Thoughts on turning 40

Come for the existential crisis, stay for the police car and Taco Bell cinnamon twists

I turned 40 last week, and I have some thoughts. The first thought is: Why am I even doing a post about turning 40? Nothing has really changed for me in the past year…I’m still freelancing, still living in the same apartment in Brooklyn, still traveling, still doing IVF with Rahul. By all accounts, turning 40 looks roughly the same for me as turning 39, 38, 37. And yet! Because it is 40, an age society has deemed A BIG DEAL, I have gotten a bit twisted about the whole thing. I wish that were not the case, as I am genuinely very happy with the life I have created for myself, but it’s true. I’m finding it harder than expected to disentangle myself from the (very much outdated yet still annoyingly pervasive) societal idea of what 40 “should” look like.

There is a glaringly obvious reason for this, of course. Infertility. Turning 40 while you’re going through IVF is a true gut punch. 40 is the age at which you have officially missed the boat on becoming a mother (or even just getting pregnant) in your 30s. 40 is also the age I was happy not to be when I started IVF at 36. “Don’t worry, you’re not even in your 40s yet,” my doctor reassured me back then. At 36, I was still considered “young” in the infertility world. I was fine. I still had time. “Your 40s are when things get extra tricky,” he said.

And now here I am. Three and a half years after starting IVF, 40 has arrived. Eight rounds, a few surgeries, and a million breakdowns later, and it still hasn’t worked. I am still not a mom. And I am still completely busted from the IVF process! In what can only be described as a hilarious twist of fate, or the universe just messing with me and Rahul, my 8th egg retrieval fell one day before my 40th birthday. This means I began the last day of my 30s unconscious on the operating table, and spent the rest of the day hopped up on anesthesia on the couch.

I can’t lie, I was pretty depressed on that recovery day. Somehow this tracks, I thought to myself. Of course I’m spending the last day of this decade consumed by IVF. But fortunately, the universe came through with an uplifting and much-needed reminder on my actual birthday. It all started with a trip to the Catskills. Rahul booked us a surprise Airbnb in Woodstock so that I could at least do something to celebrate my 40th (so cute). Yes, I still had to rest and recover, but as long as I had to be on a couch, at least it could be a cozy couch in the Catskills with a roaring fire, right? He picked up a nice bottle of Barolo and pasta ingredients at our local Italian specialty store to cook a comforting birthday dinner at our Airbnb, and we were on our way. It snowed on our drive, and we were listening to my favorite “global life” playlist, and I was starting to feel positive again. Fast forward to 7 pm in Woodstock. We were two minutes away from our Airbnb, literally two minutes, when we got stuck on a patch of black ice on the road leading up to the driveway. Our car, a Volvo SUV, does not have four-wheel drive, and we simply could not move. There was no grip. It was also too dangerous to keep trying, as we were very close to a ditch and didn’t want our car to tumble into it, obviously. So we called our Airbnb host to see if he had any local tips, and he told us to call 911. They are very used to handling inclement weather situations like this, he said.

That’s how Rahul and I found ourselves in the back of a police car on my 40th birthday, with our new friend Kevin (our hero) at the wheel. Kevin actually got stuck himself while coming to assist us, so he ended up calling a local plow guy to help both cars. The whole situation was a four-hour ordeal, but we ultimately made it out safely with our car intact, not to mention a new and deep appreciation for local rescue services. The new issue was: Where do we go next? It was 11 pm at this point, and the road to our Airbnb was still inaccessible…basically a skating rink. Our new friends told us we could park our car on the side of the road and walk to our Airbnb, and they would not give us a ticket the next day (lol). But it was a 22-minute walk on black ice in total darkness. Plus we had all our stuff. Hard pass on that! We decided to book a hotel and come back to assess the Airbnb situation the next day.

The only hotel that was still open was a Hampton Inn in Kingston, about half an hour away. We booked it, and spent the entire drive there talking about what to eat. We’d been munching on chips and Diet Coke in the car (every drive to the Catskills involves chips and Diet Coke), but other than that, we hadn’t eaten since lunch at 1 pm. We knew it’d have to be some sort of fast food, as my lovely birthday pasta dinner was clearly a dream of the past, and that’s when we saw it: Taco Bell. The restaurant of my youth. It would be a stretch to say I grew up on Taco Bell, but it’s not a stretch to say I ate a whole lot of it as a kid. It was another time! Fast food was fine! My whole family loved it! And here is where the symbolism cannot be overlooked. As I was sitting there devouring my go-to childhood order (a Meximelt w/o meat and cinnamon twists) for my 40th birthday dinner, I realized: Maybe this is the universe’s way of reminding me I am not “too old” after all. Maybe this is the sign I needed, the reassurance that I will always be young at heart. Maybe 40 really is the new 30. Or maybe the whole incident really was just the result of winter wintering. If that’s the case, whatever! Let me have this!

The point is, there is a lot of pressure around turning 40. As I mentioned above, I am genuinely proud of and grateful for the life I’ve created, so I was surprised by how much it impacted me last week. (The hormones I was taking probably didn’t help.) But thanks to my Taco Bell moment, I now realize I’m a whole lot younger than I think. Maybe even younger than I used to feel. We never did make it to our sweet Airbnb pictured above—ended up booking a different one that was easier to access—but I still spent the weekend by a fireplace in the Catskills processing this idea of reinstated youth. And I kept coming back to the Dylan line in My Back Pages: “I was so much older then…I’m younger than that now.” How true it is! I used to think that things had to happen on a certain timeline, but now that I’m older, I know better. Now that I’m older, I understand that you can’t control the way your life plays out, only your reaction to it. And there’s so much freedom in that. Freedom that feels a little bit unburdened. A little bit like youth. Big thanks to TB for the life lesson I didn’t want…but absolutely needed. Happy birthday to me :)