to be nearly forty and feel like I'm only just getting started!

[MenacingDennis]

Does anyone else feel like this? I feel like my life is truly coming together, I have a husband who I love, two beautiful kids, a newish career that I really enjoy and hope to do well at. My teens and twenties were not so happy, full of self doubt and uncertainty, doing work that I hated and in the wrong relationships. It's all good now, but sometimes I struggle with the feeling that once you hit your forties the best is sort of behind you. That's rubbish though isn't it? Can the best still be ahead?

Excellent to see lots of other women who are happy to be fortyish, and not buying into the whole 'your life is tragically past so buy your Oil of Olay/Botox/Stairlift/Coffin package now' marketing crap that's designed to make you feel bad so you spend money. It alarms me how many women genuinely let themselves be conned into this kind of thing! My sisters-in-law keep making remarks about Big Birthdays and parties as though I will need something to take my mind off the horror of turning 40 next summer, and are clearly baffled that I'm not sharing their concern. (Little do they know I will be a new first-time mother (all going well) by then.)

Congratulations Hardcheese, and no way weejimmy have you left it too late! I have been giving this more thought and just feel that I wasted too much time when I was younger worrying about (what now seem like) relatively small things and I need to spend the next forty years (because I'm fully intending to make it to 80 at least!) not doing that. And when I'm 80 I'll laugh that I once thought that 40 was old. I think it's just that mismatch between how you feel inside and, well, how you look! Which is not old, of course. Just . . . a little more mature. One of the even better things is that I've always liked older men, and now my husband is older. So I like him even more.