How To Be 40: Beginner Lessons For Women Turning Forty I took my first breath in the arms of woman on the cusp of forty; my formative years were shaped as she navigated her forties. And, I suppose, in turn, her forties were shaped in part by me.

That woman was my mother. And, it was the ’70s.

Portrait of A Woman Turning Forty

There is a picture etched in my memory more vivid than any other picture from my childhood. I am three years old, grinning, leaning back over my highchair, craning to look at my mother who is sitting beside my father at my grandparents house.

My mother is what I remember most. She, and my father wearing a brown cardigan and stylish trousers, sit side-by-side, opening gifts. It’s their Silver wedding anniversary. My mother is naturally beautiful. Slim and trim and modest in a simple and stylish shift dress of the early ’70’s. Her skin is sunkissed. She’s smiling her shy smile.

She is 43 years old.

Looking back what is remarkable about that picture is not simply that she looks great at 43, unlike how we think most parents look, but, her life experience up until that point was so …epic.

I was three years old, and I was her youngest. There were eight who came before me. I was child-number-nine, born when she was 39 years old.

She’d gotten married at 18, had her first kid by 19, raised a baseball team of babies, including twins, lost a child to a swift and cruel illness, and was temporarily raising five of us and my father in a campground while he looked for work, having just relocated half-way across Canada on a wing and a prayer in the back of ’62 Ford cube van.

Struggle was her companion. Yet, bitterness never was.

Her persona is capped by her detached bemusement about aging. Her standard quip is ‘it’s better than the alternative.’

I, however, am not that zen.  Here are five lessons I learned the hard way.

1: Don’t Look Back

Looking for some guidance when I was approaching 40, I tried to tap into her zeitgeist. She pointed out the obvious: at 40 she was too busy raising a family to remember her age half the time let alone worry about how old she looked. Besides, what did it matter?

Could it be that simple? I’ve thought a lot about this over the years and I’ve concluded that, yep, it’s quite likely that simple. For her. For some. My mother was (is) beautiful and beloved and unburdened by vanity and for the most part, the opinions of others.  But, her life experience was nothing like mine. At 39 I was single with no kids, a career woman, traveling the world in an exciting job, meeting incredible people. I had a busy social life, and, an apartment in the middle of a big city.

Not only did our trajectories look radically different, the choices available to us during our lifetimes differed, the pressures and expectations weren’t the same. In 39 years since I was born, the world itself was in some ways virtually unrecognizable, for better or worse.

As much as I wanted advice, I would have to look elsewhere.

2: Freaking Out Is Totally Acceptable

I remember the day I started freaking out about turning forty. It was the day after my 39th birthday. In my mind it was the beginning of the end.

In fact, it wouldn’t really be an exaggeration to say I’d been mildly dreading it since I turned 30. With that kind of anticipation, what chance did I have of being anything but traumatized by this…this number? With October marching closer, I started a Being Forty journal. It was a safe place to vent and fret and dream; it led to my research. Later, it drew other women like a moth to a flame.

For years, I wished for a mentor, someone I could trust,  who would assuage – heck, even diagnose -my neuroses; to inspire me about life-post forty, talk me off the ledge. My friends younger than me, just seemed to make it worse, confirming my advanced age with their flawless skin and tight bodies and endless energy. I was (and am) lucky to have friendships with women who are older than me whom I could at least inquire about their approach to this milestone, and, when needed, whine about my own perceived trials. But, for the most part, I wrung my hands in silence.

3: Don’t Compare Yourself to Halle Berry

Like any busy, misguided female in the 21st century I turned to the most obvious place to medicate my anxiety: the internet. I found women who were, like me, hitting this milestone age, and, they managed to look fantastic. Except these peers had personal chefs, personal trainers, stylists, air brushing, botox and had won the genetic lottery. Halle Berry, Julia Roberts, Jenifer Aniston. These were my homegirls.  Somehow, knowing even the most beautiful women in the world were also facing forty made me feel less of a pariah.

