Jane Genova

The 2012 Holiday Season for this Single Girlfriends is one of profound gratitude. My second breast biopsy came back negative. That is despite the fact that breast/colon cancer tends to cluster in families and that it does in my family. My eyes are okay. My teeth, at least the ones which matter, are keeps, for […]

Once Randy dies, that’s it.  No more pets.” That’s what my 64-year-old neighbor told me several months ago.  I agreed. Last February I had to put to sleep my Havana Brown feline Carlotta.  It was horrific for me and worse for her soulmate black coal feline Jason.  I vowed that when Jason, who is 17, […]

I’m an optimist. That should explain why, around my 66th birthday, I decided to look for a full-time job.  It wasn’t that my consulting business was in the dumper.  It was just that I decided it would be a good idea to have a regular paycheck, some benefits, people to be around, and learn new […]

My age – on the other side of 50 My family history – breast, colon cancer, which tend to be linked in families  My mind-body problem – bouts of depressive episodes since age 11  Those risk factors haunted me as I went through the ordeal of two ultrasounds and one biopsy after the yearly mammogram. […]

The meme of our time is failure.  In fact, the folks at the HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW are all worried about Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership at Facebook since he hasn’t as yet failed and therefore not proved he has what it takes to come back Well, I got really lucky there.  In 2003, I lost it all, […]

Here it is the holiday season. And no one over-40 gets through it without work, the emotional kind, I mean.  Ministers, spiritual coaches, and therapists worth their salt all tell us that work goes a lot easier if we start with a gratitude list.  Yeah, really. Well, that gratiude list really does trigger an internal […]

This is awful.  That’s what I thought to myself every few years, after I was over-50.  Now, I find out that I am not alone. “Necessary suffering” is what Richard Rohr calls much of what goes on in the second half of life.  A Roman Catholic priest, Rohr recently published “Falling Upward.” Yes, suffering is a […]

Who hasn’t surrendered to the reality that the original strategy, tactic, and/or educational investment wasn’t panning out?  With such a volatile economy disrupted by technology, we’re all finding ourselves stumbling or even stuck.  Yet, it’s been tough to admit that, yet again, Plan A didn’t work.  We feel foolish.  Our confidence is shaken to the core.  And […]

Shakespeare’s comedies frequently end in weddings, the universal symbol of hope, even in the face of mankind’s dark side. We single girlfriends honor that emotion when those we care about take that step.  Even though divorce happens after about one half of marriages there’s the possibility the couple, two sexes or one sex, can do […]

At age 77, Gloria Steinem is having a renaissance in the media.  Of course, thanks to Steinem, we single women didn’t have it rougher than we did.  We could have, you know. For decades, Steinem not only fought that we women, single and married, be perceived and treated as people [not babes]. She also remained […]

Perhaps we single girlfriends here in the U.S. should start a national Single Pride Day.   There is now concrete evidence showing that we took the road which savvy educated women around the world are increasingly traveling.   How that is playing out in Asian societies is the cover story in the April 20th issue of THE […]

Singism by Bella DePaulo could be the sophisticated Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Like that iconic but sentimental work, Singlism might just call the right attention to the tragic treatment of those not in a legal marriage. The Census Bureau counts them as 40% of the adult population. If you are among them like I have been […]

There’s a platitude which, like most platitudes, turns out to be mostly right.  And that’s that most women marry their fathers.  Peek in at anyone’s family reunion and it’s almost ludicrous to observe how many women have spouses or boyfriends who are dead ringers for Papa Bear. Both my sisters married men like my passive, […]

During the 20th century, it was a common goal of determined females: That our lives would be different from that of our mother’s. I was hell-bent to take the road less traveled for females from ethnic blue-collar families when I packed my trunk and took the train from Jersey City, New Jersey to Seton Hill […]

Royal weddings can be for the single woman what Christmas tends to be for everyone: The agony and the ecstasy. The magic is being played out on the small screen of a young golden couple who found each other, adjusted to each other, and made it to the day when they would commit themselves to […]

“Old age takes everyone by surprise, and no one really ever comes to terms with it.” That’s what Jill Lepore writes in THE NEW YORKER’s March 14th article on aging “Twilight.” Lepore is referring to the thinking of G. Stanley Hall.  Ahead of his time, Hall was looking at aging from all kinds of angles […]

It was part of the whole enchilada of growing up Roman Catholic and female in the 1950s: The longing to become a nun. Nuns, who were our teachers, were brides of Christ.  You didn’t have to be genius to figure out that meant they were without the angst of the groom returning home drunk.  They […]

Back in high school, guidance counselors and teachers hammered into us Baby Boomers how difficult it was for the 76 million of us to get into college.  Early on we learned to game the system by presenting ourselves on our college applications as the well-rounded, social young people we were expected to be. Most of […]

There was nothing my mother loved more than scanning the economic horizons and finding possible signs that The Great Depression was going to again happen. Family members, neighbors, and even the parish priest had down cold every one of my mother’s floor ladies in the factory and how the owner played had cute with her. […]

The single state, at least for women, is a mixed bag professionally. Sure, on the one hand, employers discriminate favorably in hiring and promoting single women.  They recognize the advantage of having on their team those of us who have few pressing family obligations, bring in that paycheck, and a strong work ethic. There are […]

At one time, to constitute a Power Couple, like the Clintons or Obamas, you had to be married.  That left a single woman like myself out.  The Establishment simply wouldn’t have tolerated power shared between a man and a woman who were unmarried.  Of course, that’s changed.  Look at the current Governor of New York […]

I can cut onions and talk,” was how Kelley Connors, head of KC Health and builder of healthcare communities for women, entered the conversation on All The Single Girlfriends [ATSG] podcast February 14th.  And, that three-hour talkfest was how Toby Bloomberg launched ALSG, a digital community for women over-40 who are not in traditional marital […]

Since I have always been single, I have no idea what the financial pressures are in the married state.  What I do know is that being self-supporting from my early 20s has meant I have pushed myself to learn how the world of work operated.  I didn’t seek to change it, either from within or […]

The shock for me – and now for more and more of us – was that I was older, yet I had to start over again.  In 2003, my communications boutique had collapsed.  My personal life hadn’t been too hot either. [My free e-book GeezerGuts].  African-American bestselling author and Yoruba priestess Iyanla Vanzant puts this […]