There’s Nothing New About 40

By Joan Opyr, 12-06-06

I had a birthday last week, a big birthday, and I'm afraid I have some disappointing news for all of you 39-year olds. Are you ready? Are you sure? Okay, here it is -- forty is not the new thirty. I'm sorry, but forty is just forty, same as it ever was. Yes, I know; we've taken this milestone birthday, tarted it up, given it a shot of Botox and a public relations makeover, but the truth is as plain as the gray hairs on our heads. Forty is the grand entrance to middle age. There is an exit, but if you're the optimistic sort, you'll recognize that there's really no need to take it. Being forty is not that bad. In fact, so far, it's been pretty good.

I am not grateful to my friends and family for the black balloons, the over-the-hill cards, and the tombstone-shaped birthday candles, but there's a lot to be said for embracing your age. Think about it -- would you really want to be twenty again? I mean truly twenty. I'm not talking about transferring your forty-year old brain into your twenty-year old body. (You've been watching too much Futurama.) I'm talking about what you know now that you didn't know then. I'm talking about what you've learned over the course of four decades. Unless you're a hopeless alcoholic, I'll bet you no longer do Jell-O shots. If you drink wine, it probably doesn't have cans of fruit cocktail or Everclear in it, and I would guess that it's served from a bottle, not ladled out of a plastic trash can. What kind of wine do you drink at forty? Shiraz, merlot, or bordeaux. At twenty? Purple Jesus.

Your checkbook might or might not have a bigger balance now than it did twenty years ago; I suppose it depends on if your last name is Bush. Whether you have more money now or not, you recognize that you need to keep your account in balance. The phrase "kiting checks" no longer conjures up the image of a picnic in the park. It's serious business, and so even if you're squeaking y from paycheck to paycheck, you try to keep a few "whoops" dollars in reserve.

Perhaps you own a house now, or an apartment. If you rent, maybe you share with one other person, not a dizzying rotation of girls who run up eight-hundred dollar phone bills and then disappear, or guys who look like Shaggy from Scooby Doo and eat the dog's food when they run out of pizza. Your bathroom is pretty clean. You no longer find strange hairs on your soap or have to worry about who might have been using your toothbrush. Your home is your home. It's not a flop house.

Still not convinced that forty is better than twenty? Think about who were you dating at twenty. Want them back? Right. I thought you'd come around to my way of thinking.

Listen, if you've been taking good care of yourself, eating healthy foods, and you have a sense of humor, you don't need to pretend that forty is the new thirty. Forty is good. Okay, the age spot thing is kind of annoying. Wait -- are you pretending you don't know what I'm talking about? Look at the backs of your hands. What's that? You don't see anything? Put your reading glasses on and look again. Those small, slight discolorations? Those are not freckles, my friend. Those are age spots. You might have been blessed with a baby face, and if you're a gym queen, perhaps your butt is the biggest liar in town, but your mitts will betray you every time. You might kid someone with a kind heart and a thick pair of beer goggles into believing that you're twenty-eight, but your hands tell the truth. Trust me: it's a kind of sign language.

I am better at forty than I was at twenty. I am older, and I am wiser. So my knees creak a bit when I stand up. So what? I can't hear them. I stood too close to the concert speakers back when I was twenty. [End of article]