Every cultural script told me this birthday was supposed to feel like a crisis. It has, so far, felt like something closer to relief.
Turned fifty this week, a birthday I had genuinely, actively been dreading for the better part of the past year, absorbing, I think, considerably more cultural messaging than I fully realized about exactly how a woman is supposed to feel crossing this particular threshold, and I have spent the days since, somewhat to my own genuine surprise, feeling not the dread and crisis I had fully braced myself for, but something closer to unexpected, almost suspicious contentment that I keep waiting to collapse and have not, so far, actually collapsed.
I think it is worth naming honestly just how much specific cultural weight gets loaded onto this particular birthday for women specifically, in a way I do not think gets applied nearly as heavily to men crossing the same numerical threshold, a whole genre of articles and films and casual social conversation treating fifty as some kind of definitive marker of decline, invisibility, the beginning of a long, quiet fade rather than simply another year passing the way every other birthday has, in my own actual experience, always turned out to be.
I spent a fair amount of the past year genuinely bracing for that specific narrative to hit me the moment the actual date arrived, and instead, the week has unfolded considerably more like an ordinary week than anything resembling the crisis I had fully prepared myself to weather. I went to work. I saw friends. My daughter made me a genuinely lovely, slightly lopsided cake that made me cry for reasons that had almost nothing to do with the number of candles on top of it. None of it felt like the beginning of any kind of ending, despite how thoroughly I had convinced myself, across the preceding months, that it inevitably would.
I think part of what has actually helped, reflecting on it properly this week, is a specific, deliberate choice I made a while back to spend considerably less time consuming exactly the kind of cultural content that reinforces this particular narrative about women and aging, fewer magazine features about “ageless” celebrities working suspiciously hard to look considerably younger than fifty, fewer casual jokes at dinner parties about women my age becoming invisible, a deliberate curation of my own media diet that I do not think I fully appreciated the cumulative effect of until this specific birthday arrived and simply did not produce the crisis I had been braced for.
I called several friends who have already crossed this same threshold over the past few years, specifically to ask honestly how they actually experienced it, curious whether my own unexpected contentment was some kind of fluke or whether it reflected something more genuinely common that simply does not get discussed nearly as openly or as often as the crisis narrative does. Nearly all of them, once we got past the initial, slightly performed acknowledgment of the cultural script we are all apparently supposed to perform around this specific birthday, admitted something remarkably similar to my own actual experience, a birthday that, once it actually arrived, felt considerably less catastrophic than the cultural narrative surrounding it had led them to expect.
I think there is a genuinely interesting piece to write properly about this specific gap, between the loud, dominant cultural narrative about what turning fifty as a woman is supposed to feel like, and the considerably quieter, less publicly discussed reality that a meaningful number of women I have actually spoken with seem to experience instead, and I am planning to actually write it properly, once this week’s birthday haze has settled and I can approach the subject with a bit more analytical distance than I currently have available, sitting here still slightly disbelieving my own unexpected contentment.
For now, though, I am simply going to sit with this particular week exactly as it has actually unfolded rather than the version I had spent the better part of a year bracing myself to feel instead. Fifty, so far, feels considerably more like relief than crisis, and I intend to enjoy that relief for as long as it genuinely lasts, without spending too much additional energy anxiously waiting for the crisis I was promised to eventually arrive late.
My daughter, watching me blow out this year’s candles with what she later described as a suspiciously calm expression for someone turning fifty, asked directly whether I was actually alright, clearly expecting the crisis the culture around us has taught even a fourteen-year-old to anticipate on her mother’s behalf. I told her, honestly, that I was better than alright, and watched her process that answer with a kind of genuine, slightly confused curiosity that made me newly grateful for exactly the kind of honest conversation this particular birthday has apparently opened up between us this week.
I think that specific exchange, more than anything else from this whole unexpectedly content week, is what I want to actually hold onto going forward, a chance to model for my own daughter, directly and honestly, that the cultural script she will inevitably absorb about what turning fifty is supposed to feel like for a woman does not have to be the only, or even the most likely, actual outcome. She has decades before she needs to test that lesson against her own lived experience. I am glad, this week, to have given her at least one clear, honest counter-example to whatever the wider culture keeps insisting she should expect instead.
More from this author at Caitlin Moran, prat.uk.