Intro:

They say forty is the new twenty.  Now I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I’ve found in my forty plus years that emotionally, there’s something to that.  I feel now like I am just really figuring things out and becoming the person I want to be.  I mean, does that phrase mean it’s okay to be a single and childless woman in her forties?  If that’s the case, than I would think there would have to be some success professionally and financially associated with it.  Does it mean that women in the forties look more like they’re in their twenties?  I would have to say not from what I’ve seen anyway.  Would it be okay to be a single, childless, unemployed, broke, overweight and uninsured woman in her forties?  I doubt that’s what they mean, but if you meet all of those requirements you would just be figuring out your life and your future, and in that way, forty is the new twenty applies to me.  So with the exception of a few gravity issues, a few wrinkles, and a few gray hairs, I feel like a twenty-something woman on the brink of discovering what she really wants and needs to be happy and successful, just like an arrogant, twenty-something, new college graduate should feel. 

If there is a way to figure out how I got to this point, I guess it would have to be count and label the gray hairs.  At this point I don’t have many grays, so I think I can still account for each one, maybe each 10, and how they got came to be.  For the sake of simplicity, I’ll just label them as one each.  I can’t explain the one white eyebrow hair though, that’s just weird.  I guess it’s the equivalent to the man’s ear hair, it’s just weird, I don’t like it, I keep yanking it out, it keeps growing back, and it serves as a constant reminder that I am, in fact, forty-something.