The Other Side of 50

I’ve been middle aged since I was a kid. I’m not sure why. I guess partially due to temperament and partially due to birth order. To my bat mitzvah party, I wore a woman’s structured black suit with shoulder pads and sensible heels, looking like a tiny executive rather than a 13-year old. I read Agatha Christie mysteries instead of listening to Top 40 radio. I got married and had kids young — most of peers were still dancing the night away in clubs while I was home sleep training my babies. My old soul has always been a mismatch with my chronological age. But now, I am finally turning 50.

“Age is just a number” people say about getting older, mostly in an effort to make peace with aging. But for me, age truly is just a number because the actual number has just never been relevant to who I am. To bring this home, in the past year I had both my hips replaced due to severe osteoarthritis. Everyone kept saying to me: “But aren’t you too young for that?” I literally never asked myself that question. Having hip replacements decades before most people made do perfect sense to me — I’ve always been on an alternate timeline.

Be the architect of your joy

And while I don’t typically give my age much thought, I’ve actually spent all year considering how to celebrate my 50th birthday. Because if the last four decades have taught me anything, it’s that you should never miss an opportunity to mark a milestone, yours or someone else’s. The specific number I’m turning doesn’t matter to me, but grabbing life by both hands, that does.

It’s a slightly weird birthday because I’ve known for a year that my husband would not be home to celebrate with me. He’s crosscrossing the country covering the World Cup this summer. My 50th birthday, our daughter’s 18th birthday, and our youngest son’s 16th birthday, all fall within the first wildly intense first week of the tournament. Knowing that he wouldn’t be here with me actually illuminated the first of a two life lessons I’m carrying into this (God willing) second half of my life: No one else is going to plan your joy for you. You need to be the architect of your own joy and invite people along to help you build it. So I’ve made plans throughout the summer to celebrate with family and friends around the country. I didn’t wait for people to read my mind to decipher what I wanted. I didn’t wallow that my birthday wasn’t going to be picture perfect. I took control of my destiny by figuring out the things that would fill me with happiness and then asked for help to make them happen.

Don’t forget to ask yourself what you want

I have spent the last decade wanting to write a book. Three years ago Cara Natterson and I wrote This Is So Awkward together and it’s work I’m incredibly proud of. But I knew that I had another book in me, one that expresses my singular voice. So I used turning 50 as a deadline to motivate me to write my next one. (Stayed tuned for Teenhood: Confessions & Lessons from the Trickiest Phase of Parenting coming January 2027.)

In truth, this book is symbolic of something bigger I’ve been thinking a lot about and discussing with friends: What do I want? I had a therapist ask me this recently and I looked at her in confusion. “What do you mean? I never ask myself what I want. I ask: What do my children want? What does my husband want?” Those of us who’ve spend decades devoting our lives to our spouses and children have the imperative to figure out we want for ourselves. The answer doesn’t come right away and putting it into action takes longer, even a decade’s worth of time in my case. But we all deserve to start by asking the question and seeing what bubbles up in response.

So for my birthday, to show I’m learning from my own lessons, I’m taking the day off from work to celebrate my actual age catching up with my old soul.

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