40 is just a matter of how you look at it

“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.” —Sophia Loren

Over the weekend, my younger sister celebrated her 40th birthday, though celebrate is hardly the right word.

Forty threw Sis for a loop.

Never mind that she’s built a good life for herself in these last four decades. She has close ties to friends and family because of her generous heart; a relationship with God because of her faith; a successful career because of her work ethic; and a decent golf swing because of her determination not to let the boys win every time.

She could appreciate none of it as the big day fell. She was, as she explained it, “officially very old.”

Rather than face the music - friends and family singing off-key around a cake ablaze with 40 candles— she sneaked off to a little apartment at the beach. She wanted to ride out the passage of this milestone alone.

No cake, no favors, no silly hats. No joy.

Instead, she ordered in a pizza, rented a movie and waited it out, she said. Maybe, if she didn’t acknowledge 40, it would go away.

It wouldn’t. When she woke up, she was on her way to 41.

“My life is half over,” she wailed when she arrived at my house the next day.

She’d agreed to come out of her hole and share a quiet, belated birthday brunch because I promised there would be Bloody Marys.

I empathized with her, but I felt no sympathy.

As I close in on 50, I’m convinced middle age isn’t the winding down we’ve been conditioned to fear. It’s an energized second half - time that, at long last, can be filled with the stuff of my choosing. Lived fearlessly, this life stage might be made up of the real glory days.

Click here!

No. It isn’t all easy.

What woman can really ever get over gravity’s pull?

Or deny that her adult children are more draining than babies ever were? I know a woman whose only daughter fell in love during a semester abroad and has moved to AUSTRALIA to be with her soulmate. My own son joined the United States Marine Corps in a time of war.

The infantry?! It has to be the infantry?

And I know too many friends who bought into the promise that marriage meant forever and happily ever after, and who sadly, now in mid-life, with the help of lawyers, acknowledge it was a big, fat lie.

What is sweet about middle age, though, is that even amid the storms, most of us are comfortable in our own skin. Finally, I know me, and I want to be friends, anyway.

In The Queen of My Self: Stepping into Sovereignty in Midlife, author Donna Henes urges middle-aged women to stand up and better the world.

“It is a coincidence that just as the planet teeters on the very brink of destruction, there comes along a generation of fiery, accomplished, clever, ambitious women at the height of our supremacy to whip it back into shape,” her book says.

I don’t know about all that. It sounds like a lot of pressure.

I do know that I finally feel the power to say what I think and do what I want even when it’s not in keeping with others’ expectations.

That’s surely something to celebrate. That is why I want to convince Sis to toast herself in the mirror on the occasion of her next birthday.

“Brava, old girl! Here’s to living.”

— Kate Fratti