Things I Think About Just Before Turning 40

How I See Myself at 40

It is 5 days before my 40th birthday.  I'm 39 years old right now.  I felt that needed to be said.  I have been thinking about this new age that I'm approaching, thinking about it a lot, actually.

I was told that your 30's are SO much better than your 20's, but that hasn't proven to be all that true.  When I turned 29 years old I made a massive life change by getting divorced and moving 3,000 miles away from home, where I ended up marrying a really wonderful man.  The moving part was a mistake in some ways, and that led to most of the misery of my 30's, but the (really rather wretched) sadness of that is now more of a dull hum in the back of my skull, rather than an earth-shattering revelation I'd reel from every day when I woke up for the first few years.

I look at women on TV who play moms to children the age of my son; women who are actually playing the part of the 40 year old mother of an 8 year old son.  I cannot believe I'm in their league.  I can NOT possibly look THAT old, can I?

See?  I don't have eye wrinkles like this.

I check the mirror to double-check.  I don't have any wrinkles on my face at all; okay, around my eyes for the first few hours upon waking up, but I haven't had any botox (yet.)  I sure as hell don't look like Teri Hatcher (we're talking eyes here - of course I don't have her skeletal body, which I'd love to have.)

I also see a "girl" who still dyes her hair red, has nose, eyebrow, and upper ear cartilage piercings.  (Okay, I took out the eyebrow piercing because I never ended up feeling much like Fergie, although I rather liked it.  Too much public pressure to remove it, and I fell for it.)  I cannot possibly be about to turn 40 years old.

I remember being a teenager and my future Mother in Law having her 40th birthday.  Her friends did the whole "Lordy, lordy, look who's 40!" thing - and I remember feeling - literally - sick to my stomach with the revulsion of the thought of celebrating something so horrible.  Now I'm that horrible person.  But, SHE looked 40.  I don't look 40!  I hated her.  I hate her to this day.

I remember watching a movie with Billy Chrystal in it.  City Slickers.  He stood up in front of his son's class for "Bring Your Parents to School Day" and he was humorously depressed about his life.  He started going through the decades of life in order to explain to the kids what they've got to look forward to, and when he got to 40 he said "...and when you're 40 you'll undergo some kind of 'procedure'..."  I was young when I watched that, too, and I wondered what procedure I'd have to undergo.  I think I need a hysterectomy, sadly.

Damn Billy Chrystal, why must you always be so right?  (I was wrong about the decade/procedure part, but I'll post it on to the end of this entry.  It's a moot point, though - I've always remembered the "procedure" (but it's really surgery) decade as being 40.  See how well I pay attention?)

At this point in my life - I'm calling it the half-way point even though I hope to live to be 100 years old. (I'm terrified of dying...I'd like to be 100, heavily medicated, and just fall asleep and not wake up - that's how I want it to go.)  So, let's say that I have a good 40 to 60 years to live.

These are innocuous, but sinister big-ass mochas.

Well, I have surely done a lot of fucking up in the first half of my life.  I wonder if I can overcome so many of those things?  For one - will I ever be able to lose weight and look sexy again?  I am so weak from panic attacks and agoraphobia, a very bad back, and my pure & unadulterated love for Mochas, smoking, and not moving.  Can that be reversed?  If I haven't yet had the will - where will that will come from?  Does becoming 40 give you a renewed sense of willpower?  Or does that only happen when you find out that your husband and you have grown apart, or worse; that your husband has had an emotional or physical affair with another woman?  (I believe an emotional affair is just as horrific to endure for the injured party.)

For the first time in my life, since I was a child, I have a dog that means more to me than myself.  That's something that a 40 year old woman would say, but I just love that dog.  She sleeps with me and never elbows me in the middle of the night.  She conforms her body to mine in The Boat (that place where your knees bend when you're lying on your side) and we keep each other warm, and I like to believe that when she's sleeping on a chair (as she is right now next to me - in a big comfy red leather chair, not some piece of crap chair - only the best for my baby) that she's not sleeping as well as she (or I) is sleeping when she's in The Boat.  She also loves to protect me.  She wants to maul the UPS man even though I've introduced her to him a dozen times, and yet my cats will simply stare at him from their perch on my roof.  (Yes.  On my roof.  That's how much they 'care' about anything.)

