Summary: For the past three decades and then some—ever since I got the hang of running my mouth—I’ve been trying in vain to get my mother to do my bidding. But it remains one of life’s great mysteries why she never bent to my will. It’s beyond me why she has chosen to live her life as though she were a self-directed individual with a mind and agenda of her own. When ma retired more than a decade ago, I did all I could to encourage her participation in activities beyond work and us ‘kids’. She wasn’t impressed. Ma, you gotta take an interest, I said, never initially bothering to specify what I thought she should be interested in. Get out there, I urged her. Go date. Look alive, woman! Volunteer, socialize, learn a language, I insisted. Do something, ma! Whenever I thought about her, which was often, I wrote notes, and phoned home from wherever I was in the world—in between my own adventures—to assess her status and gently clobber her with my attempts to pack the open calendar of her newly retired life. She wasn't having it. Naturally, I stepped up my plan, drafting to-do lists (you know I'm infamous for my lists, honey), providing phone numbers, and slipping in the sobering statistics and manufactured facts about retirees who—by not remaining active in their golden years—ultimately retired from life itself after leaving the workforce. Having nearly reached my limit, I opted, as any keenly desperate strategist would, for overt tactics of fear and intimidation. Did you know, I said with much conviction as I could muster, the FBI did a study that said life expectancy of retired people who don't stay active after leaving the workforce is only 5 years? Still unmoved by this latest dump of misinformation, she replied, What makes you think I want to do anything, Kriste? I been doing all my life. And I’m tired. There aren’t many occasions when you’ll find me short for things to say, but that one shut me up pretty good. After recovering from my mom’s ungracious outburst (and world-weary expression of her deeper personal truth, which I was powerless to fix), I grudgingly decided that, after decades of trying to run my mom’s life, I had to allow that maybe she knew what was best for her. Maybe, I considered, she could run her life without the intrusion of my unsolicited statistics, persistent lists, and thinly veiled demands to Move It. It was a difficult fistful of pills to swallow, but I was out of the nest living a life of my own and had to let my mom fly—or not—as she saw fit. Then one day, not having fully and totally nor finally given up on the attempt to resurrect and direct my mom’s social life, I sent her a memoir I’d hoped would change everything. It was the story of a divorced, freshly retired teacher who—despite her many attempts at ‘staying busy’ by volunteering and senior activities—she got blindsided by a sudden desire to have sex and maybe even fall in love after so many decades spent on the shelf immersed in other things. Bingo! Just what my mother needs, I proclaimed. Sex! I don’t give up easy. I love that memoir because our heroine, Jane Juska, is a woman after my own heart. Some would say she was well beyond the age of ‘knowing better’, past 60, and she still looked at her life as an adventure and knew that, even though she was clueless about getting into social circulation again—let alone getting into bed with someone new—she went for it anyway. She anted'd up and duked it out through the pages of her story and invited us in for the ride, so to speak. The book: A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance. It was the perfect gift for any mother from a concerned daughter with her mom's well-being in mind. I made a special trip to the post office just to send it off. Once I’d given her enough time to read and marinate on the book, I called ma and engaged her in the following discussion: ME: So, ma, did you get that book I sent you? MA: What book? ME: You know,
