“How does one be happy, hurting, growing, and healing simultaneously?” Good question, right? These are the jumbles that Lesley Ware, now 42, started working through when she turned 40. At the time, the author and educator was going through what she describes as a “major life transition”. Lesley was recently separated and starting therapy to […]

Women over 40 have more power — at home, at work, in politics, in the world — than ever before.  That’s one of the key takeaways from a recent survey of 500 women over 40. We were already feeling confident about middle age women’s power — Jumble & Flow’s raison d’être — but what we […]

Do you want to overcome career boredom, burnout, and frustration? Do you want to find a career path that’s more fulfilling, challenging, or in line with your values? Who doesn’t, right? If you said “yes” to any of these questions, you’ve come to the right place. The good news is you can do something about […]

I’m not going to lie, I hate being old. BUT, I really like growing older. Because I really like growing. It’s like this… My back hurts, my knees hurt, my neck hurts. Sometimes the obscurity hurts. No matter how fabulous you are, there’s a kind of invisibility cloak that falls upon women over 50. It’s […]

Not going to sugar-coat it — the first day of my twins’ kindergarten was kind of a shitshow. (BTW, I took the above smiley photo of my husband and our kids an hour before school started.) On Monday, August 24, Zoom conked out just as millions of other kids tried to log on for remote […]

I have a number of favorite people, but Dixie Laite is hands-down at the top of the list. I’ve thought of Dixie, now 58, as a mentor ever since she welcomed me with open arms when I arrived as a fresh-off-the-boat Midwesterner in New York in my early 30s.  We’d originally met through my old […]

“No one expected me to be Black,” says Candice Nobles, reflecting on the day she arrived for her first day on the job at a San Francisco software company in 2002.  This was the pre-Zoom era — she landed her marketing role through phone interviews while living in Chicago. “It was hilarious,” Candice says. “The […]

This was Kirsten Johnson’s life in 2016 when she battled stage 3B inflammatory breast cancer. She’s pictured here with her stepdaughter, Claire (now 17), the daughter of her now ex-husband, and her daughter James, now 6. Being a cancer patient / self-employed / single mom is no fucking joke.” You can count on Kirsten Johnson […]

You can learn so much from living 40 years. I’ve learned that the choices I made in my 20s and 30s can change the course of life in a way that we simply can’t imagine until we turn 40.  The choice that I made in my 20s to not attend college straight after high school […]

(One Line, digital drawing by Jen Hewett) This article was republished with permission from artist Jen Hewett. It originally appeared here on Jen Hewett’s blog. On June 3, I received a text from my friend, the art director, illustrator, and writer (and Black Brunch Club founder) George McCalman. “Jennifer,” he asked, “what is happening?” For the past few days, […]