Nothing says midlife more than a text like this after a girls’ night out: “Here’s that recipe and a link to that hoover I was telling you about.” The Instagram algorithm has been putting variations on this joke in front of me for weeks. It knows me and my ilk far too well.
I just spent a few days with a group of women almost exactly my own age. We’re schoolfriends, known to each other for almost three decades. We all turned 40 during the Covid lockdowns. Our celebrations were limited to Zoom calls and painstakingly curated video montages. For years we had planned to take a trip to mark the collective 40th birthdays. Covid pushed it down the line and then pregnancies and family commitments saw us boarding a plane to the south of Spain to celebrate the milestone just the three years late.
We agreed on four days in a beautiful villa outside Malaga, all organised by our tenacious leader with a toddler at home and a vision board populated with images of sun loungers, pools, tapas and post-7am REM cycles. Of a group of 12, eight made it to Spain. Not bad going, we thought.
We kept catching ourselves as the embodiment of the joke. We swapped recipes and air-fryer recommendations and HRT successes. The holiday WhatsApp group was alive with steam-mop recommendations and reminders about magnesium supplements. We whiled away an afternoon considering the pros and cons of Botox – none of us have taken the plunge – versus LED masks (two have made the purchase and at least two more are considering it). A recommendation of All Fours, the Miranda July novel about a perimenopausal woman who abandons her life, was eagerly noted.
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There are nine children between the group who made the trip. We dissected the ins and outs of bedtimes, bowel movements and tantrums. Chats and dinners had a fluid movement of Mams dipping out for a night-time video call. Husbands and partners delivered chillingly late bedtime updates. We collectively encouraged abdication of guilt and responsibility for events occurring almost 3,000km away.
At the airport we indulged in the age-old Irish custom of speaking as Gaeilge to form our own little smug communication club as we discussed sex, relationships and “scannáin gnéas”
The last time we travelled together like this was for hen parties in our 30s. Our text catch-ups were full of wedding excitement and cost breakdowns for the willy straws and watersports. Ah the folly of youth, planning an event involving a wetsuit after a night on the tiles. In our 20s, we were all talk of travel, boys, post-work drinks and feral nights out.
We were the last cohort of teenagers to experience those formative years without the internet, mobile phones or social media. If we had the technology to text back then it would have been all Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet but also, come to think of it, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet – the former brought homework pains and the latter brought our lord and saviour Leonardo DiCaprio and an enduring soundtrack. Blur versus Oasis, boys who looked like Kurt Cobain and getting the better of our parents were also high on the agenda.
In Spain we talked about our parents. We worried about them getting older and reminisced on the few that are already gone. We fretted about the housing crisis. We compared the traits of Millennials and Gen Z. We wondered what the future holds for Gen Alpha. We discovered that several of our party are still wedded to printing out boarding pass. They remember a time before the infallibility of smartphones and are taking no chances.
At the airport we indulged in the age-old Irish custom of speaking as Gaeilge to form our own little smug communication club as we discussed sex, relationships and “scannáin gnéas”. I’m struck that it was only now, at this big age, that we felt adult enough to have such conversations. A flight delay drew instant worries about getting home before bedtime. We felt like teenagers again as we laughed about our relatively early nights in the Spanish villa, and hooted when our least “online” friend referred to us as “millenniums”. I observed a group of women, probably in their early 30s, almost certainly a hen party, and wondered how much older and wiser – or less wise, depending on the parameters – we looked. In the queue for the plane I heard one of my girls chatting about bleeding radiators. While waiting to board, our tenacious leader made an online purchase. Because what is life without a steam mop recommended by a friend?