For the better part of three decades, I’ve been shrugging off milestone birthdays. Forty: eclipsed by my mother’s death two weeks earlier. Fifty: an excuse to squeeze a girlfriends’ lunch between meetings. Then I turned 60—the boundary between thinking I have forever to do my growing up and accepting the fact that I don’t.

Less than two hours from now I will be lying on an instrument of exquisite torture with my quivering legs upraised in a crude approximation of straightness, my arms beating like the wings of a mangled bird and my lower abs screaming for mercy. At the very thought of this posture I can feel the sweat between my thighs (which strain for tightness but never achieve it) and a wicked cramp in my right foot (which is supposed to point but instead flops about like a flag of surrender). I sometimes doubt if I’ll ever get the hang of Pilates. But so help me, I persist.

On my way to buy yogurt and cold cuts at Metro, I happened on a celebration of the human urge to connect—several hundred deaf people of all ages, ethnicities and style sensibilities, engaged in a gabfest so consumingly joyous, I couldn’t quite suppress a stab of envy. They were investing not just flying fingers but all four limbs in the art of conversation. They punctuated anecdotes with a repertoire of expressions that captured every note on the emotional scale. Each one of these people seemed fully absorbed in the exchange at hand—no looking over a companion’s shoulder to check out more promising social options. So I felt free to amble among them and stare in an invisible, contemplative way that felt more respectful than rude.

“I’m so over your desk,” my son said with a faintly dismissive look at the desk where I’m sitting right now. And a fine desk it is: keyboard tray, two drawers, made right here in Canada, not in some Third World sweatshop. He had planned to buy one just like it for the house he and my daughter-in-law have bought. Now he covets a designer desk with neither keyboard tray nor drawers. Oh, well. These days no self-respecting husband takes decor direction from his mother—or his wife, for that matter. There’s something about owning a marital home that transforms the modern male from a schlepper with a TV and a plywood futon to a furniture maven whose domestic visions feature Barcelona chairs and dish racks that double as countertop sculptures

While scanning a dark movie theatre in search of my husband’s face, I spotted the bright chrome glint of the cane that he was waving in my direction like a banner. A cane, we have lately discovered, has uses undreamed-of by those who have no call for one. It can flick light switches, press elevator buttons and open California shutters. In saucy hands it can tickle a spouse’s bum.

My mother taught me to love the stories at the heart of every life. Now that she’s no longer around to meet me for a Mother’s Day lunch, her stand-in is the stories we lived together. It’s partly in tribute to her that I’ve created a forum on this website, the mother/daughter gallery, where readers can post defining memories of the women who formed them and the girls they are guiding into adulthood. If you haven’t toured the gallery, what better time than Mother’s Day? Read on for a preview of the preview of the colourful, unforgettable and sometimes maddeningly complicated characters you’ll meet. But don’t stop there. You too have a mother/daughter story, and this is the place to share it.

Do you ever visit open houses just to peer into the private lives of your fellow humans? Me too. That’s how I stepped into the graciously proportioned house where Diane Keaton briefly lived with Al Pacino, just around the corner from the modest brick semi where my family was living at the time.

My husband, bless his heart, thinks I’d look pretty good in a bikini. I haven’t worn one of those since my pre-stretch mark days, and even then I dared expose just the merest ribbon of tummy. Should I go for the gusto while I can still do a full set of ab-busting hundreds in Pilates class? Let me mull that over for a bit. I may have reached the farther shores of middle age, but in some respects that’s just as well. After half a century of meeting other people’s expectations, I’ve earned the right to focus on what pleases me—and prepares me for an active, vital future.

Admit it: don’t you like to be admired, obeyed and supported? Don’t you find yourself gritting your teeth when certain wildly irritating people choose to diss you, undercut you and wage passive/aggressive campaigns that keep you up at night? I’ve been there. And believe it or not, I’m better off for it. The difficult people in my life have been my best teachers, challenging me to broaden my skills and confront my own difficult side. I’ll share the no-holds-barred story in a June 15 keynote speech at the fourth annual Journey to Success Conference in Oakville.

We were dressing for a party while a summer storm drenched the city. Trees swayed and creaked in the wind; rain lashed the bedroom windows. It pelted down with such noisy, wall-beating force, I could have sworn someone was draining a bathtub on the third floor, where no tub had ever existed. “What a stinker!” I said to my husband as I clipped my favourite earrings into place. “Couldn’t you swear you were standing in the middle of that rain?”