🧘🏻♀️ So this is 40?
Reaching this milestone as a millennial; looking back and looking ahead.
I am not 40 yet, but I will ring in the big milestone next week. I’m basically there.
As I plant a marker in my timeline for middle age, here is how my life currently looks:
Last month, I signed up for a class to get a certificate in writing. Continuing my education and getting a certification has been a goal of mine for years, and this year I am finally making it happen, and in one of my passions, no less.
Both my kids are sick, again. Happy Birthday! Restock the medicine cabinet. I’m waiting to see if I’m going to get sick before the big party I have planned, or if I’ll survive unscathed. (So far, it’s looking like the latter. 🥳)
I recently got an IUD to help manage PCOS, a uterine fibroid, and possibly endometriosis, and my hormones are going all wickity-wack while my body adjusts to this foreign object. It’s strange; one would think this shouldn’t be doing me any good because it’s just a piece of plastic shoved up my hoo-ha, but I feel so much better since I’ve gotten it (despite wickity-wack hormones).
My cat still randomly pees on the stairs because, like 3/4 of the humans in the house, he has anxiety.
Like half of my country of residence, I struggle to balance staying informed about what is happening outside of my home with maintaining my sanity. (I currently will only watch The Daily Show for TV news, because at least it will make me laugh.)
There are many things that I struggle with each day, week, and month, but I am aware enough to realize I have much privilege and live an abundant life. I am content with my choices. I have a loving marriage, beautiful children, a body that keeps me alive, and a mind that continues to crave knowledge. Every choice that I have made has brought me here, to my midpoint, and I look forward to making choices that will lead me to more milestones to be marked.
Looking Back at My Last Four Decades
ONES: I was born in 1985 in a small town in Arkansas shortly after my mother’s family immigrated from Thailand. She soon after married my stepfather, which brought us to Germany where I began my education at an Air Force Base. I celebrated my tenth birthday in New Jersey.
TENS AND TEENS: My mom and I lived in Utah with my aunt and her family while my stepdad had to work a remote year in Korea. After we reunited, we moved to South Carolina, where I finished middle school and began high school. I only got as far as my freshman year before being transported to Texas. I graduated there, which is when I began making the big decisions as a new adult1 that would begin to shape my life into what it is now. The first big decision I made was applying for the college program for the Disney World Resort. I spent sixteen weeks in Orlando, and it was all the time I needed to know that I was capable of moving out of my mom and dad’s home. I turned twenty while in the college program and mourned my teens as I blew out the candles on the cookie cake my roommates had purchased for me, anxious about the life that I, and I alone, was responsible for.
20s: From Florida, I returned home, but only long enough to pack a U-haul and move with some high school friends to California. I began a short career in entertainment while earning an AA in communications for cinema, radio, and television. Then I made the biggest decision of my life when I met the man who proposed to be my husband. I decided to say, “Yes.”
30s: As I am currently exiting this era and reflecting on it as I sit on the precipice of a new one, I realize how rickety this decade was for me. I quit my job in entertainment after I had been screwed one too many times, desiring to only focus on being a mother and homemaker. Motherhood, postpartum depression, and getting taken advantage of by an MLM occupied the first half of my 30s, along with anxiety and physical health issues. The latter half included an awakening—both internally and externally—followed by anger. Lots of it. For Year 39, I have been focused on getting back to my center. I’m still allowed to get angry, as long as I balance it with rationality and calm. I’ve taken steps to care for my mental and physical health, which have opened up avenues of time for focus on my passions. I strive every day for balance, and gee am I striving.
This is what I desire for the next four decades (and beyond). Balance. (Also get my shit together and keep my family safe.)
In the first decade of our lives, we have little to no control over it. We are obligated to follow the lifestyle of our caretakers.
Coming of age as a teenager, I excelled academically but did not ask enough questions about the curiosities of life in general. But I could love.
Much is expected of us in our 20s. It’s absurd, thinking about it now: the pressure we have put on ourselves as a society. Did we forget that our life expectancies have grown? We no longer need to find a life mate by 25, because we can be expected to live past 30 and 40.2 Why do we feel we must finish a formal education, find a life partner, have children (if we want), and own a house all in this decade? Is ten years enough to cram in all of these huge milestones? Launching a career post-education, finding “the one,” reproducing, and owning land, while at the same time we are transitioning from child to adult? Even now, when our communities have dwindled down to only the nuclear family, are we supposed to do this with little to no support? I digress.
I’m not certain what is expected of us in our 30s. Perhaps because we are expected to have done all the milestoning in our 20s, maybe our 30s are meant to enjoy the fruits of that supposed labor. Or, if those expectations have not been realized, maybe it is thought that your 30s are meant to “catch up” with those that you have “not accomplished.”