During this entire year I awkwardly avoided any jokes of being ‘old’, choosing instead to feel oddly ashamed and adopted the ‘lie about your age’ approach. Some of my closest friends were planning BIG 40th birthday celebrations. The very thought horrified me. What was wrong with these people? They should not be drawing attention to this terrible event.A  full six months after  I turned 40 I resigned myself to ’come out’ about my age, i.e. get over it. I’d call it more an act of surrender, borne of exhaustion from keeping up some imaginary ruse (I was kidding no one) than it was a peaceful and joyful embrace.

It was like my spirit had been waiting for me to figure this out. It made room for self-acceptance which is oxygen to self-confidence and empowerment. That freed up my psychic energy to pour into a creativity, to find true love and to be brave in my career pursuits. Things were looking up.

4: Reject Invisibility For Women Over Forty

Age is a delicate subject, even to the most courageous, feminist among us. Perhaps now, more than ever, we are pounded with the message that to age is to lose worth.

Psychologists have been telling us for decades that this – feeling unvalued, ignored, irrelevant- is one of the biggest triggers to anxiety and depression.

The secret, I’ve learned, in part from the dozens of women I’ve had the privilege of interviewing, is to not pay any heed to that feeling, whether it is self-induced or projected upon you by another. The truth is, invisibility can happen at any age and for many reasons. If you ask around, or think back to your own memories, invisibility happens because you’re too young, too short, female, male, old, timid, immigrant, don’t speak the language, not in the clique.

There will always be people who are invisible to you; not necessarily because of prejudice or willful rejection, but simply because we are not aware at all times. The same is true for those times when you feel invisible.

There’s a way to turn off the invisibility switch – you hold that power, your finger is on the switch. Stare down anyone who dares to consider you less visible.

5. Redefine Forty on Your Terms

If you’re turning 40 in the next few years your parents were Baby Boomers. You were shaped by their philosophies, but, also by the world you grew up in, which was a much different world than the one they grew up in.  We are redefining what it means to be 40, and beyond. Embrace yourself. Put on blinders that force you to focus on your bliss, and, see what happens.

 

“There are far, far better things ahead than we leave behind.”

– C.S. Lewis

women woman forty age how to be forty beginner lessons

Bugging my parents on their 25th wedding anniversary

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The Diver Every summer when I was a kid, the rugged east coast village where I lived with my four brothers and our parents, would announce what to me was the most exciting news of the year:  the opening date of the town’s one and only outdoor community swimming pool.

It signalled the end of the school year, the promise of warmer weather, and well, swimming lessons. It also meant the return of what a 9-year-old palette craves – piping hot salt-and-vinegar french fries,  fresh from the canteen and inhaled after hours of play in frigid water. The pool was a 15 minute walk from my house, and sat in the shadow of the brick school that I attended from kindergarten through graduation.

Waiting for the Whistle

So it began. Every year, on the first day of Pool Season, kids in bathing suits would push to the front of the queue  to claim bragging rights to being the first to plunge into the deep end of the ice cold water, pumped in courtesy of the volunteer fire department. It would be days, even weeks before the capricious summer sun would start to warm it.

The doors would open and we’d file in, speed walking along the rough concrete deck to get into position.

There I stood, punier, paler and younger than the rest, staring into the highly chlorinated shimmering water in nervous anticipation; silently wondering if I’d forgotten how to swim in the last 10 months. We waited, shivering pre-teens,  lined up along the edge, legs cocked for push off; impatient for the the lifeguard to blow the first whistle of the season.

Before the whistle had finished we’d throw ourselves from the ledge, head first into the water, and emerge screaming from the cold water and the excitement.

Summer had begun.

How Not to Lie About Your Age

By the time I was 38 I was already obsessing about turning 40.  Like many others, my notion of middle-age, especially for women, pointed to a loss of relevance, impending social invisibility and fading sexiness. I knew women in their 40s, 50s 60s and beyond who were relevant, brilliant and sexy. But, I was convinced they were outliers. It was that number, and a lifetime of unconscious judgments that I projected onto it that left me crippled with fear. If I couldn’t figure it out before forty, surely, I was doomed.

