What I Wish I'd Known at 40 (Written at 44)

This is the post I would have wanted to read. I hope someone finds it when they need it.

I am going to write it directly, without the usual hedging, because the version of me that needed this post did not have time for hedging. He was 39, sitting in a waiting room, doing calculations. He needed someone to tell him the things that turn out to be true.

Here are the things that turn out to be true.

Your body will change, and that is fine

You already know this in the abstract. What you don't know yet is the specific texture of it: the back that announces its presence in the morning, the recovery time that is no longer measured in hours, the way that two consecutive bad nights require three good ones to resolve.

None of this is catastrophic. All of it is manageable with a degree of intention you will need to apply to your health that you might not have needed to apply in your thirties. The word I would use is deliberate. You need to be more deliberate: about exercise, about sleep, about what you eat and when, about the things that restore you versus the things that drain you.

I have written a lot more on the specific practical side of this. But the headline is: the body is capable, it just requires better maintenance than it did at 32, and the maintenance is worth doing.

The time anxiety is real and also manageable

You will run the numbers. You probably already have. I have written about the maths in some detail, so I will not repeat it here.

What I want to say is: the anxiety that comes from the numbers is not evidence that the numbers are bad. It is evidence that you care, which is a better quality in a parent than indifference. The anxiety can be felt, examined, and mostly set aside. It does not require resolution, only acknowledgment.

What helps: doing the things you can do. The health maintenance. The pension. The life insurance you should have sorted earlier (do it now, the premium only increases). The being-present-in-the-time-you-have rather than spending the time worrying about the time.

What does not help: the 4am version of any of this. The 4am version is not a reliable narrator. I have made a rule about not having important thoughts between 2am and 5am. It is imperfectly observed but the intention is useful.

The isolation is real, and you should do something about it

The particular loneliness of being an older parent whose friends have teenage children is something I wish I had expected. I didn't. I assumed my existing relationships would carry the weight of the new context, and they do, but they carry it differently than the weight of having someone going through the same thing at the same time.

I found some of this online. I found some of it in a library on Thursday mornings. Neither was what I expected. Both were worth finding.

Do not assume you don't need it. The self-sufficient version of yourself that got through the thirties on existing relationships and professional focus was operating in a different context. The new context rewards different kinds of connection.

Your relationship will need attention it didn't need before

Not because it is failing. Because the structure that previously supported it — the evenings, the unhurried time, the spontaneous decisions — is no longer available in the same form.

I have written honestly about this. The short version: the relationship doesn't fail dramatically, it erodes slowly, and the erosion is entirely reversible if you notice it and name it and spend twenty deliberate minutes a night remembering that you chose each other.

Twenty minutes. Phones in the other room. Every night you can manage it. This is not romantic. It is structural maintenance and it works.

The gift in it

Here is the thing I could not have told you at 39 because I did not know it yet:

The awareness of time that being an older parent produces — the visibility of the clock that younger parents may not feel with the same intensity — is not only a source of anxiety. It is also a source of something that I do not have a better word for than presence.

I know that the phase my children are in is temporary. I know this in a way that I suspect a 31-year-old cannot quite know it, because I have enough life behind me to have experienced the speed of things, to have noticed how quickly the specific texture of a period of life can shift from something you are living to something you are remembering.

This knowledge makes me stay still when Ellie wants to sit on the sofa and talk about something she has invented. It makes me carry Sam slightly longer than I need to when he has asked to be carried. It is not sentiment. It is information. The information is: this is happening now, and now is the time to be in it.

I would have told the 39-year-old version of myself that this was coming. I don't think he would have entirely believed me. He would have to find it himself.

You will find it too. That is the last thing I want you to know.