My oldest son turned 27 today.
He texted me this:
When I was a young adult, I told people that 50 was the tipping point. We’d have our (obviously) superior youth which we would hang on to with white knuckles through our 40’s, but 50 was the end. Might as well hang it up. We had a good run. Nothing to do but shrivel. I couldn’t fathom being 50. God, how impossibly old. What is there even left to do?
And here I am. Unbelievably not in the crypt. I want to go back to my young self and assure her that she will absolutely be the shit when she is 50.
All her friends are too.
And the women ahead of her? Even better. We are smarter and wiser, funnier and better. I swear we are hotter. We have stopped pretending to laugh when some guy isn’t actually funny. We ask for raises and profit shares. We run our own companies and hire our own staff.
Sex is amaaaazing. We wear what we want. We absolutely do not care if everyone likes us anymore.
We buy a blue bikini if we feel like it. We have bread and wine for dinner sometimes. I want her to know that the endless gender limitations she is navigating do not get the final say. The tidy, narrow job description of “good wife” and “good mom” and “good Christian” doesn’t hold, and she will discover an expansive world outside her imagination. It will thrill her to no end.
She will write and lead and preach and buy her own house. She will become her own power source. None of this could be realized back then, see? She wasn’t there yet. She didn’t know yet. She hadn’t seen it yet. She hadn’t learned yet. Not because she was doing everything wrong. She was just young. She will eventually set a fire that was just an ember back then. So getting older isn’t the end at all; it’s really the beginning.
Midlife has plenty of weird patches, and those get a lot of attention. A few things we built in young adulthood didn’t last, including around half our marriages. Careers have meandered absolutely all over the place. Parenting turned out to be far more complicated than advertised. Peri- and menopause entered the chat, and it is certainly jerking us around. Because no generation has ever invested in women’s healthcare at this age, we are sorting it out in real time. Life absolutely did not go like I expected.
But let me be clear: I absolutely love being 50. I love my life. It has gotten smaller in some ways, because many of the earlier structures were assumed, or expected, or inherited, and midlife comes with the mettle to leave those behind without apology. Most of us also onboarded so, so, so many relationships when we were younger that midlife has keener discernment for, so plenty of these won’t endure. We start whittling our gorgeous life down to what we actually love, who we are genuinely free with.
It has become clear that these few years are indeed precious — youth imagines them stretched out endlessly. Who could even imagine being 50 back then? But here we are, and just like that, half a century is in the rearview mirror and we simply can’t tolerate wasting a single more day. We just can’t. It is all too dear and too short. We can’t bear to spend any more years on bitterness or jobs we hate or being angry all the time. We’re not going to the beach because of our thighs?? Nonsense. No one cares, and no one has ever cared, and we were wrong when we thought everyone was fixated on us all those years. Wasted energy has revealed itself to be the tragedy it always was.
We have spent decades building a life, and now we get to live one. The urgency of young adulthood has exhausted itself, and this season asks a different question: What do I want out of the second half? Can you imagine the wonder of this?? It is something between reinvention and self-discovery and what always truly was and what absolutely should be. What a time to be alive! How do we want to live? What do we want to release? How do we want to spend these next years? Who do we want to be? Phenomenal. We’ve earned our way here, and this is our prize.
So my darling son, born to me as a 23-year-old baby adult, don’t waste another second worrying about 40, and while we’re at it, try to stop worrying about practically everything. Maybe 6% of it should be worried over, and that is a fact. Life gets better. You will get better. So much of the noise and fog clears decade by decade until what you are left with is the most gorgeous life you could have ever imagined.
Now when women say to me, “Wait until you’re 60!” or “You’ll love being 70!”…I believe them.
