Reflections upon turning 40
Today is my 40th birthday, and I have been feeling many feelings.
Excitement, because it is my birthday and I frankly enjoy being showered in affection and subjected to the high-variance hijinks of my little brood.
Restless impatience, because there is so much I want to do and haven’t done, and my mom died at 62 and my cholesterol is high and who knows how much time I even have left…
Then terror, because… 40?? The age Sally freaks out about “someday” approaching in When Harry Met Sally? The age at which one is officially considered “middle-aged”? The age that so many of history’s great talents, like MLK Jr and Michelle Trachtenberg and Frederick Chopin and George Gershwin, never even reached?
And then I told my husband Matt of my grand plan to write a post that catalogues what various great builders had and hadn’t accomplished yet by the time they were 40, and he twisted his eyebrows in scorn. “You’re thinking about this so completely wrong,” he said. And when I rushed in to mount some s…
