The other side of the hill...

image from here

I look around me and I am surrounded by subtle signs of being about to turn 40:

The ever increasing furrows in my brow,

The 4 growing children rampaging through my house,

 The people mover in my driveway that ferries us to weekend sporting events,

Thoughts of career paths less travelled, and what the heck am I going to do when I grow up?

The fact that I eat dinner by 6 and go to bed by 9pm most nights,

The wondering who I really am.

 I commented to a young whipper snapper of 21 at work the other day that I only have one friend that’s almost my age (4yrs older) and most of them are a good ten or more years older than me.  I recently had quite a lot of fun at a 60yr olds birthday party (see I even blogged about it here).

 To this I got a raised eyebrow look followed by a look of pity and she said “Oh, wow that sucks, it means all your friends are going to die way before you!”  Well.  Isn’t that just lovely, mutter mutter... kids these days... Thank you very much, I now have a mental image of myself alone in a rocking chair with many cats and a collection of funeral dates on my calendar.

I think that the thing that possibly gets me the most about these signs of turning 40 is that I’m not even bloody close to 40 in chronological age. I’m only 26 damn it! Somewhere along the line I boarded a time machine and skipped to the future. I mean does working as a casual between babies at the same retail outlet for the last 12 years constitute a career?  Nope, didnt think so. I pretty much skipped the whole career thing and jumped straight into marriage and babies. People tell me I still have time, but the thought of going back to uni when the kids leave just seems impossible and too far away. Besides, by the time I actually do hit 40 I will probably be much too busy playing bingo down at the hall with my friends.

 My grandmother decided that she was not long for this world when she turned 65 and promptly started dressing like a stereotypical granny and not doing much of anything anymore because she was too old. She lived to 95. I sure don’t want to spend 30 years of my life waiting around to die.

I guess this crossroads of life moment comes from the having already achieved pretty much everything I set out to achieve in life, short of a nice cruise through Canada and Alaska on that pretty looking boat that is anyway –see I’m being old again, where are my dreams of piss ups in Paris like most people my age?

So what do you do when you’ve done it all? I think it might be time to create me a bucket list and start crossing those suckers off – or maybe instead of the typical things to do before 40, I should do a things to do AFTER 40 – just to make sure I still have a reason to live when I really am over the hill hey?