Fortysomething

I try to avoid talking about my age in cliches, especially meme-ified ones such as "I'm this old ..." followed by a picture of a Game Boy or some other fad from my childhood. In fact, I never use the word "old" about myself except in conversation with my husband or friends, when one of us is gamely trying to understand some slang our kid used the other day. Oldness is relative. Age ranks low on the list of attributes that offer interesting information about a person. It is not a reliable proxy for wisdom, experience, pain, health troubles, or respectability. Of course that hasn't stopped anyone from trying to use it as such, and that value system has imprinted on me. I have always bristled when people made comments or assumptions about my comparative youth, and I feel proud of the silver hairs glinting through my brown locks. Even in this post I tend to equate age with wisdom.

So, yes, age is a little bit more than just a number, and 40 has felt significant since I crossed that threshold in early 2023. In part it's a mental shift, since the fortysomething range is shorthand for people who tend to be tired and achy, people who are real adults with careers and emotional baggage. In a way, I feel like I have less to prove now. Turning forty has also been a noticeable tipping point for changes to my body. Before forty, I didn't regularly wake up with an achy hip and heels aflame with plantar fasciitis. I did not know the embarrassment of leaving an exercise class early because I was leaking urine with every heavy step. I had never heard one of my child's friends call me "kind of old to be a mom" after inspecting my neck wrinkles. (I was 35 when my son was born.) I had never had to excuse myself from playtime with my kid because my back couldn't handle sitting on the floor for more than 15 minutes. Before forty, revealing my age to a friendly colleague at work would not have gotten a "[gasp] You can't be!"

Growing older is a gift, so I absolutely never lament it (although I resent the incontinence). I am clear-eyed about my current point on this timeline called life. It's a point after which my body slowly degrades, my parents become elderly, clerks call me "ma'am", and I fall ever more out of touch with pop culture. I'm already incredulous that there are fully grown celebrities who were born while I was in college. Even more incredible, they wear some of the same clothes I wore in the nineties, since we are at that stage in the fashion cycle. I ride the nostalgia wave sometimes by watching videos of Millennial moms gawping at babydoll shirts for sale at Target, or upvoting Reddit posts about Lisa Frank stationery. It's a privilege to be able to retrospect on my formative years, even the superficial parts.

I am learning, too, not to mistake nostalgia for yearning. I can look back with great fondness on an era when my time was more unfettered, my body in better shape, my romances new and thrilling, and still not wish to go back. This gets at the real beauty of being fortysomething: a sense of comfort in my own skin, a lesser tendency to give a fuck about things that don't concern me. It is not that I've grown callous or shed all my insecurities. Insecurities come with the package of who we are, and regenerate in different ways as our lives take new turns. But with experience, we learn which people and circumstances are important and worthy of our vulnerability. Karen at the grocery store doesn't get to make me feel bad about a parenting choice, but with my husband I can share all the things I think I'm doing wrong as a mom. A Zumba class at the community center, where I move clumsily through dance routines, is not the place to chastise myself, but a mistake at work may be an occasion for constructive self criticism. How lucky I am to be surrounded by people who know me and allow--even encourage--me to be vulnerable where it counts.

How lucky I am to have found a place in the world. I started a blog (again) to see what I might write about from this place.