I am 43 years old.
Not old. Not really.
And yet—recently—I’ve started to feel old.
Not in a dramatic way. More quietly.
Like a thought that keeps returning.
I catch myself thinking:
Time to slow down.
Which is slightly absurd, considering I have a three- and a five-year-old.
It didn’t start with just one thing.
It’s a combination.
My body changing.
Friends who are younger.
The quiet ways I’ve started thinking about myself.
And then – somehow – a certain type of books finding their way to me at the same time.
Last year, I picked up reading again. Easy ones at first – crime, detective stories. The kind you can’t put down. But then something shifted. I began noticing that many of the books I read had older people at the center.
In The Thursday Murder Club series, a group of retirees solves crimes.
In Remarkably Bright Creatures, there is Tova.
In The Correspondent, again – an older woman.
And in Fresh Water for Flowers, a woman not even that old, but already living as if she is.
They are not background characters.
They are sharp, observant, alive.
And somehow, reading about them made me see myself through that same lens.
But alongside that, something else has been happening.
I am 43. I have two small children. I had them at 37 and 39 – not exactly by careful timing or planning, but by how life unfolded. For most of my life, I trusted my body without question. It simply worked. The infertility years were the first time small cracks appeared in that trust.
And now, in my 40s, it feels different again.
In the past year, I’ve gained weight.
I feel tired.
I don’t quite recognize myself.
I know moving more and eating better would help tremendously. And yet I find myself in a loop:
I’m tired → I don’t move → I feel worse → I eat badly → I feel worse.
It’s simple. And not simple at all.
A few days ago, something small made this very clear.
We were outside with kids and just having fun and playing. There was a long jump area which my kids loved.
They asked me to try.
In my head, I knew exactly how.
Run. Push off. Stretch. Land.
I had done it many times before. Albeit many years ago.
Except—my body had forgotten.
I jumped. Landed too close.
Kept moving forward.
Ran out of the sandbox.
And finally fell, face-first, onto the ground.
My kids ran to me.
“Mom, are you okay?”
I was fine.
But something shifted.
Because the version of me in my head and the version of me in my body – they are no longer the same.
I also have friends who are about ten years younger than me. They joke about my age. “You’re the old one.” We laugh. But somewhere along the way, I stopped hearing it as a joke. I started agreeing. And then – quietly – living like it’s true.
At the same time, I find myself drawn to a slower kind of life.
Gardening.
Quiet routines.
Simple days.
The kind of life I see in the books I’ve been reading. It feels peaceful. And then I remind myself:
I am 43.
This is not the end of something.
It’s the middle. Maybe even the beginning.
I don’t have a career. Not really. I was 28 when I started thinking about having children. And I made decisions based on that. I didn’t apply for certain jobs. Didn’t take certain chances. Because I thought:
I will be pregnant soon and have to stay at home for a few years so I’d better not take up a new job just now.
So I stayed in something safe.
But years passed.
Now I have children. But I also see clearly that I need something more. I need work that feels like mine. Something with meaning.
Recently, at the gym (a new habit – one month in), I listened to a podcast about aging.
They discussed a simple question:
If you could choose the age at which you die – what would it be?
And the answer was: you wouldn’t choose.
Because the real question is not how long you live – but how you live. If you are healthy, engaged, connected – why would you want it to end? That stayed with me. Because I realized something uncomfortable:
I am not living a life I would want to repeat forever.
Which makes me wonder:
I am 43.
I feel old.
I act old sometimes.
But maybe the real question is not whether I am getting old.
Maybe it’s this:
Why have I decided that I already am?