40 - What the Hell just Happened

Original Post March 12, 2020 (re-published and reconstructed)

I could have sworn just yesterday I was 23, wasn’t I? Or… maybe I convinced myself that I was until I actually did turn 40. I’m not sure what’s so significant about 23, I think it’s just where my brain landed and it stayed there. Nothing magical happened that year nor can I remember ever thinking 23 is where it’s at...maybe it's just my lucky number.

I’ve polled quite a few female friends and acquaintances and found that this is actually a phenomenon that women seem to experience. I’m not sure why it happens but it just does. We all have some number in our head we decided to stay fixed at until one day reality sets in and we’re not that. I’m assuming men feel this way as well but I have yet to poll any!

So that’s the strange thing about aging, at least for some of us, ok me, it just kind of creeps up on you. You don’t notice the wrinkles, the grays or the creaky bones till all of a sudden one day you can’t help but notice them because they are literally screaming at you.

OK… if I’m being honest I’ve been going gray since I was in my 20’s but I’ve been dying my hair for so long that it didn’t seem to be as big of a problem until I turned 40. I can’t believe people pay hundreds of dollars to make their hair gray on purpose while I desperately try to stretch my hair washing to every three instead of two days just to preserve the color a little longer. As someone with naturally oil hair that's no easy feat.

I swear that there are two hairs (maybe a couple more than that) right in front of my head that even after just getting home from the salon are still gray. They are just sitting there laughing their little follicles off saying “can’t get us!”

That’s not even the worst of it; the grays seem to multiply around your body like some bizarre colonization of sorts. There’s really nothing stranger than looking down towards the nether regions just before a wax and seeing white stubble mixed in with the dark. (More on all things scaping in a future post!)

Gray pubes, I can assure you are something I truly had not thought about until it happened and it still HORRIFIES me, even as I type it.

TMI?!?

You might think so but you also know it’s true and if it’s not, just you wait!

Truth bomb - I might as well admit that a lot of my bones were creaky before 40, just not as much, now I feel like the tin man needing oil every day.

Wrinkles! Dicovering them was a hard pill to swallow.

Such fun little tellers of time! I didn’t notice them till recently and now I’m 41 so I guess I was lucky that I got a whole year into my 40’s before really noticing them enough to bother me. I laugh to myself as I type that because I’m not sure how I didn’t notice.

My youngest daughters favorite thing to say to me over the past few years has been “do your wrinkles!!!” (Like it's a parlor trick)

One day she noticed that when I raised my eyebrows I had ridges on my forehead and would run her fingers over them giggling and staring at them as though she just found some amazing treasure. Kids are just so damn cute and honest. She’d then touch her own forehead and with a sad face say, “where are mine” to which I would reply “you do not have them and hopefully won't for a very long time.” That response didn’t make her happy, but someday she’ll understand!

Sometimes I catch myself staring at pictures of myself thinking is that really me? How, when, why? I have sat and taken fifty closeup face selfies with no intention of doing anything with them other than to scrutinize my wrinkles over and over again and then delete them. Self inflicted torture. I do however consider myself to be lucky. One of the things I remember most about my mother as a kid was that she never really looked that old… at least until she got sick with breast cancer but even still, she never really looked her age. I guess I acquired some slow aging genes from her.

My oldest daughter occasionally says “Mom, you kinda look like you’re in college.” She hasn’t said it recently though so maybe in her mind I’ve graduated to somewhere in my late 20’s, or so I hope!

Enough about the wrinkles! For now!

As weird as it is to find myself here, I think I coasted into my 40’s because I was kind of too busy to notice or I was in denial, who knows! I was smack dab in the middle of trying to get my masters/doctorate to really realize that I was in the midst of what most people dread, turning 40 (cue foreboding music). I was too busy trying to feel accomplished and figure out who I was for the five hundreth time!

Sounds like maybe, a tiny baby of a crisis... maybe not!

So now here I am, 43 getting up at 5 am to steal some quiet time, officially admitting to being a morning person and writing. I've let go of my fixation on remaining on 23 in my mind and begun to accept...mostly accept, where I am in this current space and time.

Which brings me to this friends, what's been the hardest or most interesting aspect of becoming a midlifer?