Fortysomethings: Why are we Generation Confused?

One day we’re normal and reasonably functioning members of society. The next we’re neurotic, raging paranoids who don’t know if we should be congratulated, commiserated with or just humanely locked up out of sight in a nice, tasteful Mrs Rochester loft conversion. Congratulations: it’s our fortieth birthday – or the ‘Big FOUR-O’, as everyone likes to tell us in deliberately loud stage whispers with appropriate hand signs. They wouldn’t like anybody not to know how grotesquely old and mockable we are. Welcome to the scary Big Person’s World.

It’s made more confusing because being in our forties isn’t what it was. Thirty years ago when our parents were the same age they seemed to know exactly what was expected of them and to do it much better. They didn’t see Middle Age as a death sentence but as an opportunity to get down and dirty with their herbaceous borders and to save wool. It was their turn to pass on the baton to the next generation – not to hang around Top Shop and scare teenage customers into thinking they were store detectives.

The problem is that, today, we lack convincing role-models and no one’s quite sure what acting your age at forty is any more. Is it about constantly re-inventing yourself like Madonna? Is it about still buying enough CDs to personally keep HMV solvent? Is it about feeling that shop assistants are ruder and that graffiti artists should at least learn to spell ‘fuck’?

Blame the sixties. Blame the ‘have it all’ eighties. Blame everyone’s rising expectations. Blame greater equality. It’s not really surprising that we’re the generation that can’t decide if we should be wowing them in the office or concentrating our efforts on being good parents – a conflict of interests that can lead to hoping no one notices that our shepherd in the school Nativity is wearing an unwashed John Lewis tea towel.

Because to be a fortysomething now is, literally, to be everything. We’re parents, step-parents, parents of second families, singletons, co-habitees, grandparents. We’re battling with babies, Bratz-crazed teenies and moody teenagers. We’re working 24/7. We’re being told we can still wear unsuitably youthful clothes and enjoy the White Stripes. We’re still having lots of sex of course – as befits the generation that likes to think it put the Joy into it. In fact, we’re behaving in a thoroughly confusing and embarrassing way to both a younger and older generation. It’s not surprising they’d much prefer it if we did some proper housework and home maintenance, as is our true destiny, and stopped making those funny movements while humming Coldplay songs.

Of course, few forties have intentions of passing on any batons yet. Though this isn’t to say that we can’t see the attractions of having long, restful, non-child-oriented holidays that don’t involve ours going down a flume in a Center Parc in February 1,894 times. And there are unquestionably things we know by our forties – about life, love, death and the correct plural of phenomenon – that make those in their twenties and thirties seem positively callow in comparison.

Middle age? Mid-youth? The beginning of wisdom? The beginning of botox? Most of us would just say plain bloody knackered actually and leave it at that.

All we can do is try not to behave too disgracefully and to act our true age, which as we all know is a perpetual eight (according to our parents), the new thirty (according to marketing departments) or at least ninety (according to our children). Er, enjoy.