Bringing it all Back Home
Live from Towson, It's the Global Kaffeeklatsch
August 30, 2007
By Fern Shen
Photography By Bryan Burris
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Dotsie Bregel’s website may be girly-pink and a tad old school, but don’t dismiss the Towson mother of three — or her internationally known website, www.BoomerWomenSpeak.com — until you’ve spent time in the site’s forums. Size up the scene as you would a party you’ve just crashed:
Over here we’ve got a lamentation about middle-aged spread: “I have no waist, just a mushy bulge … my daughter calls it the muffin!”
Over there, an argument is brewing: “Watch the DVD before you put it down!” That particular chat, or website thread, is about Al Gore’s global warming movie. Hmm, now they’ve made nice and are talking about recycling used batteries. Meanwhile — whoa! Is that woman from Germany really announcing that she just left her husband today?! “I DID it!” she writes. “This morning I stuffed my beach bag with a change of laundry, wash bag, makeup and my precious advice books and headed for the hills.”
Bregel’s five-year-old site serves as a virtual, and international, kaffeeklatsch, logging as many as 1.5 million hits a month. (It averages 5,500 unique users per month.) But what, exactly, do the members of this motley cyberworld have in common?
“They’re all baby boomers. There are 38 million of these women in the U.S. alone!” says Bregel, who, as founder and CEO of BoomerWomenSpeak and the National Association of Baby Boomer Women, is making a successful career out of understanding this demographic stratum. “This country has never had such a large, educated and affluent group of women hitting midlife at the same time.”
Generational issues provide the common ground for these Boomer women, trumping Red State/Blue State, religious, racial, class and other differences that define and divide us, says Bregel, 49.
Women come to Bregel’s site to trade stories, to network and to soak up advice and encouragement on all the things they’re juggling these days: needy kids and ailing parents; their own creaky knees, mortality and hot flashes; chores, spouses, finances, demanding jobs, the looming empty nest.
“On this site, it’s not so much about politics or religion,” says Bregel, speaking from her airy sunroom home office. “It’s about sharing stories, getting feedback.” She lists the kinds of questions that engage Boomers, those born in the post-World War II years from 1946 to 1964:
“‘Do I have the right to leave this marriage?’ ‘How should I handle this situation with my grandkids?’ ‘Do you think I should quit my job and start this business?’”
When the forums at BoomerWomenSpeak tackle such questions, they can sound like a prayer circle, a virtual girls’ night out or a crisis hotline.
When reading through the forums on BoomerWomenSpeak, you can’t help but learn about the participants, a diverse bunch if there ever was one. Take “flippPerjo” of North Dakota, a farmer who is reinventing herself as the head of an Internet-based business. She reports that she and her husband had to sell their dairy cows and that he is now selling bull semen.
“Whittlewoman,” a lesbian feminist from upstate New York who works as a cook for developmentally disabled adults, believes Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq and carves wooden “talking sticks” for fun. (Google “talking sticks” for a description of what they are.)
And then there’s “NewLeaf,” a customer services rep from Florida who rails against political correctness and rhapsodizes about the okra at Wal-Mart and the Bible-inspired Veggie Tales cartoons.
The site’s regulars come together in a crisis. When Whittlewoman announced she was scheduled for a radical hysterectomy and said she was “nervous, anxious and simply terrified,” the forum women kicked into gear.
“I had a total hysterectomy earlier this year,” wrote “Lola from London,” whose lengthy posting was reassuring and informative, with details about the size of the incision, recovery time and the soothing effects of peppermint tea.
A post titled “First Mother’s Day without Mom” prompted many responses, including this one from “Gimster” of Texas:
“This will probably be my Mom’s last Mother’s Day, last year’s being her last in understanding. Things have gone from bad to worse here. What cruel worlds our bodies put us in. Daddy finally had to move downstairs. … Mother went off on him last Thurs., raging like a mad bull. … It feels as if barbed wire is twined around my heart. I can’t fix anything.”
