A heartfelt reflection on turning 39, motherhood, ageing, exhaustion and finding meaning in ordinary life moments.
BY 39, your body becomes a WhatsApp family group. Everything pings. Your knees crack when you stand up, your back sends passive-aggressive reminders after sleeping wrong, your hormones behave like they are contesting in an election – chaotic, dramatic and impossible to reason with. Even your stomach has standards now.
At 25, I could survive on instant noodles, iced coffee and pure delusion. At 39, dairy is a calculated risk. One wrong bite and my body responds like I have committed a personal betrayal.
And yet, strangely, this is also the age where life itself starts getting louder. Not clearer – louder. Because 39 sits in a strange middle place. You are no longer young enough to believe you are invincible but not old enough to stop pretending you may still “get it together” soon.
This is the age where your children are growing up while your parents are growing old, at exactly the same time.
In the morning, I remind my son not to leave wet towels on the bed. By afternoon, I am reminding my mother to take her medication. Somewhere in between, I forget why I opened the fridge.
Motherhood at this stage feels less like parenting and more like running an underfunded government agency. Someone always needs something. One child is hungry even though they just ate. Another is emotionally devastated because I gave her the wrong chicken part in the chicken rice – a crisis apparently worthy of a national inquiry.
There are school forms, sensory meltdowns, missing socks, unfinished homework and at least one person yelling “Ammmmaaaa!” every seven minutes like it is a legally required alarm system.
Meanwhile, I am secretly Googling whether random chest pain means stress, hormones, indigestion or my final destination.
Nobody talks enough about how motherhood changes when you start ageing too. When you are younger, exhaustion feels temporary. By 39, exhaustion has moved in permanently and contributes nothing to rent.
And career? That is another hilarious scam adulthood sold us.
When I was younger, I imagined 39-year-olds as composed women who drank green juice, owned matching storage containers and understood investment portfolios. Instead, I still panic every time my editor says, “I need to talk to you”, as if I have done something wrong in the copy.
Even health becomes deeply humbling at this age. Medical check-ups now feel like exam results day. You walk into clinics bargaining with God over cholesterol readings.
Suddenly everyone around you has a health story. Someone has hypertension, someone discovered a slipped disc from sneezing and someone’s metabolism simply resigned without notice.
And then there is sleep. At 20, sleep was optional. At 39, sleep is a luxury wellness retreat my children refuse to sponsor.
But perhaps ageing itself is not the tragedy we think it is. Maybe the real shock is realising how temporary everything has always been.
At 20, life feels endless. At 39, you start understanding time differently. You count moments now. How many more years before your son stops reaching for your hand in public? How many more family dinners before life rearranges everyone? How many ordinary mornings do we actually get before they become memories we ache for?
That is the terrifying thing about ageing – not wrinkles, not grey hair and not suddenly making sound effects every time you sit down. It is love. Because once you deeply love people, you become aware of time in the most painful way possible. You realise nothing stays. Not youth, not energy. Not health. Not parents. Not even versions of yourself.
And maybe that is why people become softer as they age – or stranger. Sometimes both. Because life eventually humbles everybody.
The ambitious girl becomes a tired mother reheating coffee three times. The strong woman learns strength is not loud. The independent person discovers vulnerability anyway. And somewhere along the way, you stop chasing perfection because survival itself becomes sacred.
So here I am. Thirty-nine. A little softer around the waist and significantly less tolerant of nonsense. Emotionally held together by caffeine, sarcasm and calendar reminders. Still anxious. Still healing. Still Googling symptoms I should probably ignore.
But also wiser in ways younger me could never understand. Because ageing is not really about losing youth; it is about losing illusion. You begin to see that life was never meant to be conquered; only lived. Messily, loudly and imperfectly with people you love. With laughter in between the fear. With grace for the versions of yourself that did not know better.
At 39, I no longer want a perfect life. I want a meaningful one. A life where my children remember feeling safe with me. A life where my writing made somebody feel seen. A life where I laughed loudly, loved deeply and did not spend every year waiting to become someone else.
Realising the point of life was never to stay young; it was to stay alive – even when your knees crack, your metabolism betrays you and the world feels frightening and fast.
To still find joy in hot tea, noisy children, unfinished conversations and ordinary days. To understand that growing older is a privilege denied to many.
Perhaps the real sign of adulthood is this: You stop asking whether you have become successful and start asking whether you have become kind.
So, yes, I am 39, terrified, grateful and slightly bloated but still here – still laughing, still Pottu on Point.
And this Sunday, I turn 39 a little more knowingly.
Happy birthday to me.
Hashini Kavishtri Kannan is the assistant news editor at theSun.
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