How it Really Feels to Turn 40

Well, I've been 40 for a little over a month now, and I just bought mom-shorts. I guess there are some things about aging that are inevitable. I bought the shorts without trying them on because they were a good deal, and I wasn't about to wait in a long line. I got them home to find that they're exactly that length. Bell bottoms for the thighs.

The shorts are a timely coincidence when I feel like everyone who asks me "so how does it feel to turn 40?" is really asking "how does it feel to take on the Jamie Lee Curtis transition?" You know the one -- the shift from hanging from a helicopter in a fitted little black dress in True Lies to being Lyndsay Lohan's awkward old mom in Freaky Friday. The desirable thief in A Fish Called Wanda -- the dowdy empty-nester in Christmas with the Kranks.

I've never been one to get caught up in worries about appearances very much, but I can guarantee that anyone who says they don't mind the physical repercussions of aging is lying. No woman likes making her resting face and having her daughter ask why she's mad. No woman enjoys slipping money to a bouncer who once waved her to the front of the line (I can imagine this might be true anyway -- personally, my bedtime leaves no opportunity for clubs). No woman enjoys when a mammogram machine gets to second base with her.

My body is older, and although I'm more fit now than I was in my 20s, my muscles and bones and forehead and liver will never reverse in time to what they once were. And then there's the whole, ever closer to my earthly demise thing.

But the physical side of aging is all that I can think of about being 40 that sucks. My favourite part of this birthday may be that I know myself so much better than I once did. I no longer golf to be a good sport, because I don't like golfing. I leave the pie on my plate if I don't want it, where once I might have eaten it, worried that people were wondering why I wasn't chowing down (on another day I might eat two pieces). I avoid heels and hangovers. I once thought that when I got older I wouldn't need to stress out anymore -- now that I'm here, I know that it's in my nature to stress, so I avoid situations and people that put me in that mindset unnecessarily. These are some of the things it takes 40 years to learn to just say no to.

As my earlier jokes about facing death may allude to, there is a certain rushing feeling to turning 40, almost like when you're writing an exam and you look up, surprised to find that the clock hands have moved further than you thought. It's a great time to take stock, and to become more focused about goals that may have gone off track, giving way to less-important priorities. I guess this is where the whole midlife crisis thing comes in, which may mistakenly have a bad rap (when you're 40, you're allowed to say "bad rap" if you feel like it, especially while rocking your mom-shorts).

Luckily, I've made good choices for myself in the past 10 years and my life doesn't need a big shake-up. But you can bet that as my kids grow bigger and I have more time to dedicate to my own path, I won't return to items that might look great on a resume, but that I don't enjoy. A big learning for me has been that there are many things I am able to do, but that I should only be romanced by what I want to do. I mean, I could take a derivative in calculus if you really needed me to, but... I'm busy that day. And also "that day" for the next 40 years or so.

Re-checking priorities applies to relationships, too. Am I spending enough time with the really important people in my life? (I type this as my son keeps calling down from the care of his sitters -- Shaggy, Daphne and Scoob -- to ask if I've finished this article yet). We can all get caught up, especially with young families, taxi-ing from commitment to commitment. But are they the right ones? Am I doing justice to the people who have gotten me through the first 40 years? I hope so.

Love is all there is, folks. At my birthday celebration I introduced many friends to other friends for the first time, struggling with summarizing meaningful relationships in a soundbyte. "This is my cousin," but my cousins are almost like siblings. "This girl rowed for Team Canada," but I don't really care, she was there for me when I was single and lonely. "This is a friend from our neigbourhood," and she helps me parent my kids. Only time allows you to collect a quality crew of amazing people. I hope above all else that I am a good friend, mother, sister, wife, and daughter, because that's really all that's important.

Whenever someone changed jobs at one company where I worked, the managers would send an email that said, "It is with mixed emotions that I announce..." and that wording applies here too -- "It is with mixed emotions that I announce I have somehow become 40 years old." I guess maybe I'll always feel about 28, and that the songs they play at the grocery store are still in the top 20 of today's charts. I'm getting older, but I'm in a good place. Can't wait to greet the insights that will take me into my 60s and beyond. But please, clock, take all the time you need to get me there.

By Ann Moore

The Purple Fig is an online women's blogazine with an emphasis on realistic and inspiring personal stories from women of all age groups, lifestyles, and nationalities. We feature essays about parenting, the journey to womanhood, feminism, overcoming challenges in both career and personal life, and issues surrounding sexuality, relationships, and family life. This is where women go to be inspired by the knowledge they are never alone.

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To remember that being wild and inexperienced and broke and young was fun -- and to live it all over again in 320 pages.The sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll of the 1970s "always scared me," says 31-year-old Christina Ricci, who hadn't yet been born when rocker Patti Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe were making music and art together, as chronicled in this 2010 memoir. "Their story sort of restored my faith in people. They went through so much but could still forgive and love each other."-- As told to Karen Holt

