Oh, Shit. I'm the Parent Now.

You always hear how your forties are so many things – you’re over the hill, this is your time to enjoy the life you’ve created before you retire. It’s the last hustle before the last gasp of productivity you have.

We don’t really talk about the reflection that comes with this decade. Your twenties are for exploration – those years of infinite freedom and limited responsibility where you can make mistakes, and most linger as harmless jokes shared years later over family dinners and drinks with friends, and the rest are the ones that guide you into better choices into your thirties. You forget that the first part of your twenties that you just graduated from being a teenager, and the last part you are a full-fledged thirty-year old with all the baggage that accompanies that title. It’s a tumultuous decade.

Your thirties seem to be the figuring-this-shit-out years. At this point, you’ve probably married and maybe had some kids, and that transition in and of itself is jarring. You still identify as that twenty-something, but in the moments you actually behave like it, your inner parent gently steps in to chastise you for knowing better. You’re a parent, for God’s sake. What are you doing? Not to mention the days it takes to recover from a single trip back to memory lane…Good Lord, why didn’t we need Pedialyte as a 20-something? A cheeseburger could have cured a morning’s hangover then, but you’re going to need a full day’s Netflix and Postmates from the couch and about two days’ worth of water to even be able to hobble to the bathroom. Your thirties are for learning these lessons, the most important of which is that you are not, in fact, young anymore. But you’re young enough, and so are your kids, and you sleep okay when you are able knowing that.

Then comes 40. It rarely arrives as a whisper. Like any major milestone, you see it as a new threshold, minus all the excitement that 16, 18, 21, and 30 brought. This one is full of both confidence and trepidation. Somehow you know that at the end of this decade comes “old age” – your fifties. Hell, you remember when your parents turned 40, and they were fucking ancient then. Is this the downhill slope? Surely not. Yet, here you are, taking baby Aspirin and cutting back on your salt intake, being responsible in changing your tires, pouring into your IRA, and registering your kids for their first high school courses. I’m not old, though – I still remember all the words to Biggie Smalls and can still recoil just at the memory of Jägermeister. All of a sudden, your favorite bands growing up are played on the local “oldies” station, an arresting moment that nearly jolts you off the road when you hear the first chords of Soundgarden on the radio.

What’s next in these chapters? In these moments, you look at your parents in such a different light, remembering all those moments from childhood but calculating how old your parents were then – realizing they were younger than you are now. The grace you exhale and give them abounds. Are you kidding me? They were me, and that age, and they had to deal with me? Those people were saints. We can only hope that our children have the same retrospective and give us the same grace.