I always thought forty would feel like something.
I turned forty at 5:35 p.m. on May 6, exactly forty years after my mother finished an eighteen–hour argument with my existence. I like to think we’ve both been tired ever since. There were no big parties, no surprise trips, no “Welcome to your fabulous forties!” banners. Just the quiet click of another decade sliding into place.
I always thought forty would feel wiser, maybe. Or at least more decisive about my skincare routine. Instead I woke up feeling like myself, just with a number that seems to belong to other people, not me. Do I feel forty? I don’t know what that’s supposed to feel like. My dad says he turned forty and was just pissed off. My husband spent his fortieth year having what we now politely call “a rough time.” I know people who say they were excited and loved turning fourty. I believe them. I’m just not there yet.
What I do know is that I’m arriving here with a few chronic conditions, a long history of putting work ahead of my body, and the stubborn belief that I want to be a centenarian. Not just alive at one hundred, but reasonably intact, able to walk my own dog and remember why I walked into a room. Lately, some old symptoms have started to circle back, the kind I used to bulldoze past. For now I’m just tracking them, making notes, trying to be curious instead of panicked while I wait out a rescheduled appointment that keeps moving from May to July to August so we only have to make one summer trip when we drop our girl at college. I have no idea if I can actually get from here to one hundred, but I’d like to try, which means life after forty can’t look exactly like life before it. I don’t know how it needs to change yet. I only know that it does.
Some of what I imagined for the last decade simply didn’t happen. I don’t have kids. A few humans came close to existing, but none stuck around long enough to be mine. I used to joke about having a little Peruvian coffee bean baby, my husband being half Andean, as if the universe were a barista taking custom orders. That joke aged badly. The wanting didn’t disappear, but it moved from the foreground to the background, like a song you can’t quite turn off. Forty is me learning how to live with that.
On the plus side, my husband got me what might be the best birthday gift I’ve ever received: a book about perimenopause and a card explaining that he loves me in every version I’ve already been and every one I’m becoming. It felt like permission to take all of my hormones, old and new symptoms and new aches seriously, instead of treating my body like an inconvenient side quest to my inbox. I’ll probably write more about what I’m learning as I go, but for now, if you are a woman roughly my age and any of this sounds familiar, go look at thepauselife.com1.
There are other lives here, too. There’s Mr. J, who still makes me laugh when I’m determined not to. Sally, our rescue dog, who lost her person too and now supervises our weird little household. There’s the twenty–two–year–old I get to play mom to as she heads toward college, the kind of parenting that comes with more cheering and less homework. There are days when I ride my bike, or sit outside, or read on the couch, and think: this is enough. Then there are days when it isn’t.
So this is what forty looks like for me right now: a little grief–heavy, a little tired, still too married to my work, but also curious. I don’t have a five–year plan. I have a question: what if the second half of my life didn’t look like the first? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect it starts with paying more attention to my body, my days, and the small things that actually make me want to stick around until one hundred.
Until then, I’ll keep loving my husband, walking the dog, maybe finding her a little sister, sending a young adult off toward her own life, and trying not to take mine so seriously that I forget to enjoy it. Forty doesn’t feel like a grand arrival. It feels like standing on a trail I didn’t entirely mean to hike, taking a breath, and deciding to see where it goes.
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The ‘Pause Life by Dr. Mary Claire Haver – A wellness resource for women in perimenopause, menopause, and beyond, founded by Dr. Mary Claire Haver, MD, a board‑certified OB‑GYN and Certified Menopause Practitioner who offers a lifestyle‑focused menopause toolkit, education, and community support. Visit https://thepauselife.com. ↩