I have an unhappy moment arriving this week. It is a day I have been dreading for several months [years] already, but it has arrived despite my best efforts to ignore it. I'm depressed to announce that I am about to turn 49, and my journey through the 40's is ending all too soon.

When taken in their entirety, the 40's have not been fabulous for me. Born in 1960, my 40th birthday was celebrated with the turn of the millennium. As I toasted the beginning of the fifth decade of my life, I had no idea what was ahead. I'm not talking about the colon blowing up, or the divorce, or my son graduating from high school and surviving without me overseeing his every moment.

All those things happened in this decade, and I was unprepared for any of it, it's true. But I have coped, more or less, and not only accept my life now for what it is, but I'm happy and at peace for the first time in many years. Life is, by and large, pretty good for me, [except, as my children will be the first to point out, for the whole being broke thing. :( ]

No, the part of being 40 that no one warned me about, and I must say, I would have appreciated some notice, is the part that I find hardest to take - you Fall Apart. The name of this malady to which I refer? Over-40 Syndrome. Boys and girls, I am not joshing about this. When people tell you that once you hit 40 it's a downhill slide from there, they are not kidding. I would call it more of a freefall, but without the compensating thrills.

It starts small, with little changes that are so subtle, at first you don't even realize what is happening. You can't drink caffeine after 5, then 4, then 3, then breakfast. Sudafed becomes Vivarin, and you will be an insomniac if you take it after noon.

Your memory is not what it used to be, especially when trying to recall things like why you walked all the way upstairs, or what you were looking for in the garage. Or correctly identifying the kid you need to yell at. [Some days I'm lucky I remember my own name, to say nothing of them.]

Your body parts begin to play this bizarre game of hide and seek, where they aren't where you left them. Suddenly, the clothes that looked good yesterday now simply accentuate what has moved south. Or out. (For the younger set who are deluding themselves that diminutive mammaries will not so suffer, I have a flash for you. Who knew what you thought you didn't have could suddenly show up in the wrong place?)

As you move through the 40's, the problems get more pronounced. My joints and muscles and bones are almost 49 years old, too, and they want me to know it, Every Single Time I Move. If I do any little activity out of the ordinary, suddenly I am a mass of aches and pains in places I didn't know about before. (And frankly, if I didn't need to know about them previously, I'm not thinking I need to have anything to do with them now, either.)

Worst of all, though, your vision, which once worked so flawlessly you never thought about it, goes downhill rapidly until you are incapable of sight except in extreme lighting conditions. For awhile there I thought that light bulbs were getting dimmer, but it turns out that the low lighting is in my eyes, not the lamps.

I understand that I am not alone in this wellspring of misery. I have heard (and seen) my friends struggling with the same realities, and they appear to be as confused about it as I am.

We go out to lunch once a month, a group of friends, and suddenly, glasses are being passed around because no one can read the menu any more. We have serious, and intense, discussions about which are better, reading glasses or bifocals. And some of us have passionate opinions on the topic, for heaven's sake.

I don't know about men, because I missed out on the whole growing old together thing[which may not be so bad after all - it's bad enough watching myself fall apart, I'm not sure I really need to do it in stereo,] but women usually realize they have reached a Certain Age when they look in the mirror and find their mother staring back at them with a shocked expression. From what I have heard, that is a bad moment for most women. I have escaped that particular vision due to being adopted; instead, I look in the mirror and think, who the heck IS that, and what has she done with my face?

It is an odd juxtaposition, to feel 25 inside, and look 50 on the outside. I am still gobsmacked every single time I look in the mirror and find the older me looking back.

I was surprised, when I expressed my dismay to my own mother, who is a truly lovely 82, to be informed that she still feels 50. It was disconcerting, I must say, to realize that at some point in the way distant future [okay, that is also a delusion, but I am okay with it, so leave me alone,] I would actually look back on 49 as the time when I was still young. Because from my angle, it is looking positively geriatric, and I simply do not understand how I got here so soon.

I realize, given that I have a 24 year old son, feeling 25 is probably a stretch, and I may need to bump that up to 30 soon. My baby will turn 18 on her next birthday, and I do understand, intellectually, that has to mean that I can't be as young as I used to be. But I don't understand how 49 arrived so soon, so unexpectedly. I am now one step away from being 50, when you can't avoid being classed as middle aged, no matter how hard you work to maintain the youthful illusion.

I am hoping that, like with most things, the dreading of it is worse than the actual fact, and once it happens, I will be comfortable for awhile again being a young 50, instead of an old 40. I hope that when 50 actually happens, it will be a fun and fabulous decade, filled with the good things of life.

But in the meantime, I am going to hang on to 48 until the last possible second. And when 49 arrives, I will be 49 forever, at least in my mind, until the calendar turns my page for me in 2010. If I could make a visit to the Wizard of Oz, I would ask to turn the clock back and be 30 again [see, I'm making progress already.] In the meantime, I will click my heels together three times, start shopping for my red hat, and show the world that 49 can be fabulous instead of frightening.

Yikes.