On the Edge of Turning 40

In sixish weeks, I’m turning 40. It’s just a number, right? I’ve never been the type to get worked up over age. Maybe it’s because I was always the youngest growing up. I was the last to get her license, the last to turn 18, the last to turn 21. It’s funny how your attitude shifts from “finally!” to “already?”

Turning 30 didn’t faze me. I laugh along with the “getting old” jokes among my friends. Even after experiencing the kind of loss that permanently rearranges your relationship with time, I’ve still seen my birthday as a reason for celebration. I’m acutely aware, painfully aware, of how fortunate I am to wake up to another birthday, another season, another year. 

But 40 is sitting differently.

It’s an awareness.
A quiet weight.
A deep inhale before stepping into something unknown.

As this milestone approaches, I can feel the tectonic plates of my life shifting beneath my feet. Slowly, subtly, undeniably.

Maybe it’s because my 30s, at a minimum, can be described as a total lifequake. Maybe that’s why I feel compelled to write about this? And maybe that’s why this series, simply called Forty, feels important. Necessary. Almost like a breadcrumb trail to remember how things started. And I hope, in ten years, I look back and say– that was one hell of a decade.

39 Set the Stage for Turning 40

Around this time last year, I had big plans for 2025. If you remember, my word of the year was “create.” I really wanted to expand my ONEHOPE business and give-back opportunities; I wanted to launch a podcast and, perhaps, even start my book.  However, the reality of postpartum life, a demanding career, and raising two young children had other plans.

Going from one child to two stretched me in ways I wasn’t expecting. The emotional bandwidth required. The logistics. The energy. The identity shifts. A newborn on my chest. A six-year-old needing reassurance and connection. A husband experiencing fatherhood for the first time. A body still healing. A brain still foggy. A job that doesn’t pause just because life inside my home expanded.

Sleepless nights, followed by 8 AM soccer games or corporate presentations. Moments when I know I have a million things to do around the house, or want to work on my blog, or ideate over the podcast that never got off the ground, but I’m nap locked, albeit by the sweetest baby.

It’s the demanding, consuming, full-time doing of it all.

I didn’t hit every goal. I didn’t stay as consistent as I hoped. I didn’t grow in the straight-line way I had mapped out. Instead, I found myself growing inward, quietly, subtly, almost invisibly. Learning to adjust expectations without self-judgment. Learning to give myself credit for the things no one sees. Learning where to soften and where to stand firm. Learning that sometimes survival is an accomplishment. But I already know that, don’t I?

It wasn’t the year I expected. And yet, maybe that’s exactly the point. Maybe it’s what I needed.

Entering My Grief Season

It’s that time of year– where my grief calendar goes into overdrive; the one my body always remembers, almost as fluently as my mind. As I approach the sixth anniversary of Matt’s death, I feel the familiar hum in the background, the emotional fog, the subtle ache, the shift in my nervous system that I’ve come to know so well. Grief has its own seasons, its own cycles, its own muscle memory. It doesn’t ask permission; it just arrives.

And even though I am eternally grateful for everything I have now, my husband, my children, and the life we’ve built, I still grieve everything I lost. That we lost. It’s that living in the “and” that I’ve come to know so well. 

That duality of joy and ache is part of why 40 feels so significant. I’m not just crossing into a new decade; I’m crossing into it after rebuilding an entire life. I look back at when I turned 30, and how much has changed in a decade. I travel back in time to that 30th birthday party on Hanover Street. We danced and sang so hard, I ended up with laryngitis for the following two weeks. Well worth it. I never could have predicted what the next decade would bring; that I would be sitting here, ten years later, writing about grief, loss, widowhood, and finding love again. It’s still mind-numbing. And yet, it’s the reality: a decade that seems to have flown by so rapidly that I remember exactly what I was thinking and feeling right before that birthday; and yet, it feels like it was five lives ago.

Meeting New Versions of Myself at 40

At 30, I married Matt, after what felt like approximately 100 years of dating (it was 5.5 years to be exact).

At 32, I was pregnant and ready to welcome our new baby into this world.
At 33, I became a widow and a solo mom.
At 36, I met Paul and learned how to be in love again.
At 38, I remarried.
At 39, I welcomed another baby and stepped into a new version of motherhood.

And now, on the cusp of 40, I’m realizing how many times I’ve had to meet a new version of myself, especially over this last decade.

Forty feels like a checkpoint.
A moment to pause, look around, and ask:
Who am I now? Who am I becoming? How am I impacting this world?

I’ve thrown in the towel trying to predict the future;  I don’t know exactly what it will hold. I’d be lying if I didn’t share some of my anxiety around the things we don’t plan for. When you’ve gone through the unbelievable and surreal experience of losing someone so integral to your being, it’s hard not to feel jaded; to plan without fear that everything will fall. To worry that everything you’ve built will crumble again. And yet, at the same time, there’s so much I am looking forward to as we continue building this chapter of our lives.

The Journey Ahead

This series, 40, is my way of stepping into this milestone.
Of peeling back layers.
Of noticing the shifts.
Of telling the truth about postpartum, motherhood, grief, identity, work, and womanhood as one woven, complicated, beautiful whole.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be writing about:

• Why turning 40 feels both expansive and scary
  
• How postpartum eight months out is revealing my capacity and identity
  
• How grief still moves through my body in cycles and seasons
  
• How the year’s unexpected paths are shaping me
  
• What I’ve learned about work, ambition, and motherhood in this chapter
  
• And how many versions of ourselves we get to become if we’re willing to keep opening
  

If you’re in a season of transition, standing at your own threshold, I hope these posts meet you gently.

If that’s you, I’m glad you’re here. And if you’ve been with me through many chapters,  thank you for walking into this next one with me.

A little over six weeks until I enter the next decade- in the words of my son, “let’s go.”