“Forty is the new thirty!” everyone squealed a few years ago while, for my generation, actress Demi Moore served as the incontrovertible proof of what we all could aspire to at that particular age.
Actually, there may be a small kernel of truth in that for I spent my 40th birthday pregnant with my fourth child and felt utterly fantastic, but trying to anticipate what will happen for the rest of the decade is like trying to find a gas station when you’re driving through one of those long, treacherously sparse sections of Texas highway. Suddenly, there’s nothing but dark road. God help you if you don’t have a coat and a decent pair of shoes.
In 1975, I sat in a dark, classroom full of snickering, toe-socked, 11-year-old girls as the most ancient female teacher on the elementary school faculty silently led us like Charon, across the river, Styx, through a filmstrip on our changing bodies. (And if you haven’t experienced the mesmeric boop of a filmstrip, you have my pity.) This change-is-coming session was far too genteel and silly back then to be helpful, but at least we had each other for support.
For all the mean girl activities that seem destined to come with enrollment in middle school, there does, occasionally, spring up a rather warm loyalty among bathroom comrades. “I got it!” my friends would mouth weakly across the room or in the school parking lot as one by one we were ferried over a dark and mysterious river and transformed into the women we would all become.
Not so at middle age. For one thing, some of the most important information is kept wickedly secret, say, for example, the 6-inch nose hair. Everyone wants to talk about night sweats and the demolition of your pelvic floor but no one will tell you to your face that one morning you’re going to wake up and discover a nose hair that has grown a foot in the night like a piece of Japanese kudzu.
If you’re a man, you’ll already have equipment to deal with this because you shave, but if you’re a woman, you’ll be completely puzzled by it and will probably have to call in sick to work.
Soon after, your eyesight goes. No one, not even the optometrist I saw faithfully each year, ever said to me, “Around the age of 43, you’re going to innocently reach for the phone book to order a pizza and discover you can’t read a single listing unless you hold it a full 5 feet away from your face. Go now and get thyself a pair of reading glasses and be prepared.”
I feel so strongly about this I’ve recently begun pulling women in their 30s aside to warn them. “It will happen! You will need these!” I say, frantically fumbling through my purse for a pair of reading glasses that haven’t had the temple arm snapped off by my 2-year old. The expression on their faces is always a mixture of horrified denial as they inch themselves out of my grasp.
Finally, your memory is going to humiliate you in the worst possible way. You’ll walk down the driveway to get the mail, a squirrel will jump in a tree and you won’t remember why you’re there. I have a friend, who, at 46, has been so terrified by this experience she convinced herself she had early-onset Alzheimers until a tearful visit with a physician set her straight. No one ever told her that her declining hormone levels would mean she could see the image of her niece in her mind, she just wouldn’t be able remember her name for 10 odd seconds and this was pretty normal.
If you’re in your 20s, you’re not even reading this, and if you’re in your 50s you’ve crossed over into the promised land of discounts and self-confidence because the worst is over, but if you’re in your 30s, take note. I know I might as well be wearing a robe of camel hair and carrying a sandwich board for all the good it will do, but I’m telling the truth.
Don’t be fooled into thinking it won’t happen to you. Right this second, Demi Moore is filling out a health history form in a plastic surgeon’s office wearing a pair of reading glasses and that nose hair she plucked yesterday is long forgotten.
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