By Fine & Fortyish
I handed out hot dogs at 16. At 18, I was working the night shift at an inpatient psychiatric hospital, talking people off ledges, literally and figuratively, before I was old enough to rent a car. I’ve done customer service, marketing, car seat safety, and most recently spent my days (many of them during COVID!) as a healthcare worker.
In between all of that, I raised three kids. Ages 21, 18, and 16. Every job I took for twenty years was chosen around one non-negotiable: being present for them. Not because I was told to. Because I wanted to. Because I was a latchkey kid who came home to an empty house and a Nintendo, and I knew exactly what I didn’t want for my own kids.
So yeah. Jack of all trades. Master of keeping it together when everything around me was trying not to be.
And now? Divorced. Rebuilding. Forty-four years old and starting a blog because apparently this is my villain era and I am absolutely here for it.
Let Me Tell You Who I Actually Am
I was born in 1982. I graduated high school in 2000. If that means nothing to you, let me paint the picture.
I had a pager before I had a cell phone. I watched MTV when MTV actually played music videos. I survived dial-up internet, which if you’ve never heard the sound of a modem connecting, was basically two robots having an argument for 45 seconds before you could check your AOL. I watched 90210 and thought that was what high school was supposed to look like. I layered my baby doll tank under my fitted graphic tee, finishing off the look with a flannel tied around my waist. I knew every word to Regulators and also every word to Smells Like Teen Spirit and saw absolutely no contradiction in that.
I was a latchkey kid. Roamed the neighborhood. Drank out of garden hoses. The rule was simple: be home when the street lights came on. Nobody tracked me on an app. Nobody texted to check in. I just… existed outside, unsupervised, the way kids used to.
I knew life before social media. I also know life where social media controls everything including, if we’re being honest, my self-esteem on a bad day. I’ve watched the whole experiment in real time and I have thoughts.
The point is: I’m not new here. I’ve seen things. I’ve done things. I’ve survived things. And I have the particular brand of sarcasm and zero patience for nonsense that only comes from living through the 90s with your eyes open.
The Part Where I Get Real With You
Here’s what nobody tells you about spending your entire adult life being someone’s mother, someone’s employee, someone’s wife: you get really good at taking care of everyone else’s life while quietly losing track of your own.
I didn’t fall apart dramatically. There was no single moment where everything collapsed. It was more like I just looked up one day, in the middle of a very ordinary Tuesday, and realized I couldn’t remember the last time I did something purely because I wanted to. Not because it fit the schedule. Not because it made sense for the family. Not because it was the responsible choice.
Just because I wanted to.
I’m 44. Perimenopause has entered the chat and brought a whole group of friends I did not invite. My metabolism has decided we are in a breakup and it is not being mature about it. My joints have developed opinions about activities they used to just perform without complaint. And somewhere underneath all of that, I still feel like the same person who walked into a psychiatric hospital at 18 years old and figured it out.
I just temporarily forgot to apply that energy to myself.
Why I Built This
Fine and Fortyish is not a “grow old gracefully” blog. I want to be very clear about that upfront. I am not here to help you make peace with disappearing. I’m not going to suggest you start wearing comfortable shoes and calling it a lifestyle.
I built this because I did look around the internet for women like me and what I found made me tired in a completely different way than perimenopause does.
Curated. Filtered. Unattainable. Content that was so polished it stopped being real somewhere between the ring light and the fourth layer of foundation. Women plastering on so much makeup they looked like a completely different person by the end of the video…and I’m supposed to relate to that? I’m supposed to feel better about myself after watching that?
Because I didn’t. And I don’t think you did either.
Here’s where I land on all of it: I wear makeup. I’m not anti-makeup, I’m not going to tell you to throw away your lipstick and free yourself or whatever. But at 44 I’ve crossed over into using it to enhance what’s already there, not to construct an entirely different face on top of the one I actually have. There’s a difference and it matters.
What I kept finding online felt less like community and more like a highlight reel designed to make you feel like you were doing everything wrong. Wrong skin. Wrong style. Wrong life. Not aspirational, just exclusionary. Like the whole point was to make you feel like you didn’t belong in your own decade.
That’s not what this is.
Fine and Fortyish exists because I think women in their 40s deserve content that makes them feel like enough. Not content that sells them a filtered version of a life they can’t touch. Real women, real faces, real routines, real talk. You don’t need to look like someone else to be worth showing up for. You never did.
That’s not me. I’m guessing it’s not you either.
This blog is for the woman who is 40-something and still feels exactly like herself at 28 when she looks in the mirror, right up until her knee makes a sound that was not there before. It’s for the woman who grew up on Looney Tunes and somehow still uses Bugs Bunny as a life philosophy. It’s for the woman who is navigating perimenopause and a changing body while still caring deeply about how she looks, how she feels, and what she’s building next.
It’s for the woman who has spent years taking care of everyone else and is now, finally, terrifyingly, excitingly, putting herself back on the top of the list.
I’m a jack of all trades, a mom of three almost-adults, a woman with a lot of nerve and a limited budget, building something for herself for the first time.
You’re in the right place.
What You’ll Find Here
Beauty and skincare — real talk about what works on skin in your 40s, what’s worth spending money on, and what is just a very expensive jar of hope in nice packaging.
Style — how to still look like yourself. Not your mother. Not your 22-year-old self. Yourself. The one who still has opinions about what she puts on her body.
Fitness and wellness — movement that doesn’t wreck you, habits that actually stick, and honest conversations about what is happening hormonally that nobody bothered to warn us about in health class.
Life and mindset — the stuff underneath everything else. Divorce. Reinvention. Starting over at an age the internet keeps trying to tell us is too late. Spoiler: the internet is wrong and also it wasn’t even invented yet when we were learning how to be people.
One Last Thing
I’ve spent my whole career being trained to take care of other people. Mental health patients in crisis. Hospital staff learning new systems during a pandemic. Kids in incorrectly installed car seats. My own three kids, every single day for twenty-one years.
I’m good at taking care of people. I’m rebuilding my ability to be one of them.
This blog is part of that. It’s me figuring out what this chapter looks like, in real time, out loud, with no filter and a solid WiFi connection (which, if you remember dial-up, you know we do not take for granted).
I hope you’ll stick around. And if any of this sounds like your life too, find me on Instagram, drop a comment, hit reply on my emails. Because the best part of building something like this isn’t the blog. It’s finding out how many women were sitting out there waiting for exactly this conversation.
Welcome to Fine and Fortyish.
Your best era isn’t behind you. It’s finally beginning!
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