I never know how to describe myself to others. Housewife and homemaker conjure an image in my mind of an apron-clad Donna Reed who meets her “hubby” at the door with a martini and a vapid smile. Stay-at-home-mom is even worse. It sounds like I’m some kind of asexual agoraphobe. I like Roseanne Barr’s idea of “domestic goddess,” but getting people to embrace me as a deity seems as likely to catch on as Prince’s attempt to be known as the symbol formerly known as the artist Prince.

Since I have never been able to think of a satisfactory job title, perhaps a nonverbal symbol would do the trick. When I’m at my husband’s holiday office party and someone says, “and what do you do dear?” I could simply hand them a card with my domestic goddess symbol on it, and they would immediately find me mysterious and fascinating and wish to follow me on Twitter! Despite my abject failure in identifying an appropriate title for my life’s work, I always considered it to be a very important and satisfying job. However, now that my kids are flying away from the proverbial nest, their exodus, for me, feels less like flying and more like falling off a cliff.

Life is full of these kinds of downward plunges, and one might think that a person with a lot of experience would have developed some strategies along the way to slow the descent; how to latch onto a ledge, a spindly outcropping tree, or a hunky mountain climber, but it seems that I never learned a single thing. Each time I am faced with a major life change I feel like Wiley Coyote, pin-wheeling through nothingness, knowing that not only am I going to land with an awful splat but that the anvil is rapidly following in my wake. Why am I not better prepared? I so admire those women who walk around like Mary Poppins or Hermione Granger, able to produce everything you might need to combat the zombie apocalypse from their handbags. My unfortunate purse only seems to contain a handful of old receipts and some fuzzy tic tacs.

While I confess to having a severe case of vertigo from the vantage point of the edge of my empty nest, this time I have determined to locate my slightly bent collapsible umbrella from the black hole that is my handbag, unfurl it and use it to float, much like the aforementioned Mary Poppins, gracefully to the ground. My umbrella in this circumstance is hopefully going to be this blog. So what can a dizzy middle-aged woman possibly have to blog about that would be of interest? I guess we will find out together. I hope that my 25+ years of job experience making and managing a home and family will provide ideas that will interest, inspire and perhaps even amuse my readers.