My recent 39th birthday found me ruminating on age and how my perspective has changed greatly over the past 10 years.

For example, I used to think that crowns were only for royalty, until my gnashers started giving up on me.

There’s nothing more humbling than standing outside your dental surgery first thing in the morning with a tooth in your pocket and begging for an appointment to glue it back in before work.

Gone are the days of looking around when a situation calls for a grown-up, which still found me in my twenties scanning for an “adultier adult” than myself.

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I’ve officially reached that age when I see people I went to school with and think “Wow, they’ve got old-looking”, while mistakenly believing I look the same as I always have.

It’s difficult to acknowledge that my days of playing hide and seek are over; not because I’m too mature to play with the kids, but I’ve been informed by my own offspring that my joints are so noisy when I move, it sounds as though I’m “holding a clickety set of maracas” each time I take the stairs.

I’ve always encouraged my boys in the way of honesty, so it’s as well I’ve got thick skin, even if not literally, as they also told me that my face is getting a bit wrinkly.

I recently read a feminist article in which the author waxed lyrical about how beauty standards for women in western culture are “deeply rooted in paedophilia” due to a rise in the market for so-called anti-ageing procedures.

Despite my personal view that everyone should hold feminist beliefs, I have to disagree with this theory on the basis that sexual attraction at its core is primally based in notions of fertility, hence looking younger means not appearing as though every egg left in your ovaries isn’t gasping a death-rattle.

We can’t blame men for all of these beauty standards either, as I know too well that it is other women who tend to judge one another more harshly and openly than anyone of the opposite sex.

At the end of the day, if I want to have Botox injected into my face – and I do – it’s because I’m trying to preserve the face that I’ve grown used to seeing in the mirror my whole life and I will not go quietly into that good night.

When I was turning 30 I experienced a bit of a crisis, worrying about leaving my twenties and any behaviour that could be excused by immaturity behind, but this time around I feel ready to embrace a new decade of my life with enthusiasm and lean into my “cailleach era”, as I’m now referring to it.

The word cailleach comes straight from the wild heart of our Irish folklore, referring to an ancient old woman, a wise crone, or sometimes a downright formidable hag.

The cailleach is the legendary matriarch of the mountains and mists, known for stirring up storms and wrapping the countryside in mysterious fog just for the craic.

To embrace your cailleach era is to gain the ability to scare off anyone with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and a well-placed curse – which admittedly I have been doing for years, but only now find it to be socially acceptable that I’ve got grey hair, or “wisdom whisps” as my da would call them. Wrinkles are just another part of the uniform.

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As my people-pleasing tendencies are fading with my youth, I heartily agree with the view that your forties are like going back to your teenage self, only you like yourself now and aren’t afraid to tell people to get lost.

It could simply be that as oestrogen leaves the building, so does your patience – and this turns your ‘maybe I care’ dial all the way down to ‘absolutely not’. But I’ve found embracing my inner wench to be an oddly enjoyable experience.

We all know people who are more concerned with their physical appearance rather than their character, when it’s the latter that could do with a makeover, so I’m trying to strike a happy balance between getting healthy and feeling good about myself, while not turning into a hard-nosed aul cow towards the younger ones, whose turn it is to bask in the glory of their youth.

Incidentally, if you’re a man and you see a woman over 40 looking deep in thought, you should know that she is probably just feeling her chin for hairs.

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