“I wrote about my daughter finding my chin hair tweezers. I wrote about my husband forgetting my birthday for the third year in a row—not out of malice, but out of the mundane chaos of dual careers. I wrote about looking in the Zoom camera and not recognizing the tired woman staring back.”
There’s a moment in every 40-something woman’s life when she stops apologizing for the space she takes up. For Suzy, the beloved columnist and resident “real-talk” contributor for 40-Something Magazine , that moment came somewhere between a forgotten dental appointment and helping her youngest child navigate a panic attack before a math test.
“I’m not even the full sandwich—my parents are still healthy. But I’m the dental appointment generation. I schedule orthodontist for my son and a colonoscopy for my father-in-law in the same ten-minute work break.” Her advice? “Lower the bar to the floor. If everyone is fed and no one is bleeding, you’ve won the day.”
“We spend our 30s striving,” Suzy says, leaning back in her chair, a half-empty mug of coffee cooling beside a stack of laundry she refuses to fold until deadline. “At 44, I realized striving was just another word for performing. And I’m exhausted from performing.”