I remember my friends’ parents turning 40. It seemed impossibly grown-up. Like, oh, there you have a house with a yard and a family and your kids are getting ready to go to college and you have thoughts and opinions about grown-up things and have insights and blah blah blah.
Tomorrow, I turn 39 and I’m kind of freaked out about it. The difference between being 15 and being 25 is so vast. It’s easy to say that you obviously are a different person at 25 than you are at 15. But, after that, there doesn’t seem to be any more great universal change. Bad things happen. Good things happen. And they refine you. But there doesn’t appear to be any more grown up you get once you’re there.
This is it. The pudding is set.
That really freaks me the fuck out. This is it. This is what me as a grown-up is.
I can’t decide if I was hoping for something better or not.
Tiny Cat Pants 
my Mom & I had a similar conversation over Mother’s Day – that my generation are now the adults. And I don’t feel so adult very often.
I guess when I was a kid, I figured someone would pull me aside & hand me the keys to the doors with all the answers locked inside. But it turns out that key & the door don’t exist – and we’re all making it up as we go along – which is some scary shit.
I dunno, B. I look at myself at 40 and compare that person to myself at 15 or 25, and I was more grown up at 40. It wasn’t that I had answers where I hadn’t had them before; it was that I recognized that not having all the answers was both normal and not scary. And I did have more insight into some things than I had had at 25, because I’d had more experiences and had taken the time to mull them over. I don’t know that I “felt like a grownup” then; I don’t know that I do now. But I could see myself as a person in the world just like all the other people — and that, to me at least, was growing up.
At the same time, I know for a fact that being 40 (or 60, or 80) doesn’t mean that a person necessarily stops growing and changing. And that’s what makes it fun.
I think in each decade I’ll realize what a dumbass I was in the preceding decade. I think the pudding is set on my interest in housekeeping, though, which is basically nil.
There is comfort in the pudding being set, though; you accept some things about yourself that maybe you didn’t before. (and who wants to be soupy pudding forever?) It doesn’t mean “no more change for me, it’s nothing but this until senility sets in!” It means “this is how I am and barring a major event (which is likely to be traumatic, so why should I want that) I won’t be getting a whole new personality. And that’s fine, because my personality is pretty good, though I’m going to keep working on refining things.” For me the focus after 40 is less “Let’s change ourselves!” and more “Let’s do stuff!”
Now here I thought this was going to be a “goddammit, there’s a giant crawdad on my porch and there are no grownups here to get rid of it so I’m just going to have to figure out how to do it myself.” post. Which would be totally what I would be thinking in such a fix.
That crawdad is actually in my kitchen on the window ledge. I’m pretty sure, judging by the weight of it, that it’s just the shed shell, but it looks pretty dang cool.