It’s official! Wear Your Mother’s Jewelry Day has been accepted into Chase’s Calendar of Events for their 2018 edition. Woot!   Can you tell I’m a wee bit excited? I created Wear Your Mother’s Jewelry Day when my mom passed, to encourage everyone to dust off forgotten jewelry heirlooms hiding in jewelry and safety deposit boxes. […]

To encourage everyone to dust off forgotten jewelry heirlooms hiding in jewelry and safety deposit boxes, I’ve created “Wear Your Mother’s Jewelry Day” to be celebrated annually on August 8 (my mom’s birthday). Join the celebration by wearing your inherited jewelry year-round, and by sharing your jewelry stories and pictures via social media using the hashtag […]

Mickie Newdorf (August 8, 1929 – February 25, 2017) My Mom was beautiful, intelligent, stylish, determined, and a successful business woman. From her I learned to follow my own path, not one prescribed by others. But, as many of you know, we had a difficult relationship. Being Mickie’s daughter (or son) was not always easy. […]

After years of neglect, I’ve given My Mother’s Jewelry Box an update! The site is now mobile-friendly and securely served over SSL. In the process, I redid the layout so that it features larger photos and a Pinterest button when you hover over a picture. What do you think? Over the years, Mom has deteriorated, […]

As the daughter of an Alzheimer’s sufferer, I’ve seen the magic that music can bring into lives of people with memory loss. Mom, who rarely can put a sentence together, can still sometimes remember lyrics! Here is Carole King promoting the work of the non-profit organization “Music and Memory.”

I admit that I’m scared to death that I’ll be following down Mom’s path to Alzheimer’s. And as I age, I am finding that sometimes a word or a name will just slip away from me, until I stop thinking about it, and then it pops back into my memory as quickly as it left! […]

I just got a delightful flyer in the mail from Chico’s, with a precocious girl on the cover, dripping in beads, with the headline “Why are some women destined to wear Chico’s?” The story goes on to explain that this little girl discovered early on that “she had a knack for making an entrance”, “she […]

The Alzheimer’s Association just sent out an email alert, urging Americans to write to Congress in support of three pieces of legislation. 1) The Alzheimer’s Breakthrough Act of 2009 (S. 1492/H.R. 3286), authorizing $2 billion in research funding for Alzheimer’s disease. 2) The Alzheimer’s Detection, Diagnosis, Care and Planning (ADD-CAP) Act which will provide Medicare […]

In preparation for blogging about Mom’s jewelry, I bought some books about collecting costume jewelry. As I browsed through them, it became immediately clear that Mom wasn’t buying jewelry for a collection. She simply loved wearing and buying jewelry. She didn’t look for jewelry from a specific designer. She didn’t shop for vintage jewelry. She […]

As I’ve pondered this project, the many reasons for doing it are very clear to me. First, writing about Mom has been a nagging undercurrent for me for many years. But I have a huge barrier against sitting down and directly addressing the many facets of our mostly tumultuous relationship. So, reason number one is […]