Forty, Apparently: A New Year's Reflection from the Woman Who Swore This Wouldn't Be Her

My twin sister and I turned forty recently. Forty. As in, the age that used to sound ancient when I was twenty-two and eating pepperoni pizza at midnight without consequences. The age where, according to the internet, I should either be “aging backwards” or “entering my most powerful era yet.”

I am neither.

It’s the beginning of 2026, and here I am—overweight, overtired, overstimulated, and honestly a little over the audacity of everyone else online making life look like a minimalist candle commercial.

I have four kids. Which means I haven’t finished a thought uninterrupted since approximately 2012. My mornings start with my youngest sleepily looking for “mooommmyyy?!?” at 6:30am like she's afraid I've snuck out of the house in the middle of the night and never coming home. My coffee is reheated so many times it legally qualifies as a science experiment. And yet—somehow—Instagram would have me believe I should also be waking up at 5 a.m. for gratitude journaling, Pilates, lemon water, and a daily facial moisturizing routing followed by a full face of dewy makeup.

Sure. Let me just pencil that in between “pack lunches,” “break up sibling WWE match,” and “wonder where my personality went.”

When did this happen? When did I become the woman who needs to psych herself up to stand after sitting too long? The woman who sighs when bending down—not because it’s hard, but because it feels emotionally disrespectful? I swear I blinked and went from “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” to “If no one talks to me for ten minutes, I might cry from gratitude.”

I didn’t plan this version of forty. I thought by now I’d be… sleeker. Calmer. More put-together. Someone who owns matching pajama sets and a couch that isn’t held together by crumbs and broken promises. Instead, my body feels like it’s constantly buffering, my brain has 37 tabs open, and one of them is playing music but I can’t figure out which.

And don’t get me started on the overstimulation. The noise. The questions. The touching. The mouth sounds. I love my kids more than life itself, but if one more person needs something from me while I’m already doing three things, I may simply ascend into the ether.

Meanwhile, online? Oh, online life is thriving.

There are women my age drinking green smoothies, wearing neutral sweaters, and speaking softly about “alignment.” Their homes are spotless. Their children wear linen. They look rested. I don’t trust it. Someone that calm is either lying or has help they’re not disclosing.

I scroll and think, Am I doing this wrong? Why does everyone else seem to have figured out the secret to balance, health, joy, and aesthetically pleasing storage solutions? Why does my version of “self-care” look like sitting in my car in silence before going into the grocery store?

And let's not forget to eat enough protein, drink enough water, take enough steps (but not too many steps), track your fiber intake, carbs are important (but make sure they're the good carbs, not the bad carbs), watch out for food dyes...all while I work my 8-5pm job, get three kids up and ready and out the door for school, make it to sport practices, games and dance class on time after school, make a dinner that includes vegetables my kids will eat, make sure everyone is bathed (because we're coming up on puberty season in this house and the body odor is real...SO FUN!) and put everyone to bed.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat tomorrow.

But here’s the thing I’m slowly, begrudgingly learning as I drag myself into this new decade: real life doesn’t photograph well.

Real life is messy and loud and repetitive and exhausting. Real life is wiping counters only for someone to immediately spill something sticky. It’s loving your kids fiercely while fantasizing about a hotel room where no one knows your name. It’s wanting to be present but also wanting to be left alone. It’s feeling grateful and burnt out at the exact same time.

And maybe forty isn’t about having it all figured out. Maybe it’s about finally admitting that the pressure to do so is absolute nonsense.

Maybe forty is about realizing that your body isn’t failing you—it’s just carried you through a decade and a half of pregnancies, sleepless nights, stress, love, 5 deployments, 3 cross country moves, a daughter born with some special needs that required 99% of your time and attention, and survival. Maybe being tired doesn’t mean you’re lazy; it means you’ve been doing a lot. Maybe being “over it” doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful—it means you’re human.

As for the weight? The lines? The exhaustion etched into my face? They tell a story. Not a perfectly curated one, but a real one. A life lived loudly, imperfectly, and with a whole lot of responsibility on my shoulders. And maybe one too many tacos and margaritas.

So here I am, stepping into 2026 not with resolutions, but with permission. Permission to log off. Permission to rest without earning it. Permission to stop comparing my behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel. Permission to laugh at the chaos instead of constantly trying to control it.

I don’t know exactly how I got here. But I do know this: I’m still standing. Still showing up. Still finding humor in the madness. And if that’s what forty looks like—overweight, overtired, overstimulated, and still going—then maybe I’m doing better than I think.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to reheat my coffee. Again.