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Baby boomers are considered the “sandwich” generation being sandwiched between our parents and our children. While we are caring for both, we are also becoming who we finally want to be. It just took us many years to get to there, accumulate life experiences and wisdom, have our hearts broken, lives reversed, hardships born in anquish, to get to that magic age of knowing to the core of our being who we are and who we want to become.

Maria Shriver, in her book Just Who Will You Be talks about loosing herself in her many roles. It’s about a woman, any woman, who gets so lost in being a wife, mother, high powered career woman, her essence becomes dimmed or lost in how other people perceive her.

I am a baby boomer starting my fifth career. Every step I take has a foundation of experience, life lessons, resources and hard learned intelligence. Another piece of the foundation is the joy of creating something new and setting myself up for victories. On the flip side are the little devils of self doubts that I have done my best to pulverized into dust but a few still linger to see what havoc they can create.

The only things you can take with you is what you give away. That doesn’t mean the stuff that you have lusted over, displayed lovingly and prominently in your home and put yourself in financial stress to acquire.

What you give away is your wisdom. The “rents” (slang for parents) of baby boomers have extraordinary stories to tell. I hope that if you are reading this you are inspired to capture your parent’s stories. These are the people that shaped our world, made it safe in which to live, invented public health which I deem more important than all of the technology we now live with. We baby boomers have really nothing to hang our star on than reaping the benefits of the world our parents created.

As a way to shore up my resolve and search for strength, I wrote a ritual for the Power of Rituals for Women entitled “Answers from Our Ancestors”. Our ancestors are the role models for our lives. Their lives can motivate and inspire us to overcome hardships, make difficult decisions and stand as our own advocate. Stories abound in my family about surviving in a world fraught with hardships: World War I and II, the Korean War, the Great Drought and men coming home from war to an economically depressed country. Throughout American history, half of the immigrants flooding to this land of opportunity have been women. They have often fled lives of despair, coming to America to begin again. My Italian grandmother was one such woman; traveling across a vast ocean with all of her belongings in a small hump-back trunk to start a new life in a country where she did not even speak the language. I can’t even muster up enough hutzpah to move across town!

Our female acestors had backbones of steel, eyes filled with determination and spirits that breathed belief in themselves and their capabilities. Such character and grit is rarely seen in this age of excess and entitlement.

As female baby boomers we want it all and we want it now. Now that we have the wisdom and experience to make it happen. We are forces to be reckoned with. There is nothing more potent than a woman in her prime ready to take flight. So while we are helping our parents transition into their next phase and our children move into their middle age, we are creating a new world for ourselves.

Power to the Baby Boomer and Power to the Ritual!

Linda Ann Smith
Award Winning Author, Speaker, Ritual Maker
Power of Rituals