You had me right up to the end. Laughing out loud, saying "blessyoublessyoublessyoublessyou!!"

But then, a little too much crotchety, blinded old-biddie bitterness crept in. The real thing, not a reaction. You lost your humor. That last little part was yours and yours alone -- not the voice of a generation. Not representative of women like myself who, at 51, find delicacy, humor and heat amidst the "More" bullshit. To not be part of the "More" mind-twaddle is not equivalent to being part of "geezerhood"; that's an unfortunate leap that you made from one extreme to the other. Your choices are neither "Amazon" nor "geezer". The magazines are bullshit -- so be it. You're simply a person, here, alive, funny, likely with a slightly different bod and mind than 25 years ago. But to call that geezerhood? At best you failed your imagination and spirit. At worst you actually caved to the "More" mentality, just from the opposite end. Let it go entirely as something against which you push for self-definition. It's nonsense on both ends!!

...was leaving out some important details.

I read the sentence ending with "but I'm too tired to be young," and knew this article was meant for me.

After the drama and excitement of my 20s and 30s, my 40s were a real letdown, downright restrictive. I'm still feeling some of the effects at 53, but this decade is definitely better. [...once I got over getting that first letter, and the others, from AARP!!! How do they do it?!] For one thing, the health benefits of dark chocolate have now been documented.

I can only imagine what it must be like to have two small children at 47... Mostly likely, you'll feel less fatigued once your kids are older. Small children are so physically draining-- older ones psychically, but by then you're sort of attached to them.

Getting enough rest cannot be emphasized too much. If I could go back and change only one thing, I would have taken more naps, and I would have relished sleep more, instead of trying to avoid it. I worried too much about missing out on things... yet I was really missing out on one of the best curatives.

Jung had it right when he said each age had its tasks, and that when the tasks of one age were fulfilled it was time to move on to the next. It's so cool, because as the age brackets increase, the tasks sound better and better, so that by the end of your life you have individuated yourself, which I assume means achieved your particular 'youness' as a person. And this, to my mind, has nothing to do with outward achievement or gain. Certainly nothing to do with how your body looks, or how much money you have. I'm sure I'm not the first to note that those people who devote a lot of their time looking twenty years younger and living that way too just might be a little bit in denial, and just might be neglecting the tasks of the age they are living NOW in order to pretend for a bit longer that they are still as they were THEN. The troublee with this is that they won't be ready for the next transition, or the next. And denial can only last for so long anyway before it all comes crashing down.

Isn't the whole point of magazines to sell advertising? And didn't they work out a long time ago that the best way to sell to women is to make them feel like crap? So the wise woman avoids coming any where near those magazines unless she's having a really great day, or else wants to wallow in insecurity. I recommend celebrity mags - they're so comforting, if not laugh out loud hysterical often enough.

Finally, the writer had two kids when she was over 40? Sounds like she went for acting and living young with a vengeance. It's no wonder she's feeling exhausted now! If it's any comfort, everyone I know with two kids under five - myself included and I only have one - feels old and exhausted. The plan is, surely, that this feeling will pass.

Why must everyone insist that Baby Boomers are narcissistic as if it's something new in humanity? That "being forced to wait until our narcissistic parade passes by" is something entirely different from previous generations, or that our children and grandchildren and further descendants down the line of history will never be as concerned with their health, their looks and their ideas as this particular generation.

My mother wore flesh colored stockings, she wore hot dresses, she bought cosmetics, she tried to stay trim and tried to make herself look better and feel better. Was she a narcissist? She wasn't born between 1946-1964, so I guess she wasn't, even though the Baby Boomer generation is no different in that respect. It simply has more options. If my mother had accesss to Botox when she was 45 years old, you damned well better believe she'd have used it. She used hair dye. Did your mom or grandma dye her hair, wear dentures, use cold cream, curlers, get perms....or use amphetamines back when they were legal and called "diet pills"? If so, they're wanting to look and feel better has nothing to do with being narcissitic, as long as they weren't Baby Boomers. Your mama and your grandma's mama thought it was horrible what your grandma and your mama did to "stay young" but it doesn't matter. They weren't Baby Boomers. Only Baby Boomers use the latest technology, the latest medical advances, the latest cosmetic discoveries.. and they do it because they are narcissists.

The Crusaders? Those Europeans who tried to rescue the Semites in the Middle East so they could be converted to Christianity? Not narcissists. Just because they thought their ideas, their culture, their religion, even their hairstyles were better than everyone else's doesn't mean they were narcissists. Only Baby Boomers are narcissists.

There's never been a tonic or a potion sold to any other generation promising to restore youth, or prolong erections or strengthen muscles. There's never been a diarist chronicling the events of his generation because he thinks people are saying interesting things and doing things differently from previous generations. There's never been another generation in which the artists and writers and musicians thought they were iconoclastic and thought their new ideas about life and art were better than the previous generations. There was never another generation which wrote about its beliefs in politics, its views about war, its beliefs about the rights of others and congratulated themselves for moving beyond the prejudices and injustices of the past.

Nothing like that ever happened in Europe or America or Russia or the Balkans or Asia across the millenia, did it?... only in America. Only the Baby Boomers.

God, those Baby Boomers are so different and so narcissistic! The world will be so much better and people will be so less narcissitic when they die off.

(BTW, just an aside for all those Baby Boomers who might want to quote "Hope I die before I get old" from the song "My Generation" when they write about the excessive, exotic narcissism of their generation -- that song never even made the Top 40 in the United States. It peaked at Number 74 on the Billboard charts.)