I have an IPod. I drink $5 frappy icey blended coffee drinks. I wear funky t-shirts with a chick on it and I cut my hair short and dye it red. I want a motorcycle, a belly button ring and a tattoo. I am 43 years old.
When did I become a cliché? I find myself talking about "finding myself" and wanting "me" time. I always thought these women in the Lifetime movies who turn 40 and leave their husbands were fiction and ridiculous. Now, I find I am one of them.
I'm not sure when it happened. I've never felt my age at any time in my life. As a child, especially a teenager, I was always mistaken for years older than I was. Old soul, I've always said. Now, it's just old and tired.
Turning 40 always seems to be the key to the mid-life crisis thing. I waited a little longer. At 40, I was too busy being suicidal to realize that a crisis was going on. No one explained that that's part of it.
Women should get a handbook at 35 that's like the one our mothers gave us for explaining "that time of the month," only it should be called "that time of your life." This one would explain that as you near and pass 40, your hormones freak out and you pretend you're just fine. You'll do and say things without realizing it. Oh, and you'll cry uncontrollably and without warning or provocation pretty much every day. You'll alienate your husband - and probably won't care. You'll just be glad he's avoiding you and snarl at his sidelong glances. You'll be exhausted all the time and you'll hang on to your emotional life by your fingernails.
If you're lucky, somebody will tell you about menopause and premenopause and perimenopause and all the other types of pauses that come on. If you're not lucky, like me, you'll go through two years of crazy before you start recognizing yourself in TV commercials starring washed-up nighttime soap actresses.
I dug the insomnia, though. Boy, I've never gotten more done than when I only slept three hours a night. So much can be accomplished at 4 in the morning when the phone's not ringing and your husband is asleep.
I also never understood those movie characters in their 40's who suddenly find themselves in love with some dark, handsome man who mysteriously appears in their life, just as they become disillusioned by their marriage. That's cliché checkpoint No. 2.
I fell hard. The only thing I missed on the cliché checklist was that he wasn't 20. He was younger than me but by a respectable amount. We at least knew the same bands and he never said, "you were alive then?!" We'd survived the '80s - me the early part, he the latter. And we both grew up on "Star Wars."
He told me that I was brilliant. Wow. I mean, wow. It didn't hurt that he was handsome in a dark, moody way (okay, another cliché point). He not only rocked my world, he spun it on its equator and I'm still trying to realign the north and south poles.
Oh, the other missed cliché point is that he couldn't have been less interested in me romantically. Friends, sure, Colleagues, absolutely. Romance, oh, look at the time. And he was involved. With a woman, thank god. In the movies, they always leave their wives, lovers, girlfriends for the menopausal woman who looks like a cover girl. In real life, I'm about 40 pounds away from cover girl and, even if we both were single, he still wouldn't date me. I'm over the crush now (well, mostly) and we've become friends, of which I am glad. I think maybe that's something the women in the movies should try, that way, you get to keep him in your life and not let him wave to you as he drives off in his sexy car into the sunset.
Stay tuned for the next hormonal blaze of emotion and bitterness!
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