That’s bullshit, really. No wonder why humans fear the 40. There is so much expected of us, that if we are spouseless, childless, don’t own a home, and/or do not have a degree, then we feel we have failed. As if life can only be defined by these four experiences. I am five days from 40. I have a spouse. I have children. I own a home. I have a degree.
I still feel less than.
My degree is “only” an AA. Do I need a bachelors to be considered accomplished in higher education?
I’m a wife and mother, but I chose to quit my job to give my family and home my full focus. This lost my home 50% of its income for most of the last decade because caregiving is not considered work to be compensated.
I own a home, but here I feel like a failure, too. There is constant clutter, the laundry is a neverending cycle that sometimes I permit myself to ignore, and the dishes I can leave for days on end because other obligations have been put higher on the list of priorities. (Like, our garage has a slab leak? What the fuck even is that?)
Fail. Fail. Fail.
These milestones, while wonderful experiences, will not make us feel any greater than if we had never met them, because there is always some other expectation that needs to be withheld.
As a millennial, I have been taught that 40 is a dreaded age. It’s the top of the hill. It’s all downhill from here. It means you’re old3. For women, that is a difficult pill to swallow.
Because it means we are no longer attractive, youthful, or fun. We must “fight aging,” prevent our hair from graying, and try try try to return to our 20-something physique. If we get there, then we must maintain it. Then we hurt our own feelings while we do because we spent most of our 20s thinking we were overweight when that was when most of us were at our skinniest.
Apparently, we are naggy and cranky at 40. Or just basically bitchy.
Here is what I plan to embrace and break when it comes to the stereotypes of the 40-something woman.
Embrace: Bitchiness. So what if I’m fucking cranky? My hormones are complex and constantly running amuck. Just when I have learned to manage, read, and predict them, I reach a new turning point and the hormones change their routine. Even the people who are supposed to be studying our hormones don’t fully understand them. I’ve also seen shit, fought shit, loved shit—I’ve done many things with the shit. I’ve earned the right to be a bitch every now and then, and when I do, it does not mean I am a bitch 100% of the time. Also, sometimes I am simply a woman speaking. Just because I challenge your ideas or statements without a frilly smile and fluttery lashes, it does not mean I am yelling. Get used to the fact that women just speak and do not have to be agreeable when they do so.
Break: “Anti-aging.” I want to be the wise old lady. She’s my endgame. We all know her. We all love her. We may have one in our personal lives. She is old and she is wise. She is fabulous. In Disney’s Pocahontas, she was Grandmother Willow. In Moana, she was Gramma Tala. In Practical Magic, they were The Aunts. Downton Abbey: Violet Crawley. Mulan: Grandmother Fa. Betty White. (No reference. Just Betty.) I want to embrace aging gracefully; I want to rock gray hair; I want to love my smile lines. This does not mean I won’t take care of myself. I’ll still moisturize and SPF. It also doesn’t mean that I don’t think highly of women who don’t want gray hair. It means I want women to be able to age at their own comfortable pace and discretion, without outer pressures to look younger. With age comes wisdom, and with wisdom, there is loving ourselves as we truly are.
Embrace: Being attractive and youthful. Just because I’m older does not mean I am not attractive or yet set in my ways. I will continue to learn to love my body in all its stages, care for it as it cares for me, and wear whatever the hell I want to wear. Fuck “age appropriate.” Maybe I’ll make that into a T-shirt.
Break: Having everything figured out by a certain age. Yes, I want to have my “shit together,” but I can have a general hold on my shit without having things completely figured out. That’s life. If we are not constantly learning new things and obtaining new challenges then what are we doing here? We are not meant to have every damn thing figured out by a certain point. We figure things out as we learn how to deal with them. We figure things out on our own through self-discovery and exploration. We figure things out with others through empathy and collaboration.
I may be a rare breed. Despite being taught to fear 40, I have never feared 40.
I feared growing up and facing responsibility, but I never feared 40.
It may be because of Diane Keaton’s one line in The First Wive’s Club, a film about mid-life women being left by their husbands for younger partners. They embraced their bitchiness and broke stereotypes.
“We are in our prime!” Annie declares as these three friends muddle through the challenges of the present chapter of their lives.
It’s all downhill from here. To me, that is not meant to be a negative thing. Going uphill was the struggle. Going downhill is the best part of the ride. With the wind blowing in my curly gray hair and rustling my “fuck aging” T-shirt, I’ll throw up my hands and yell, “Weeeeeeee!”
I use the term “adult” loosely, as it is a mere technicality that is recognized by law that an 18-year-old as someone capable of adulting.
Saloni Dattani, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, Hannah Ritchie, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser (2023) - “Life Expectancy” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy' [Online Resource]
I disagree. We may be older, but we aren’t fucking rusty ducks, okay?
This was outstanding!!