I didn’t know I was middle-aged until I wrote a book about sexy moms

When I published my debut novel (“The Band,” from Atria/Simon & Schuster) this year, I unwittingly found myself in an accidental field experiment on whether motherhood is synonymous with “middle age.” A few months prior, I was at a toddler’s birthday party when my husband casually referred to me and all the same-aged women in the room as “middle-aged.” Being 39, I told him the joke was not funny. After a brief poll around the room, all the other husbands and dads agreed: Late 30s was definitely too young to be deemed “middle-age.”

Maybe those men were just better trained to fear their wives’ fury than my own man, or maybe they were biased. After all, every woman that I knew in that room did the conventional thing and married an older guy — some by just a handful of years, a small enough of a gap to warrant having seen the same movies in high school, and some by a lot, enough to raise uncharitable questions about whether “old sperm” was a thing that they should be concerned about, seeing as children were the future and all. So by this logic, if the younger wives were middle-aged, that could only mean their more advanced husbands (in years, at least) were in danger of being at old age’s doorstep. Even so, I chose to believe them. I thought I was safe.

But then my novel — which features my fictional doppelgänger as the narrator, who finds herself in a situationship with a Kpop boy bander multiple years her junior — came out, I discovered that in fact, some people automatically assumed that the mother in the book was also middle-aged.

The first time it happened, it was in print. A journalist had interviewed me over Zoom about the backstory behind “The Band,” and our conversation was the kind that felt like it was between old friends, rather than total strangers who got introduced via a publicist. She was an author herself; also, a woman, and assuming that she didn’t have any fancy Zoom filters or high-tech ring lighting going on, looked approximately in the same age group as me. We chatted effusively about everything from situationships (love them/hate them) to our favorite bands (N’Sync, BTS) and day jobs (professoring, psychologizing, writing) to using prophecy as a plot device (to emulate both the Bible and Shakespeare). Her article, when it came out a few weeks later, reflected the depth and breadth of our conversation along with all the highlights — everything I had hoped for — but one thing that caught my eye was the mention of the middle-aged psychology professor at the center of the book. This was news to me. I had no idea I had written a book about a woman who was halfway to the grave.

Despite spending the last four years writing, editing, and promoting this baby, the fact that one of its main characters (whose voice, profession, and other demographic labels were largely my own) was already in middle age felt like a revelation — albeit not necessarily a good one. The closest thing I can liken it to is the adult equivalent of finding out that Santa isn’t real or that the tooth fairy just threw your baby teeth in the bathroom trash can after paying you market price for them. It threw me into an existential crisis that started with me going back to my bone-broth regimen (for the collagen, all the well-preserved women of TikTok tell me) and ended with me hungry and asking ChatGPT “What is the definition of middle age?”

Keep in mind that I make no references or clues to my protagonist’s actual age in the novel and only mention, in passing, her school-aged children, who just so happened to be the same ages as my real children. (As they say, all writing is autobiography.)

So I thought that maybe this was a one-off. I moved on with my life and my book promotion, wandered away from my commitment to slow-cooking chicken feet in my Instant Pot for its collagenic properties, and figured that I wasn’t really middle-aged. I comforted myself with reminders: I still got carded for buying alcohol at the grocery store! (At least when I didn’t have my children with me). I still got randos DMing me across my socials! (At least whenever I posted material that didn’t involve books or husbands or kids). I could still fit into the short-shorts I had since college with my alma mater scrawled across the butt! (Although now I have just enough shame to only wear them to bed and not in public, where other women — my age or not — could judge me).

But then, during another interview, it happened again. The second time I heard the reference to the “middle-aged woman” at the center of the book — much to my shock and awe — was in person. During an author panel at a yacht club, the bookseller interviewing me and another novelist expressed her surprise that the “middle-aged” mom in my book was so driven by sex. I, in turn, expressed my surprise that this was a surprise to anybody.

I looked around the room at the audience. Based on my cursory and non-scientific snap judgment, it looked like most people there were my age; a good number of them were older, as at least one had explicitly pointed out to me during our taco bar lunch earlier that day. I asked them if they stopped caring about or talking about sex after college, or their 20s, or whenever it is when a person transitions from being a young person or generic adult into “middle age,” whatever that is. I stopped just short of asking them about their own sex lives because I still wanted them to like me enough to buy my book.

Afterward, when I returned to my separate life as a social psychologist and mother myself, I wondered: Is motherhood itself synonymous with middle age?

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Here’s why it matters: As I teach my undergrads every semester in the Psych of Prejudice class they’re required to take, ageism is real. By that logic, it’s no stretch to unpack the many negative connotations of “middle-age,” and to be automatically labeled that because one is a mother is a social liability of motherhood that nobody is talking about, but maybe we should. Because here’s what else comes with that: the association between motherhood and all the other things we — myself included — historically associated with aging, like an absent sex drive, a declining openness to experience, irritability and moodiness.

I grew up across various neighborhoods in China, Puerto Rico, and American cities across the Midwest, the South and the West Coast, and I don’t remember knowing any sexy moms. Maybe women just aged faster back then, before Instagrammer mothers who could pass for the same age as their teenage daughters invaded our feeds and told us that anything was possible, especially with the right gym equipment/plastic surgeons/plant-based diets/Korean skincare products. The only time I came close was once in the fifth grade, when my own mother elicited shock and awe from my classmates when she showed up to pick me up from school early in a green velvet dress and face full of makeup.

“That’s your mom?!” a boy I was madly in love with asked me, clearly impressed. He was probably thinking of his mother, who wore her grays prematurely and her clothes breathable and loose-fitting.

“Yep,” I replied, smug for the first time that year as the new girl in school already in the comedogenic throes of puberty. But then in the months and years that followed, that green velvet dress disappeared, never to make an appearance again, and instead got replaced with muumuus, as comfortable as they were shapeless. I didn’t think much about it until several years into my own marriage, when my husband would make the oft-repeated joke that if I ever started wearing muumuus myself, we would never see another wedding anniversary. I’d laugh and remind him that I like my outfits uncomfortable and spandex-ridden, partly to keep him on his toes and partly because my self-esteem is unstable so I could use all the help I could get, particularly in the form of attention from strangers. But also because I believe in the mom who still relishes being seen for herself and not just as an extension of what she can do for other people.

As I approach my 40th birthday — which might soon usher me officially into middle-age-dom myself — I’m comforted by the oft-cited finding that a 40-year-old woman (and mother) usually has the sex drive of a single (and childless) 18-year-boy. In this climate, few stats give me more hope for the future.