Aging is a beautiful motherfucker.

Grandma and the kids making homemade spaghetti for Sunday dinner, 2023

Never have I been happier than in my forties. But also, never have I been more stressed out.

This decade is funny that way. The older I get, the more secure I become; in who I am, who I want to be, and what I expect from myself, relationships, and life. I’ve realized I don’t have to tolerate other people’s - or my own - bullshit anymore. I’m polite, gracious, and forgiving, but I’ve finally learned that this is my life, and I get to choose who is allowed to exist inside it.

Somewhere around forty, an old drunken mantra from my twenties resurfaced.

“I do what I want.”

My ghost is running through the streets somewhere in the early 2000s, wearing pink hibiscus flip-flops, slamming a Jager bomb at a dive bar in my favorite pink Abercrombie polo and a microscopic denim skirt, shouting those words at some exasperated boyfriend trying to drag me home before last call.

Only now, it means something different.

Less reckless rebellion. More confidence. More ownership. More permission to honor the four-year-old Fancy Nancy inside and be who I really am.

As I edged out of my thirties, I started thinking about all the things I had always wanted to do but never did. And when I looked into my children’s eyes, I saw not just my reflection, but the reflection of the people they were becoming, watching me carefully to learn what was possible for their own lives.

So, I took a deep breath, whispered “fuck it” into the universe, pushed myself past fear, and started doing them.

I always wanted to write, so I wrote a book and published it. Not nearly as easy as it sounds, but I was determined to see it through.

I’ve traveled all over the world, but somehow had never made it to the Bahamas, so we went. We brought the whole crew and had the best time.

I wanted to stop migrating and find a forever home, so we are moving.

As I look back, I know I’ve had a beautiful life. Not a perfect one, of course. There have been wrong turns, grief, dead ends, heartbreak, and moments when I wasn’t entirely sure who I was anymore; lost in adolescence, between two worlds in post college young adulthood, and lost again in early motherhood and babyland. But for the most part, I’ve loved deeply, traveled widely, built a family I adore, and somehow ended up married to a man who still feels like home after all these years.

And together, we’re raising five — yes, five — of the most extraordinary kids I know.

It all sounds great, right?

And it is. But here’s the thing no one really tells you about your forties: even the beautiful life you spent your whole life building, has large pockets of its own brand of heavy.

This season of life is full in a way that is both wonderful and completely exhausting. There are children who need rides, advice, money, reassurance, snacks, clean laundry, and emotional stability at all hours of the day. Marriage needs time and nurture, a home needs maintenance, careers need dedication to sustain, friendships attention to hold onto, and a thousand tiny invisible responsibilities that somehow always seem to land in your lap.

And just when you finally begin feeling secure in yourself — when you finally feel like maybe you’ve got a handle on who you are and what matters — life shifts again.

Suddenly, you realize while you were spinning like a top, your parents have quietly grown old.

The people who once steadied you begin needing steadying themselves.

Phone calls become worrisome. Doctor’s appointments become more frequent. You start speaking in the language of medications and specialists and test results. You find yourself studying your parents’ faces for signs of exhaustion, fragility, forgetfulness, and even mortality.

One day you realize the people who made you feel safe are no longer invincible.

And there is something deeply disorienting about simultaneously raising children while slowly preparing to lose your parents. It feels, at times, like standing in the middle of life itself — one hand reaching forward, the other reaching back.

Maybe that’s why aging feels so overwhelming sometimes. Not because it lacks joy, or agency, but because it contains so much of everything all at once.

Love. Pressure. Gratitude. Fear. Achievement. Grief. Purpose. Exhaustion. Happiness. And the omnipresent knowledge that it won’t last forever.

All tangled together.

But maybe that’s what growing up actually is. Not buying a house or having a retirement plan but learning how to carry the most contradictory of things, and that you can feel deeply fulfilled while also fantasizing about disappearing alone into a dark hotel room for forty-eight uninterrupted hours.

So, if you’re in this season too — trying to hold together children, marriage, ambition, elderly parents and your own sense of self without dropping any of it — I feel you.

We’re all just doing our best, somewhere between gratitude and exhaustion, while time keeps moving underneath us.