for his future, that he’ll have more family.
When my son turns 22, I will be about to turn 70. Make no mistake—I intend to be here. I’m planning on dancing at his college graduation in a bright red dress. I’m not going to stop moving these next twenty years, since he never stops moving. There might be times when my creaky knees protest against kneeling on the floor to zoom trucks around an imagined track with him, but I do it. The exhaustion of sleep deprivation seems to affect me more powerfully than it did when his sister didn’t sleep six years ago. (Then again, thanks to perimeno-pause, I’m battling insomnia often, so I might as well get up when he needs consoling.) But he’s a better sleeper than she is, so it’s more sporadic. And maybe we do quieter things in the morning together. I’ve relaxed my stress about morning video time—activated by a culture that screams that any screen time is terrible for a child—and remember again just how many episodes of The Brady Bunch and Laverne & Shirley I watched as a kid. I turned out okay. He will, too.
That might be the greatest gift I can give my children as an older parent. I don’t think of them as mine, an extension of my ego. I’m not trying to perfect them. I don’t want to do all the “right things,” like make sure they never eat junk food (Cheetos at the emergency room can be a real gift) or get great grades in everything (heck, if they get As in the subjects they love and Cs in the ones that leave them a little cold, I’ll be fine with that) or prevent them from falling on the playground. Breaking a leg can be a rite of childhood passage. I’d rather they run hard and fall than stay safe all the time.
And since I’m an older parent, I know that I might not ever meet their children. That pains me. But it also reminds me to encourage their independence, to be all right in the world without their mom solving their every problem. Life is short. I’d like them to be each other’s best friends. And their own.
There are conversations with my daughter, long and important, that happen every day, about tensions with friends and doing what is right, about not expecting to be perfect, and how vital it is to keep doing what makes you deeply happy. (My son and I talk more about trucks and helicopters at the moment, but those talks are coming soon.) If my children had come into my life when I was in my 20s or 30s, I might have had more energy. But I wouldn’t have had the wisdom of living another decade or two. Mostly, I tell them this: I love you. And everything passes. You’ll be okay.
At nearly 50, I finally know this for myself: everything passes. I will be okay. These children are gifts, exactly when they arrived.
However, I wouldn’t mind another cup of coffee.
Shauna James Ahern is the author of the much-loved food website Gluten-Free Girl, a food memoir, and three cookbooks, including the James Beard Award–winning Gluten-Free Girl Every Day. Her work has been published or recognized by the New York Times, Gourmet, Bon Appétit, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and the Food Network, among others.
resurrected h
er design career when she was in her 80s—after twenty years away from the design world. The world-renowned ceramic and industrial designer returned to creating new forms in her distinctive style and continuing a lifetime of meeting challenges with ingenuity and perseverance.
Born Eva Striker in 1906 in Budapest, Eva began studying painting at 17. Encouraged by her feminist mother to learn a trade, she left school to apprentice with a potter. She graduated to the journeyman level and became the first woman admitted to the local potter’s guild. Eva developed a sensuous, biomorphic form to her pottery, her flowing lines a reaction to the angular modernism of the times. Ever curious, Eva moved to Russia in 1932 and became an artistic director for the Communist government.
In 1936, the course of her life changed dramatically when the Stalinist regime falsely accused her of an assassination plot. She was imprisoned for sixteen months, most of the time in solitary confinement, before she was released without explanation. Eva reunited with and married Hans Zeisel, and the couple fled Europe for New York in 1938.
Eva began working at Pratt Institute, creating the department of ceramic arts and industrial design. In 1946, she designed a collection of unadorned porcelain pottery for the Museum of Modern Art, the museum’s first one-woman exhibition. By the 1960s, however, Eva had stepped away from the pottery studio and instead focused her attentions solely on scholarly writing and antiwar activism for the next twenty years.
A trip to her native Hungary when she was in her late 70s got her creative juices flowing again, and she returned in full force to the world of design, creating glassware, rugs, lighting, and furniture in addition to new takes on her traditional pottery designs. In 2005, she was awarded the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. She enjoyed the renewed interest in her work immensely and worked industriously until her death in 2011 at age 105.
is 95 years old. She is an active impressionist painter and art teacher, and a late-in-life fashionista and “Eyelash Cabaret” performer. During her lifelong career as an artist, she traveled across the country teaching painting to students of all ages and experience levels, hosted three instructional series on PBS, and made the famous paperback portrait of Ayn Rand. In 2010, photographer Ari Seth Cohen met Ilona (who, of course, was looking exquisite in a turquoise and lime green ensemble) on the sidewalk in New York’s West Village. He took her photograph for his blog, Advanced Style, in which he features women over 50 who dress with zest. Ever since, Ilona’s fashion sense, right down to her long red eyelashes, has garnered her attention from the likes of New York Magazine, Time Out New York, the Huffington Post, and others. She continues to inspire with her passion, openness, and enjoyment for every day—and every little thing—life brings.
Lisa: Ilona, what is your favorite part of the day?
Ilona: Every moment, because I’m alive! I gather all of my energy and do all kinds of things, like when I go and take my baths. Afterward I have ointments, and I take creams all over. I love the smell. I try to enjoy everything I do.
Lisa: You’re an artist, fashion icon, and performer. Which came first?
Ilona: All my life I’ve been an artist, but I had lots of different jobs in order to sustain myself. Because unless you’re born rich or have something that makes you special, you just have to muddle along. It’s hard to make a living as an artist, as you probably know.