Blinded with determination, I devised a solid plan. I would throw a huge party for my 39th birthday. This would divert attention, so no one would notice when I turned 40 the following year (because, everyone was paying close attention to my age, obviously). The party fell on a warm October Friday night; a band played under a tent, there was dancing, a cocktail (the “Frantini”) was launched in my honour. I was surrounded by friends and, aglow on the love of friends and a few Frantinis.

Of course, I’d failed to see the hole in my master plan. Everyone  assumed it we were celebrating my fortieth and that I was joking about still being 39. To this day friends who went to that party think I’m a year older than I am.

What followed in the next inspired soul searching, research, interviews and now, this blog.

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The Language of Forty

How do we talk about something if we don’t have the words?

This difficult question has presented itself to me before I’m half-way through my first coffee. I’m standing in my socks, staring at a wall of sharpie-covered sticky note chaos in my office. It’s an early winter morning.  I’m mentally willing the pastel cloud of research staring back at me to organize itself.

Language That Empowers

I’ve spent years investigating the topic of women turning forty from every possible angle. The notes are sorted into colour-coded categories that I’ve been digging into on the topic of women in their forties   – Neurology, Biology, Psychology, Sociology – with dozens of sub-headings mixed in. It had become a point of practicality. I needed a shorthand to describe what I was doing.

I took a sip of coffee, looked at all the headings, and mumbled, “Fortyology.”  

The Fear Whisper

Without exception, whenever the topic of my research came up, any woman over 35 and within earshot perked up, looked me straight in the eyes, and whisper-pleaded with me to publish my book before their fortieth birthday.

Turning forty was obviously on their minds, and despite a life that looked really good on Instagram, they were having a small (or in my case, large) freak-out. At the very least, they had some legitimate questions about life after forty.

Perhaps, it is because this is a truly complex time of life for women. It’s a time when we
are so much to so many in our lives, yet struggle with our own identity. Many women in their late 30s and early 40s feel profoundly unfulfilled, or disillusioned with the life they’ve built, irrespective of what it looks like on the outside.

It’s no wonder we lack a meaningful language to talk about this stage of life. Our words are borrowed from our younger selves, and more often from the media messages that we willingly and unwillingly absorb, and have for our entire lives.

The Age Gap

There is no lack of bite-size reading material on the subject of turning forty. Most of it social media clickbait, full of tired, patronizing advice, or lists of 40 Things To Do In Your 40s! Or, the truly gag-inducing Forty Is The New Twenty genre.

But, what I have found, despite research chops honed in national newsrooms, hundreds of conversations with scientists, psychologists, women (and men) of all ages and countless magazine articles and research papers is this:  a common language to describe the era of your forties does not exist.

In fact, serious study of women between the ages of 36-50 is hard to come by.  For decades, if not millennia, women in this age bracket have been dismissed as less than noteworthy in scientific terms, except for very specific exceptions, such as fertility.

But, finally there are signs of change in that gross overgeneralization.Research in the fields of biology, psychology, neurology,  is opening new conversations and revealing valuable data.

To Have A Voice, You Need A Language

Which brings me to the name of our new language, and blog – Fortyology.  

Forty, refers  to the age bracket between 40-49, and ‘ology’ is the study of.

Yep, that’s me. World’s first Fortyologist.

Fortyology  is the umbrella under which we will explore data, stories,  sage advice and culture of being forty(ish)  in a Boomer – Millennial world.

I’ve spent several years researching Fortyology from a place of passion, science journalism, self-interest and above all, the desire to share this with you. It’s no coincidence that I’ve also been embedded in the world of my forties and have learned much from my own experiences, research and wisdom from those who have come before.

I can’t wait to share this language and the world of Fortyology with you, and for all of us to expand our vocabulary.

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