Please note that probably NO 20 or 30 something-year old woman would ever talk about their dog this way.  This is the behavior of a woman who is aged, at least to the point of 'almost turning 40.'  God help me - what will it be like when I'm 50?  I hope I won't have 3 dogs.  Imagine the cost in treats alone!  My Social Security Benefits aren't going to cover that!  I'll likely need 12 medications for varying illnesses by then!  (God, please ... just, no?)

At 40, will I become an organized, mature woman?  I just don't see that happening.  I mean, it's not like I need a craft room since I don't do...oh my God - I'm not going to start doing crafts am I???  That's what old women do!  No.  Just no.  As I was saying, I don't have a craft room that's cluttered.  I just have a whole house that's cluttered.  Now, will turning 40 fix that?  Will I have to start buying O magazine, or Better Homes & Garden?  Right now my husband embraces his old age (41) and subscribes to Sunset magazine.  Just the NAME of it sounds like an old-person's home!!  Sunset.  What the hell is he acting so old for?  I hope that doesn't happen to me.  Sunset magazine is a west-coast magazine that tells you about all these great things you can do on the west coast when you don't have kids.  Again, we have an 8 1/2 year old son.  I sometimes worry about his perspective.  (My husband's - not my son's...My son knows exactly what he wants and does it all the time.  He is very happily living the life of an 8 year old boy.)

I have to really start worrying about my cholesterol and glucose now.  I take a medication that elevates both.  Nice, huh?  Well, I'm working to wean off of that and take it as-needed, but I'm about six months from that point, and I wonder what damage has already been done, considering that I've taken this medication for 2 years and didn't know there'd be these side effects.  2 years ago my blood was perfect, but now it's the blood of a 40-year-old.  Oh, to have 38 year-old blood again.

I'm guessing that, also, by now my face will never NOT look like I'm frowning.  Unfortunately, I've had a problem with smiling ever since my teenage years, and so my mouth is in the permanent shape of a frown.  I think that's very sad.  Yes, this is very devastating to me.  I always thought I'd have a chance to retrain my face before it got too late; I suppose 40 is too late.  Perhaps there's a "procedure" I can undergo to make it look less like a frown and more like a non-emotional face, unless I am actually smiling.  I'm certain there is, but I'm not certain I'll be able to afford that in my lifetime.  I'm still a renter.

I suppose I could always lie and say I was 37.  Who would challenge that?  It's not like I would be saying 32 or 39; which everyone knows are bullshit numbers for 40.  *Sigh.*  I guess it doesn't matter because I'll still know.  Unless my mother lied - which would not be at all unlike her.  She must have gotten pregnant on Valentine's Day of 1970 in order to have me almost exactly nine months later...God.  No, even she wouldn't go to the trouble of falsifying documents throughout my entire life that would otherwise prove that I was born in 1982.  Oh my God.  Where in the HELL was my big sister - who would have still been in my mother's womb on Valentines Day in 1970?  I'm doing some math incorrectly here - give me a second to think about this.  Dawn was born in April of 1970, which means that my parents got it on in August of 1969, right?  August of 69 through April of 1970 my mom was pregnant with Dawn.  If I was born in October of 1971 then I MUST have been conceived in ... oh, yeah - February of 1971.  Oh fuck, I thought for a second I might be my sister Cheri's kid!  (NOOO!!!) Oh thank GOD for math!!!  It always has only one right answer.

Why can't real life be more like math, anyway?  Everything should have a simple, elegant, and reasonable answer to it.  At 40 years of age, shouldn't all of the really hard questions been solved already?  Or is this just the beginning of Advanced Trig?

Fuck.

Also, will I stop swearing so much now that I'm going to be a woman of a certain age?

Well, there you have it.  The things I am thinking about a few days before my 40th birthday.

Billy Chrystal's Quote from City Slickers:  Value this time in your life kids, because this is the time in your life when you still have your choices, and it goes by so quickly. When you're a teenager you think you can do anything, and you do. Your twenties are a blur. Your thirties, you raise your family, you make a little money and you think to yourself, "What happened to my twenties?" Your forties, you grow a little pot belly you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud and one of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother. Your fifties you have a minor surgery. You'll call it a procedure, but it's a surgery. Your sixties you have a major surgery, the music is still loud but it doesn't matter because you can't hear it anyway. Seventies, you and the wife retire to Fort Lauderdale, you start eating dinner at two, lunch around ten, breakfast the night before. And you spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate in soft yogurt and muttering "how come the kids don't call?" By your eighties, you've had a major stroke, and you end up babbling to some Jamaican nurse who your wife can't stand but who you call mama. Any questions?