Lisa: Yes, I do! Tell us about being a teacher.
Ilona: I have been teaching art impressionism for forty years. Every year, in the spring and the fall, I went out for two months all over the United States—Arizona, Iowa, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana. I mean, you name it, I was all over the place. And I stayed one week in each community, then they’d pick me up for the next community, so I did a lot of all-around teaching.
Lisa: It’s been forty years, so you started teaching in your 50s?
Ilona: I think I started in 1969, I believe. I still teach today in New York, but I no longer travel.
Lisa: Do you feel like you’re a different person than you were when you were younger?
Ilona: Everybody is a different person according to her experiences, because you learn while you live. Every day you learn a little something, unless you’re not open.
Lisa: How do you feel like you’re different now than you were ten years ago?
Ilona: Until recently, I always had a feeling that I was not good enough. I never gave myself credit. Even when I did important things, like illustrating Ayn Rand. Ayn came to me because she liked my style. And she liked it so well that she put it on all her book covers. When you look at book covers of Ayn Rand, you can see my portrait that I did of her. And I painted Tennessee Williams, did you know?
Lisa: Oh, no, I didn’t. That’s wonderful!
Ilona: I’m the only one who did it. I met him in Key West at a dinner party—I had no idea who he was, but he and I clicked immediately and we laughed a lot. I had a celebration of a portrait I did of a fellow in Key West, and they had an unveiling, and he was invited and he said to our host, Roy, “I never wanted to be painted, but I would like to meet this guy who painted this.” And our host said, “Now for one, it’s not a guy, it’s a girl, and you know her because she’s standing next to you.” Ha!
Lisa: So when you were younger, you didn’t give yourself very much credit, but has that changed now that you’re older?
Ilona: I never believed I was good enough. You know, I never gave myself credit. The difference between then and now: I know who I am now. It took me an awfully long time. It was maybe just ten years ago when I was in my 80s that I found out. But I feel now very full of myself, and I give myself credit for all these years of struggling and all the people I met.
Lisa: You have figured out the secret to a fulfilling life—you’re very happy, you enjoy yourself, you feel good. What advice would you give to women who are struggling to find their happiness?
Ilona: Everybody is struggling for something. Some, all they want to do is find a lover. Others want to be very famous. Others want to have a well-paying job. And they might give up when they don’t succeed right away. But it takes quite a long time to nourish whatever you want to do with your life.
Also, there are different ways to be happy. If one way doesn’t work, try another. I didn’t understand this when I was younger. I never knew there were several doors in life. I always thought I have to go straight, the same way I was brought up by my parents. But then I discovered there are lots of doors in life and lots of potential, if you are open.
Lisa: So openness is an important part of being happy?
Ilona: Yes. Look for different ways of finding happiness if something doesn’t go well. But don’t give up immediately, like many people do nowadays. And open communication is important, too. For example, in their relationships, many people, in the first fight they have, they say, “Good-bye, baby,” you know? But you have to work it out, and the best way to work out things is with communication. You talk about it, you’re honest about things, you try to find out what is wrong, and then you try to fix it. It’s not a one-way street. When you deal with another human being—whether it’s a teacher, a lover, or a business partner—I’ve learned you have to consider that the other person has a different point of view, and it’s often not going to be the same as yours! But the essential work is the compromise. And in life you’ve got to learn how to compromise, to give in. You don’t have to give in to everything, but if both people give in a little, you’ll find peace.
, a lifelong advocate for social change, was given a platform for her voice late in her career, allowing her to leave a powerful and lasting impact on the civil rights movement.
Anna was born in 1899 in Marshalltown, Iowa. She and her family were the only African Americans in the small town. The Methodist church, education, and a strong work ethic were the foundations of her childhood. She attended Hamline University in Minnesota, becoming the college’s first African American stude
nt and graduating with a degree in English. She accepted a position to teach English at the historically black Rust College in Mississippi, where she experienced institutionalized segregation for the first time, galvanizing her lifelong commitment to civil rights. Anna left teaching to serve as a director at the YWCA, relocating to different facilities throughout the East Coast. She married Merritt Hedgeman, an interpreter of African American folk music, in 1936.
Although Anna had always been active in protest activities and civil rights, it was in her late 40s and early 50s that her political career became established. In 1948, she was hired into the prestigious position as the executive director of Harry Truman’s reelection campaign, and she worked to connect the candidate to African American voters. In 1954, she was appointed to the New York City mayoral cabinet, becoming not only the first woman but also the first African American to hold the position. As the civil rights movement began to gather steam and national attention in the early 1960s, Anna became a respected leader, helping to organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In 1966, she was one of the cofounders of the National Organization for Women. She continued to advocate for civil rights through lectures and books until her death in 1990 in Harlem, New York.
is an author, an educator, a brand strategist, and the host and founder of the first and longest-running design podcast, Design Matters. As the former chief marketing officer at Sterling Brands, she worked with clients to develop some of the world’s most widely recognized brand identities and merchandise. She is the editor in chief of Print magazine and the cofounder of the first graduate program in branding at New York City’s School of Visual Arts. She is president emeritus of AIGA and one of only five women in 100 years to have held the position. It wasn’t until her 40s that she began to realize and enact her full potential in her field. At age 54, Debbie continues to be a leader in the design world, both in discipline and in discourse. Graphic Design USA named her one of the most influential designers working today.