Other features of the site include reviews of books (a biography of Anais Nin and The Zen of Organizing, among others) and resource links (topics include depression, spirituality, divorce and the ever-popular sexuality after 50). But the site’s heart and soul are the personal stories that women tell in the forums and in first-person essays: stories about mothers, motherhood, marriage, being single, being authentic — being a woman getting on with life and in life.
Bregel says that she has learned “what we all have in common as women” after getting to know site users from as far away as Germany, Australia and Ireland.
It’s the kind of pronouncement she has grown comfortable making now that she has reinvented herself as an expert on Boomer women, consulted by Time, the Los Angeles Times, the CBS Early Show or whatever media outlet needs a quote on her much-covered demographic specialty.
Not bad for someone who grew up in Cedarcroft, went to Mercy High School, dropped out of college to marry her high school sweetheart, optometrist Ross Bregel, and “never wanted to be anything but a wife and mother.”
What prompted this stay-at-home mom to launch the project was a kind of spiritual and emotional crisis after her mother died of cancer. Bregel also realized that her three high school-aged children would soon be off to college and that she would be “out of a job.”
“When she died, I was totally without purpose,” Bregel recalls. “I would sit at this table with my Bible and my journal and try to figure out what to do.”
The answer came to her after reading Ophelia Speaks, a collection of essays by young women. Bregel started collecting stories for what she thought could be a similar book for her own generation — and then realized that a website would be a good way to present them. The site could be not just a story archive but also an ongoing conversation. Investing $30,000 for computers and site design, Bregel created BoomerWomenSpeak in 2002.
Now she’s hit the big time: “When you Google ‘boomer’ and ‘women,’ my site comes up first,” she notes proudly.
Bregel has major plans for her site, including getting some national advertisers. (Right now the ads are mostly for women-oriented books and menopause products like moisture-wicking pajamas.) Still, with those and Google ads, Bregel says she is finally making a profit.
A new enterprise is her second site, www.nabbw.com, the National Association of Baby Boomer Women. In return for yearly dues of $75, members receive e-mailed advice from a panel of experts (in health, finance, law and domestic abuse). Members can also listen in by phone to scheduled “tele-seminars” with speakers addressing topics such as “Preventing Identity Theft” and “Irritable Male Syndrome and Male Menopause.”
Bregel also wants to market informational packages (on CD, PDF and audio file) that are essentially interviews she conducts with experts on Boomer-centric topics. “We’ll sell them for $9.99,” Bregel says. “I want to be the Wal-Mart of informational products.”
Mostly, the 400-member association is a kind of marketplace where members can advertise their products and purchase items, often at a discount. At some point, Bregel would like to offer members health insurance.
Bregel doesn’t ask site users to tell her things such as age or income level, but she does have a sure feel for her community’s zeitgeist. Members went predictably gaga over Dove’s recent “Pro-Age” ads, which feature photos of tastefully nude, unapologetically middle-aged women. Bregel and a handful of volunteer moderators pop into the forums every day to prime the conversational pump with such items.
Generally, though, the conversations run themselves. Red-hot emotions, like this first-time post, can strike like lightning:
“7 months ago my husband of 27 years died. He didn’t die of a long drawn out illness, he didn’t die in a car wreck, he didn’t die in any of the ‘normal ways.’ He died on a street in NE Baghdad. A sniper shot him in the back of the head. He was 51 and the love of my life.”
Sometimes the hot button is something silly. There were 89 posts on the “You Might Be Older Than Dirt If You Remember…” thread from people who did indeed recall collecting S&H green stamps, owning a pair of PF Flyers and buying soda in glass bottles from vending machines.
Great stories, people have said to Bregel, but don’t these women have friends to share them with, face-to-face?
“In our mothers’ generation, women talked in the neighborhood, met over the back fence,” she answers. Now women are busier, they work more outside their homes, they relocate and they don’t get to know their neighbors. And today’s stressed-out, downsized workplace, Bregel adds, is no place to find a social life: “People are too busy for the whole water-cooler thing.”
The other reason she offers for her site’s appeal? Anonymity.
“Boomer women are going through a lot,” Bregel says. “Sometimes these stories are just too hard to tell in person.”
