Sitting at Magnolia Café on South Congress on the morning of Oct. 10, Allison Allen and I are jittery. It’s not the coffee. The anxiety created by another tumultuous week in the world financial markets hung in the air. She just got off the phone with a financial advisor. My mind wandered to my next client meeting, wondering if the budget will be slashed. Even with the pleasant cling-clang of a busy restaurant and the smell of bacon in the air, it’s hard to start talking lightly about the weather, food, life and business.
It’s almost 10 a.m., and the restaurant is busy, with at least two people to a table. Perhaps the week’s events prompted an en masse craving for comfort food, like my own favorite gingerbread pancakes. Allen and I talk to shake off the week’s news, before digging into a conversation about her business, WomenBloom.com, and her life in Austin. We are trying to be upbeat. I appreciate her efforts and resist my own instinct to unload on her like she’s my new best friend, or worse, my therapist. After all, her blog, “Ask Allison,” bills her as “The Middle-Aged Woman’s Go To Girl.” Surely she has some answers. When we walked to our table, she offered a bright side of the global crisis. “These kinds of things always seem to get me in touch with the things that really matter to me,” she says. “The things that really matter don’t go away.”
From what I’d heard, I imagined resiliency is Allen’s middle name. At age 50, she seems to have it together. She knows how to keep putting one foot in front of the other, gaining momentum with each stride. When she was 36, her husband, whom she’d known since she was 17, died in a plane crash. After his death, she packed up and moved to Austin in 1996 to “remake her life as a single woman.” Since then, she has started two businesses, earned a graduate degree in organizational leadership from St. Edward’s University, and learned to play bass guitar. In 2007, she decided to metaphorically “clean house” by moving out of her house in charming Rosedale and renting a new one in Travis Heights.
Then in early 2008, Allen launched WomenBloom.com, a website to help women make the most of mid-life. As the site’s founder, blogger and editor, she tends a virtual garden of women’s mid-life insights. WomenBloom features essays by dozens of women from across the United States, some Ph.D.s and others who are penning their thoughts out loud for the first time. Essays burst forth with wisdom and assurance, with titles like “Seriously Cool” and “Embracing Our Age.” Combined with credentialed expertise on topics both light and sober, WomenBloom’s essays cultivate optimism to nourish mid-life revelations and discoveries.
Sitting at Magnolia Café, I observe Allison’s stylish, casual poise. Secretly, I’m hoping I’ll absorb just a small dose of confidence, this entrepreneur’s joie de vivre. If I do, I wonder, will I weather my own personal and professional transitions with more grace?
I am not yearning alone. My own desire to learn and understand how women grow and change as they age is reflected in numerous women’s sites. Ann Daly, an Austin-based life coach and author of A Year of Clarity: The Monthly Guide for Women, says sites like WomenBloom speak powerfully to midlife women for two reasons. “First, because women love to get information before making decisions,” Daly says. “Men may drive around the block half a dozen times, but women will stop to ask directions. Second, because women love to learn in a social setting. We’re collaborative learners, and we’re eager to learn from each others’ experiences. The web is our new coffee klatch.”
As hostess of her new virtual café, Allen serves up stories that resonate on an emotional level. She says it’s her broader background in organizational development that informs WomenBloom’s commitment to sharing women’s stories. After the 2000 - 2001 economic downturn, she discovered MIT lecturer Peter Senge’s influential tome, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization. As a student of organizational development, she came to appreciate the role of stories among people, both inside and outside of organizations.
It seemed natural to her that to create an online community, she needed to let women tell their stories. They are like stakes in a garden, supporting the growth of its readers.
“When women can see bits of themselves in an inspirational story of a woman, for example, who successfully made a career transition, they are more likely perhaps to decide they could do it, too,” Allen says. “And telling one’s story helps people validate and ‘own’ their sense of self.”
In her blog at WomenBloom, Allen balances personal experience and introspection on everything from co-habitation, dating and shopping, with more serious topics such as rising suicide rates and the impact of the global financial crisis. I gleaned the wisdom I sought from her that morning at Magnolia Café, when I went to her blog entry dated Oct. 10:
“I’ve been through some very bad times before and I’ve finally learned that no matter how bad it is, certain things I love remain.
“I remember during a particularly rough patch during which I was hooked on listening to classical music consoling myself with the thought that no matter what happened, Mozart’s music was still sublime, and it wasn’t going anywhere.”
Allen’s attitude is a perennial favorite: Keep on blooming.