It’s been said before, and I’ll reiterate: your 40s are a strange time. Some days, you embrace the fabulousness of your age, donning an IDGAF attitude like a superhero cloak. Other days, you feel like just telling the world to take a hike.
As our kids grow and start to need us less physically, their emotional needs seem to skyrocket. The trials of parenting teenagers and preteens are intensely personal, leaving us with stories we can’t share because they aren’t ours to tell. So, we parents navigate this journey largely in silence.
Our careers may be flourishing or shifting gears entirely. We might be contemplating a complete career change, which can be unsettling as a nagging voice in the back of our minds questions whether this is truly what we want. The truth is, we often have no definitive answer.
We find ourselves juggling aging parents, friendships that require attention, and the realization that we’ve become adept at filtering out the nonsense in our lives. Yet, this also reveals the sheer volume of trivialities that were once part of our daily grind. We volunteer and strive to contribute positively to the world, but it frequently feels like a drop in the ocean.
Nights are spent tossing and turning, worrying about a child struggling in school, feeling guilty for not reaching out to a parent who has been feeling isolated, and stressing over work emails sent at all hours. The regrets of our youth replay in our minds, while the discomforts of midlife—like acid reflux—make sleep elusive. Just when you think you might finally rest, a wave of anxiety crashes in. (Is it just me?)
When we finally carve out a moment for ourselves, we often find ourselves overwhelmed by the weight of our emotions, realizing just how lonely and uncertain we truly feel.
So yes, your 40s are undeniably strange. But this experience is more common than we think. The issue arises from the lack of open dialogue about it. We hear endless tales of how incredible your 40s can be, with women claiming they’ve finally found their place in the world—what about the rest of us? Where’s the memo that talked about feeling lost or confused?
The reality for many women in their 40s is a mix of contentment, gratitude, subtle fear, loneliness, and exhaustion. There’s a constant push and pull between cherishing the fleeting moments with our kids before they head off to college, and yearning for the freedom that empty nest life promises. Our intuition becomes sharper, yet so does our regret over past choices. We dream of pursuing our passions while simultaneously feeling drawn to simpler, quieter lives that involve adopting a bunch of dogs.
At the heart of this internal struggle is the awareness that life is short. We want to urge ourselves to take risks and chase our dreams, but then reality hits—our responsibilities to our children, our parents, and our friendships pull us back.
Experience has equipped us to trust our instincts, but it has also amplified our self-awareness and self-doubt, causing us to second-guess ourselves even when we know we’re right. Life becomes a balancing act filled with big ideas, profound realizations, and ambitious dreams, yet we often feel stuck by the demands of daily life.
We convince ourselves that these feelings are merely signs of a “midlife crisis,” as society has labeled them. But the truth is, the world has it wrong. We’ve been fed misconceptions about what it means to be a woman in her 40s. This fierce realization of what we want from life isn’t a crisis; it’s a homecoming—a moment of awakening to the fact that life is too precious to waste on trivialities and outdated expectations of how we should live.
It’s not a crisis to seek more from this one life we have. The world simply needs to catch up.
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