Today is Paul McCartney’s 70th birthday. Doesn’t he look good?
Well, it’s my birthday too. I’m not quite 70. My sister Janie, our family Beatle maniac, thought it was so cool that I shared the same birthday as her most favorite Beatle. We are just alike. I have big hair. He used to have big hair. He grew up in England. I grew up in East Texas. He has billions of dollars. I wish I had billions of dollars.
We celebrated my birthday this weekend because my boy is away at basketball camp today. The kids picked out my cake and flowers. They wanted to put 47 candles on the cake and were about half way there when the hubby told them to stop. He said it would be a fire hazard and would ruin the cake with wax melting all over it by the time we got them all lit. He was right. My age is now a fire hazard!
To tell you the truth, my age feels pretty good. There is something very liberating about being in your forties. You have seen enough of life to get kicked around a little bit and you start kicking back, or at least that is how I feel.
Little did I know that I would create something like Livin’ Sassy in my forties. When I thought about starting a blog, I knew that I didn’t want it to be all about me. It just didn’t seem natural. I knew I wanted it to be about my friends. I will never forget my very first job interview out of college. A very uptight HR lady asked me, “Why on earth did you put something like Named Most Friendly in High School on a professional job resume?” The twenty something me left the interview in tears. The forty something me would have told her, “Because genius, in this job, I am required to work with people and bring in new business and relationships. It is a sign that I get along well with others. Upon meeting you in this interview, I don’t think I really want to work at a company who employs an HR person like yourself that obviously has a stick up her &^$% “ Whew, I feel better. I have been holding that one in for quite a while!
I guess my point is that I have always enjoyed my friends. I still sing the song I learned when I was a Brownie, “Make new friends, but keep the old…one is silver and the other gold!” I listened intently to my Brownie Troop leader.
I now have this wonderful website that showcases my friends. I just love clicking on the main site to see all their beautiful faces popping up all over. I didn’t realize where I was going with all of this when I first begged my friends to let me take their picture for my new blog. It all makes sense to me now. I was meant to tell their stories as a reminder to them that they are wonderful. Most of my friends are busy raising their families and lose themselves in the process. When I call them to ask them to model something for me, it immediately makes them focus on themselves for at least a day. The day that we take pictures is my favorite. We all feel like giggly teenagers again, like we are getting away with something that we aren’t supposed to be doing. In this case, it would be that they really aren’t models and I don’t work for a famous fashion magazine, but it sure is fun!
I was at the pool the other day taking my daughter to swim practice and I was talking to some of the Moms that I didn’t know very well. They asked me if I was still underwriting mortgage loans. I was almost apologetic in explaining what I was now doing as a career. I gave them an update that included showing them my blog on my smart phone. They couldn’t believe I took all the pictures and wrote all the content. I guess I hadn’t given it much thought about how it looked from a person that didn’t know the whole story about how I came about creating a new blog. It made me proud.
After six months of blogging and turning down job offers in my old life of mortgage lending, I now consider myself a blogger, a professional blogger. There, I said it out loud without apologizing. In this short amount of time at trying something so new and different, it feels good. It feels right. I have yet to make a profit but I have a sense of fulfillment.
For this next chapter in my life, my focus will continue to be my friends and family. The difference is that I now have a little blog: and thanks to all their wonderful stories and beautiful faces the readership of Livin’ Sassy continues to grow. I want this website to be a constant reminder that just because you might have reached a certain age and raising your kids consumes the majority of your time; you can’t forget about yourself. Even though you might not have time for a dinner out with your girlfriends, I want you to be able to log on Livin’ Sassy and escape for a little bit.
Livin’ Sassy isn’t as much about the clothes or jewelry that you see modeled by all of my friends. It is about the real friendships that you see in their smiles in being together; I just happen to be the common element that is there to observe and to take their pictures. The joy for me has been capturing the moments for them to share with their families. I can’t begin to tell you how many of my friends that have modeled for me have later tell me that their husbands treated them a little differently since they had been called “Sassy!” And this has been the first picture that my friends have had taken by themselves in years.
Although you may not see my face that much on this little blog, it is intended that way. The person taking all the pictures is me. I am honored every time that someone agrees to be a sassy model or a sassy girlfriend. I think it is so meaningful because it means they trust me, you can’t really have true friendships without trust.
There has been nothing more rewarding to me the showing my friends how beautiful they are even though they might not be feeling that way with whatever may be going on in their lives at the moment.
At first glance, the pictures on Livin’ Sassy might appear to be a lot of different ladies at various places all over town modeling clothes. I know them to be so much more.
These are extra special women who happen to wives, mothers, sisters and friends who want to live their lives as best they can and recognize that they can’t do it without each other. Girlfriends mean so much. They mean so much to me that I created a little website to honor them and show the whole world just how much I love them. My friends have brought me so much in my 47 years and I only imagine that it will just get better as we grow old together. We are all Livin’ Sassy!
Thank you for being my friends.
Thank you for being Livin’ Sassy readers.
I love you.
47. Bring it!
Stay Sassy Ya’ll.
Amen, Ms Blogger. Life is as good as you want it to be. I know, it is not always easy, but when you have family and friends, anything can be overcome. Even the forties- the fifties can be just as great!! Love ya.
You make it look easy Janie! Love you too!