On the edge of forty

I’m 39 years old, within striking distance of my 40th birthday.

When my mom turned 40, my Dad threw her a beach party in February. They served potato salad in plastic pails, stuck tiki torches into the snowdrifts outside, and laid plastic tarps down in the kitchen before dumping wheelbarrows worth of sand on top of them. A 40th birthday is a moment in time, but that amount of sand indoors is forever.  

On my dad’s 40th, my Mom threw him a funeral for his youth – a huge party complete with a prop coffin borrowed from some teacher friend’s high school theater production. Everyone wore black, bad flower arrangements abounded, and several people eulogized him.

I intend to turn 40 in a very different way. With Emmett and the kids, in New York, determinedly low-key. We’ll probably get dim sum. Our nanny will come over and Emmett and I will get a drink at Bemelman’s. It will likely rain. 

Ten years ago, I turned 30 in New Orleans – a city I did not enjoy though I acknowledge that’s a me problem, not a New Orleans problem. The angst of getting older colored the entire trip. At 30, I was a major work-in-progress – married and happily living in Brooklyn, but also hellaciously uncomfortable in my skin and stuck at a job I disliked. All I could see was the work yet to be done, and it overwhelmed me.

Now, my vantage point has changed enormously. Between 30 and 40, I assembled the building blocks of a very good life, and now the maintenance of it consumes me. 

Every day, for example, I use an app called Habit to mechanically check off 34 daily tasks. Some of them are easy – floss, read, journal, swallow a whole handful worth of vitamins – while others are difficult; ’exercise for 45 minutes’ is the one that looms largest each morning. The 34 tasks don’t include any parenting or work stuff, or any of the longer-term goals that pinprick the edges of my consciousness all day, like a fly buzzing about the room. Extreme productivity, I’ve come to believe, is the price I must pay for a life I love. Slack even slightly, on the other hand, and I stand to lose it all.

This version of me – on edge, pragmatic, more likely to read Atomic Habits than Anna Karenina – won’t take a day off on Sunday. I’ll still do the 34 habits. I’ll still be checking Outlook for my run-down of meetings the next day, hitting ‘schedule send’ on emails so my birthday-martini hangover doesn’t slow me down. I’ll be looking ahead to the next decade, a blank slate, and feeling pressure to make something of it.

But I’m also forcing myself to look back a bit. In a fit of consumer-ism abetted nostalgia, I ordered a custom senior cord jacket from Bode this summer. “Inspired by an early 20th-century collegiate tradition in which seniors illustrated their corduroys with personal motifs,” these hand-painted jackets – they send you a questionnaire to help determine what goes on them – take three months to make. Mine arrived this week, and it’s an homage to all the things that have made my nearly 40 years on earth so rich and wonderful, from the Anderson’s Acre buoy that adorns my mom’s cottage dock to my husband’s signature red glasses to the Roosevelt Island tram. It’s the most beautiful thing I own and a powerful reminder to linger a little in all that’s good right now.

With that in mind, I’m going to throw it on and get out to make the most of my fast-waning 30s. See you on the flip side of 40.