"The Middlesteins" By Jami Attenberg

Help with the overeating anxiety that comes up at age 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39 and 40. Even if it's not you who's struggling with the actual overeating.Edie Middlestein has never been thin. But in recent years she has eaten herself into life-threatening obesity, bingeing at fast food chains and Chinese buffets despite a diabetes diagnosis and multiple warnings from doctors. Tired of watching her "killing herself, and taking him with her piece by piece," Richard, Edie's husband of nearly 40 years, walks out on his incessantly nitpicking wife, throwing the Midwestern family at the center of The Middlesteins into turmoil. With an expansive heart and sly wit, Jami Attenberg explores the family's attempts to save Edie from herself. Benny, Edie's conflict-averse son, is going bald from the stress of it all, while his high-strung wife makes a mission of overhauling her mother-in-law's unhealthy lifestyle. (Forced walks around a track do not go well.) The Middlesteins' schoolteacher daughter, Robin, is pushed "over the edge toward something close to hatred, or at least the dissolution of love," by her father's leaving. Meanwhile, Richard savors the pleasures of online dating, only "in the quietest moments in the mornings" suffering guilt for abandoning his marriage. As for Edie, she finds romance of her own with Mr. Song -- the widowed chef at the Golden Unicorn, who appreciates her raucous humor and zealous enjoyment of his cooking -- despite wallowing bitterly in memories of her ex. Throughout this poignant novel, the characters wrestle with two defining questions: What do we owe each other after a life together? What do we owe ourselves? -- Abbe Wright

"The Inheritance of Loss" By Kiran Desai

For those I-am-all-alone days: a reminder of how our stories wind around each other, even from opposite sides of the globe.With her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (Atlantic Monthly), Kiran Desai has written a sprawling and delicate book, like an ancient landscape glittering in the rain. It focuses on one crumbling household in northern India, the Himalayas watching over the story like distant gods. There is a mean and increasingly vulnerable retired judge as paterfamilias, his 16-year-old orphaned granddaughter, and the frightened, scheming cook who is their last remaining servant. Stories radiate from each of these characters: from their pasts, from their romances, from the adventures of the cook's son as an illegal immigrant in America, each of the threads leading toward a core of love, longing, futility, and loss that is Desai's true territory.Desai has a touch for alternating humor and impending tragedy that one associates with the greatest writers, and her prose is uncannily beautiful, a perfect balance of lyricism and plain speech. Hers is not a linear sensibility but a comprehensive one, and she has a flawless ear for the different castes, the different generations, the worlds of Anglophilic sisters at tea and illegal immigrants arguing in a bakery in Harlem. Novels have two aims, Flannery O'Connor once wrote, to reveal mystery and manners, and Desai has mastered both.-- Vince Passaro

"The Museum of Innocence" By Orhan Pamuk

Every woman needs one romantic, elegant Nobel Prize winner in her life.In The Museum of Innocence, Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk offers a world-class lesson in heartbreak and happiness. Kemal, Pamuk's narrator, is the thwarted lover, his beloved the exquisite Füsun, who marries another man. Her rosewater-scented hands have touched the ordinary objects (a barrette, a glass, a cigarette) that Kemal has furtively taken and now displays in his intimate museum -- which is both the house in Istanbul where Füsun once lived, and the book that tells her story. Pamuk's own presence in this wily narrative is as surreptitious as passion itself.-- Cathleen Medwick

"Making Marriage Simple" By Harville Hendrix, PhD, and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD

The book that shows you how to save your marriage (or any other long-term relationship) with frowny and smiley stickers -- no joke.The leading marriage experts share 10 essential truths learned from their own relationship problems, such as "a frustration is a wish in disguise"; "incompatibility is grounds for marriage"; and, "conflict is growth trying to happen."-- Leigh Newman

Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety By Daniel Smith

The memoir that puts worrying in its place.There's nothing funny about an anxiety so crippling that it takes only 30 seconds to turn a minor mistake at work into a potential disaster involving unemployment, homelessness, and death. And yet you'll laugh out loud many times during Daniel Smith's Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety—as when he says his wrung-out 23-year-old self resembled "Nixon resigning the presidency," or when he calls his anxiety a "drama queen of the mind." In the time-honored tradition of leavening pathos with humor, Smith has managed to create a memoir that doesn't entirely let him off the hook for bad behavior (is one's mother the source of every problem?) but promotes understanding of the similarly afflicted. (Who knew there were two kinds of sufferers: the stiflers and the chaotics?) Now, if only he had revealed the full name of the psychologist whose tough-love approach turned out to be the best medicine. What if the worst does happen, Smith had asked the good doctor; what if I do end up dead in a Dumpster? "Well," the therapist responded cheerily, "at least then you won't be anxious anymore!"— Sara Nelson

"Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women" By Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron: She was funny. She was smart. She was who she was meant to be.The first essay in this collection is about being flat-chested and making your way in the world as a woman with no breasts, which was never my problem, even at, like, 10, when I was reading the book. But Ephron was also hilarious, and I didn't know women could talk that way about those kinds of things. The collection felt like a really funny, intimate conversation you could have with one of your best friends. I thought, "This is how I want to write. This is the kind of stuff I want to talk about, and this is the way I want to talk about it."-- As told to Sara Nelson

"Beautiful Ruins" By Jess Walter

Who doesn't want to frolic in Italy on her 40th birthday? Bonus: when arriving on the last page, you'll suffer neither jet lag nor lost luggage."The funniest and best novel I've read all year is Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins. Not many satirists can stop on a dime and testify with equal power and intelligence to what is not, for them, a laughing matter." --Richard RussoJess Walter's Beautiful Ruins is an irresistible romp through Italy in the Technicolor era, when a starlet hooked up with the dashingly drunken Richard Burton and charmed the townspeople in a tiny seaside village. The present-day scenes are pretty snazzy, too.

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