A Woman of a Certain Age

We got the US Census Survey in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and I dutifully sat down to fill it out. I printed my name in the boxes, last name first, and when I came to the space to fill in my age I very carefully and without hesitation wrote “38.” This would be fine, except that I haven’t been 38 years old for 10 years. What’s worse is that it took me a few minutes to realize that it was wrong. How could this happen? How could I just misplace a decade of my life? Memory loss? The dangers of multi-tasking? Teenagers living in my house?

I could have just chalked it up to a “midlife moment” and left it at that. But I was still curious. Why did THAT year lodge itself so firmly in my psyche? If my brain intended to make me feel younger, why not give me the benefit of the doubt and go back 15 years, or 20?

On second thought, no. I wouldn’t go back to being 28 again if you paid me. My thirties were a vast improvement, when my life  started to feel like it made sense.

Maybe everyone has a “golden age” when they have really come into their own. I’ve known people who felt they were at their best in high school. Others really identified with their years as single young adults—carefree, exploring. Some people felt like life finally came together when they were new parents, complete with diapers and baby vomit and sleepless nights. Was it possible that my golden age was when I entered midlife?

I did some reading. I came across a journal published by TIME Books in 2009 called Your Brain: A User’s Guide. It included an article called “Gray Hair and Wise Brains,” by Jeffrey Kluger. The article reports the growing conclusion by neurologists and psychologists that the brain at midlife is much more elastic and capable that we thought. He says:

“Far from slowly powering down, the brain begins bringing new cognitive systems online and cross-indexing existing ones in ways it never did before. You may not be able to pack as much raw data into your memory as you did when you were in college, and your short-term memory may not be what it was, but you manage information and parse meanings that were beyond you when you were younger. “

In short, you become wiser. I can’t wait to tell my kids.

Recent advances in brain imaging make this easier to see. When we learn something, our brains wrap nerve pathways with fatty sheaths of myelin. This myelin sheathing serves to insulate the nerve signals and make transmission more efficient. The more myelin sheathing, the more “hard-wired” the connection. Kluger cites a study showing that healthy adults had more myelin in the frontal and temporal lobes, where reasoning and “big thoughts live.” What’s more, “the quality of sheathing reached its peak at around 45 or 50.”

To top it all off, the temperaments of older adults change to match these new skills.  They become more comfortable with ambiguity and frustration.

We get wiser and more patient. This is all good.

So I’m feeling better about getting older. Maybe midlife will be my “golden age,” which is fine with me. But still, why 38? Maybe I’m being a little pedantic here, but I’m still wondering if there is some larger meaning in that age for me.

I thought back to what was happening ten years ago and couldn’t remember anything dramatic. I lived in the same town, the same house. I was married to the same person, still had the same four kids. So I dug out the Christmas letter we sent out that year to see if it I recorded some momentous event. Nothing stood out. We took some fun family vacations. Our oldest child started junior high and our youngest started preschool 4 days per week. I decided that year to start writing a book.

Oh, wait. What was that last one? Now it’s coming back to me. I was 38 when I took the first step toward my lifelong dream to write as a job. I’m sure it was no accident that it happened at the same time our youngest daughter was finally in school four days a week, of that the oldest was at an age she could reliably baby-sit. It was a small shift in the day-to-day life of my family, but a huge leap in the way I saw myself. That was the fork in the road that took me to the place I am today. I finished writing that first book about 18 months later, and put it in a drawer.  But then I wrote a second one, and started a company called I Am Story. That initial step brought me to today, when I sat down at my computer to write this post.

So yes, my 38th year was a good one, a marker for hope and intention and the beginning of good work. Not a bad place to hang out for a while.