Forty

I celebrate my 40th birthday on Saturday October 9th. I don't feel 40 at all. In fact, I feel younger now than I did on my 30th birthday.

Last month, I found out for sure that I am, in fact, one of the oldest in my class. Norm, my statistics teacher, collected the ages of the people in my cohort to demonstrate a concept. I asked if we had to tell the truth; some people laughed. Norm said yes, we had to tell the truth. He started at "20". People started raising their hands at "23". After "35", he asked if he missed anybody. I raised my hand and called out, "Forty, next month." The class got noisier. Norm hesitated. A few gentlemen in the center of the room graciously calculated "Thirty-nine," but Norm said it had to be rounded. There was someone who is 37, and another who is 45. But the median is around 28. I'm pretty sure a lot of people's perception of me changed that day -- for better or for worse, I don't know.

As I walked to school this morning, I realized that my mother was about 40 when she went through a similar life change. That was when she dropped everything and went to the US. I remember because I was in my second year in high school, the year I turned 14. She had me when she was 26, so she must have been around 40 then. I wonder, is it something that all women go through? Or something only strong women go through? Or something only women in my family go through? My sister Dee will turn 40 next year; I wonder what her life change would be, if any. She's mellower than I am; maybe the life change she chooses would not be as drastic.

The funny thing is that turning 40 is liberating. I am old enough to make life decisions without needing someone else's approval. (Being single helps too.) I am old enough to recognize peer pressure and to rise above it. I am old enough to know whose opinions I should care about and whose opinions I can ignore. I am old enough to know who I am and to accept who I am.

And, yet, even though I've already defined myself, I continue to redefine myself. Maybe that's why we choose to create drastic life changes. So we can discard that old self-definition and create a new one. Just as nature's cataclysmic events destroy life in order to create new life....

Well, here we go -- I am at the threshold of my new life.