There comes day, when you realize Holy Shit! I am about to turn 40! It’s a big deal, it is a big deal to most of us. It is a really big deal to someone who buried her mother before her 40th birthday.

Yes, I was starting to walk past the mirror and I say , “Hey, that woman looks like me if I was old”. And then, remembering that it is my face despite internally still feeling around twenty-five years old. I started to cry, a lot. I cried not because of my crow’s-feet, age spots, and so on but because I was going to die. One day!

So, I did the reasonable thing and started planning an escape from reality. My husband and I plus child like to get away for a month at a time and pretend we live somewhere fabulous instead of in the suburbs of the Midwest (reality).  This is typically a joint effort except when you are getting ready to turn 40!

My husband said, “I’ll go anywhere”. I have many, many flaws but I am not indecisive, by night fall it was the Greek Islands or the Amalfi Coast. My heart over ran with gratitude for being able to make this wonderfully tough decision and it was a past trip where I fell in love with Rome and Capri that had us heading to the Amalfi Coast.

Here are the reasons maybe you should head there too:

1. You know how you spent the equivalent of years worrying about things that never happened? Me too. I worried about people who now I don’t even have their phone numbers, men I dated that now I can’t remember their last names, and the opinions about my life from people who didn’t necessarily rock at their own. And, a million other worries courtesy of being slightly a hypochondriac, a fascination with crime dramas and reading way too much news. Well, that’s why I was crying. I wasted too much time. My place was the Amalfi Coast, it’s a great place. Find your place and stop wasting time.And I knew about time and still wasted it. Then, I stopped crying because Hello! I was wasting more of it!
2. You know what is almost as great as going on vacation? Planning VACATION. It’s adult Christmas morning with visions of sugar plums dancing in your head replaced with visions of no packing of lunches, grocery shopping, or work.Let’s not forget toes in the sand, the sound of the waves, and the FOOD. Oh, how I love to find great food and a restaurant over the water even better. This girl is not cooking, it’s VACATION. You get a mental escape and we all need one.
3. Yes, I know turning 40 doesn’t get everyone a pass for a month away. It didn’t get me one, my actual birthday was during a month that my husband and I are swamped at work and around the same time as my daughter’s birthday. On my actual birthday, I celebrated at a quiet dinner with some close friends. But, I had something to look forward to and it makes all the difference.
4. Day to day life is a lot. You start forgetting why you married your spouse, how to really laugh (the kind from the pit of your stomach), and you forget who you were before adulting gave you those wrinkles and dark circles. That’s why God invented credit cards and hotel in every city. If you can get one day, take it! You are worth it and you will not get that time back. And while you are relaxing, you may just remembering that YOU ARE WORTH IT!
5. As our boat pulled up to Amalfi,  I snapped the photo of the town and behind my sunglasses there may have been a tear in my eye from being overwhelmed that I got to be 4o and have this experience with my people in this incredible place.

In the evenings, we would sit on the steps of the Duomo (the church) in the middle of town and enjoy a gelato. On those steps, I realized that our days in Amalfi in our tiny apartment where we hung up our wet clothes underneath lemon trees to dry, and did not once turned on the television that it wasn’t about flying to Italy instead it was about getting to a place where you can slow down long enough to enjoy the simple things like the sweetness of turning forty.

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