“Oh, how I remorse not having worn a bikini for your complete yr I used to be 26,” Nora Ephron famously wrote. “If anybody younger is studying this, go, proper this minute, placed on a bikini, and don’t take it off till you’re 34.” If any geriatric millennials are studying that and bristling at the concept that they’re not match to be seen partially clothed in public, maybe they’ll take consolation in the truth that our idea of center age has shifted fairly considerably within the 20 years since Ephron wrote these phrases.

The oldest millennials at the moment are 43, so it’s not like having to return to phrases with growing old is a brand new affliction for us. But I used to be amused to learn an article in The Instances of London lately, entitled “Assist! I’m about to achieve my ‘millenopause,’” from a feminine author who was about to show 36. It was a curiously self-loathing piece, which appeared to purchase into the right-wing press’s view of us as immature and self-obsessed. “Millennials at the moment are the most important era, and our legacy is… what? Boomeranging to dwell with our mother and father? Staying in shared properties into our forties? A declining fertility price? Burnout tradition?” she writes, including, later: “We’re so infantilized that I really feel as if I’ve skipped straight from newly graduated to middle-aged.” That is adopted up by a personality assassination by a member of Gen Z (although, at 27, you’re pushing it, love) through which we’re referred to as “embarrassing” and “self-absorbed.”

I got here away feeling compelled to defend my era, who, as ever, bear little resemblance to the media stereotype of us. Sure, it’s true that financial hardship has been considerably infantilizing. I don’t really feel like an actual individual a number of the time—I can’t drive, I don’t personal a home, and I appear to exist in a perpetual state of chaos. And but the actual fact stays that I’m an grownup: I’ve a job, and an accountant. I’m somebody’s mom. There comes a time the place you simply have to simply accept maturity, whether or not the coat suits or not.

It’s true that geriatric millennials have needed to revise the standard markers of maturity, akin to marriage with kids. We’re settling down later (if we accomplish that in any respect), shopping for properties later, and having kids later. The Pope thinks we’re selecting pets over having children, however everybody I do know is both a father or mother, weighing up whether or not or to not turn into one, or attempting to work out the form their life will take in the event that they don’t select to procreate. After I wrote a e-book, The 12 months of the Cat, a few time in my life once I was on the cusp of creating this significant life choice, a number of older ladies stated to me that they admired the truth that I had given it a lot cautious thought. “We didn’t actually give it some thought,” they stated.