Hey everybody, Jen Hatmaker here at your host of the For the Love Podcast. Welcome to the show.

You guys right now we are kicking off a brand new series that I am really excited about and it's called For the Love of the Middle.

So I know not everyone is in the middle part of life yet but a lot of us are. I certainly am and you'll be there soon enough too right.

Some of you are already there and beyond so there's really good takeaways for all of us and if you're past the middle Bravo to you.

You have made it through this kind of messy time and please enjoy listening to us try to get it right.

So in this series we're going to talk about all the stuff in the middle of life that brings us sometimes the stuff is challenging but also some really wonderful surprises and learning more about ourselves in a new way.

So I am absolutely of the mind that the middle is not the beginning of a downhill slide.

I think not only is there so much to enjoy here but there's so much to look forward to still.

So we're going to try to open up some of these convos around stuff like empty nesting, preparing for aging our own and others by the way caring for aging parents obviously menopause, the reinvention of ourselves, all this life change we're experiencing and more.

So this is the nitty gritty of the middle season of our lives that there comes a point where there's more in the rearview mirror that ahead.

And so we're going to lean into some incredible experts for help and counsel and wisdom and advice but also just a really robust conversation that I hope is liberating and encouraging and help us all feel a little bit seen starting with today because today we're talking to Mary Piper.

She says a world renowned clinical psychologist and author, she's written 11 books on a wide range of topics but she's most famous for her breakthrough ideas, a really an early adopter on the development of the self image of girls younger girls and then how older women can age authentically and happily.

She's actually one of the first psychologists to call out how culture was both shaping and harming young girls in their development and she was pointing to ideas that you and I talk about now all the time but at that time this wasn't even language we had as she's pointing to misogyny and sexism and sort of self esteem and she was a pioneer really.

And so thus this provides the perfect launching pad for Mary to now approach and help us navigate the age ism and misogyny and sense of loss that occurs when we age as women she's done this with young girls and now she's applying the wisdom to us i'm noticing a phenomenon as I get older 48.

I really like getting older and I mean that sincerely not as a trope or as a stick I really like it and a lot of things about it now there's some stuff that's hard and we're going to we're going to pick through all that in the series but I like how I feel I like who I am I like what my relationships look like I like how my life is starting to return to me in terms of like time and energy because I'm about to be done with the head.

Heavy heavy heavy parenting lift and so i'm wanting to look at this stage and what is to come with hopeful eyes and with excited I want to mindset that says this might just be wonderful.

So Mary Piper has a lot to say on the subject and how to address some of the challenges that we're going to face as well as what is awesome about what's next 75 she's learned it and she has lived it and she has studied it by the way Mary she studied cultural anthropology at the University of California Berkeley and then received her PhD from the University of Nebraska in clinical psychology in 1977.

I mentioned she's authored 11 books including four New York Times bestsellers and her latest book is called a life in light meditations on impermanence I love this conversation so let's welcome the wise and the wonderful Mary.

I'm happy to be here Jen so I've told my listeners a little bit about you I high leveled it for them but I wonder before we sort of dive into your work would you be willing to take a few moments to tell us kind of who you are and where you are in the world and essentially kind of the broad arc of what brought up.

So I brought you to where you are today yes well first of all I'm 75 I live in Nebraska Lincoln Nebraska are state capital I'm married to a man that I met the first day of graduate school in clinical psychology he was a classmate of mine and we planned to just be study buddies but at the end of the first semester we decided we couldn't be study buddies.

We've been together over 50 years and I have a couple children I have five grandchildren I'm a caretaker of a sister younger sister who has dementia she's on dialysis and she's bedbound so I understand the dilemmas of caregivers.

I'm also an activist and very involved in environmental and human rights causes here in my community I think in terms of psychology and my writing what really set me up was I was an anthropology major at Berkeley and got very interested in this field of anthropology called culture and personality that Margaret me started.

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