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Yesterday I ran into a friend’s twenty-something child while in Target. When I told her I’m turning forty soon, she had the nerve to say as she patted my hand and gave me a wink, “But didn’t you know - forty’s the new twenty!”

Are you kidding me?

Tell that to my cracked knees, my arthritic hands, my graying hair, my sagging boobs.

“Oh yea, ” I retorted, cradling my Starbucks in one hand and a bottle of hemorrhoid cream in the other. “So what does that make you, a newborn?”

Forty is the new twenty only when you aren’t turning forty.

I don’t want to be forty. People say it’s great, it’s all good, they are so happy where they are in life that it doesn’t matter.

It effing matters.

There. I said it. Turning Forty Sucks.

Why Turning Forty Sucks: An Essay by A Menopausal Mom

I hate it that more than half my life ago I was in high school. Not that I liked high school; I hated it, too. But at least I had youth on my side when I was in high school. My eyes weren’t perpetually burdened by dark lines, and odd stray hairs didn’t pop up in funky places. My joints didn’t ache before it rained, and my hands were not wrinkled.

Why Twenty Was Good

My breasts, never large, were at least perky and cute, and my stomach, never completely small, didn’t contain this kangaroo pouch - the leftover remnants of two C-sections. I could hold my farts, most of the time, and that goes for my pee as well. Preparing for long trips didn’t make me want to OD on Valium, and I could stay up all night long drinking shots of anything and still look great (well, at least halfway decent) the next day.

I was young. I had life in front of me.

Now, seriously, what do I have to look forward to?

1. Menopause
2. Retirement
3. Death (That’s the end, folks!)

So I thought I’d make a list of the great things I can see about turning forty.

1. (There is nothing here)

Since I can’t seem to think of anything, I thought I’d make another list of things that are great about not being twenty.

1. I can buy booze now.
2. I can hold down a steady job.
3. I don’t have to date strange guys anymore as I try to find ‘my type.’

The rest, well, I liked.

I liked staying up all night, drinking shots of tequila while dancing around as though I were the hottest number this side of the Mississippi.

I enjoyed being stupid and dumb and ‘young.’

I liked knowing I could dream and dream and dream and maybe some of those dreams could come true - and that, even if they couldn’t come true, I had time on my side just in case.

Now, rather than dream I just want to nap. Like sands in the hourglass, as they say, these are the last days of my life.

I don’t have time left to write that great novel as an aspiring ‘young’ author. I don’t have time to make it big in Hollywood, even if i do go through extreme plastic surgery. And even if i do have time to become a doctor or a lawyer or some other high paying professional, I don’t have ‘time.’ I have children. A house. A family.

I no longer say, “This is what I want to do in my life.” I say, “This is what I hope for my children.”

When did this change?

So I have to do something extreme now, of course, to make up for it. To say, “Holy shit, forty IS the new twenty!”

I’m married, so becoming a cougar is out.

I’ve already run a marathon, so that is off the list, too.

Sky diving doesn’t thrill me, and quite honestly backpacking around Europe at my age seems, well, weird.

No, I have to think of something, and something soon. I only have a few months. I’m asking for your advice on this, folks. Please, tell me something I could do to embrace forty, to make me feel twenty again.

In the meantime, I’m off to waste hundreds of dollars on various lotions and creams that I hope will make me look, well, if not twenty then at least thirty-something.

Hey, that’s better than nothing!