When I was on my own after my husband entered a dementia facility, I resolved to wrestle with all the things that had dogged me over the years, issues that I never had dealt with and that were keeping me from being the woman I wanted to be. Of course all of the inner work took place over years and I have certainly not completely resolved all of the issues but enough to give me what I was looking to have...a better, more peaceful, more satisfying life. I am a work in progress as are we all and I continue to try to move forward every day by guarding against old ways of dealing with problems.

Body image was a big one for me. From the time I was very young the norm in my family was most definitely overweight women. My grandmothers were small and plump, my mother fought weight gain as long as I knew her, my aunts were overweight, except for one. They all died too young of heart disease and early on I began to associate death with fat. Mine was called ‘baby fat.' When my grandmother, who was an expert seamstress, came to our home in New Jersey and fitted me for a dress, she would return with the finished dress the following month to find that it did not fit. I had grown, taller and wider. The ‘tch tchs' I heard from her made me burn with shame, even though I knew she loved me. It told me that though everyone around me was fat, fat on me was a most definite 'no no.' But I was overweight and endured taunts from boy classmates until I went to sleep away camp at the age of 11. I seized the opportunity because I hated the food. I slimmed down and reveled in the praise of parents, relatives and friends.