When I turned 40, my mother gave me a birthday card with an illustration of knights jousting and a message that said "Welcome to the Middle Ages."
Frankly, I was offended. That's a card you give to someone turning 50, I thought. The 40s are just some sort of pre-game warm-up.
Does that sound like a typical baby boomer response?
At the time, our daughter was still in preschool and my husband and I were juggling several different jobs. Now our daughter is applying to college and we're still "multi-tasking." After a prolonged youth spent avoiding activities that made me sweat, I've added marathon running to the mix.
Marathoning at midlife may be my version of the red sports car. Or it may be a way to remain fit to enjoy my 70s, when I may be semi-old and finally able to retire.
Or you might just say it's a baby boomer thing.
The 78 million baby boomers -- Americans born from 1946 to 1964 -- continue to challenge traditional notions of religion, spirituality, social activism, politics, art, intimacy, fashion, sports and, too often, good taste.
This is not a conventional group. Some of my boomer friends are first-time parents in their 40s, and graduate students in their 50s. We're also an old subject, one that's getting older each day. It's hard to pass a week without hearing some official in public life opine what the aging of the largest-ever generation will mean for this country.
Will we entertain second, perhaps third, careers? Will we stay at home or move into senior communities? Will we continue to play club lacrosse ... or strain the health care system in other ways? Will we go back to school? Can we be drafted into volunteering? Will we pile onto cruise ships? Will we need to keep our day jobs well into our 70s?
All of the above, say Mary Elizabeth Hughes and Angela O'Rand, Duke University scholars who studied the population group for their 2004 report, "The Lives and Times of the Baby Boomers," part of a study funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and Population Reference Bureau.
Next to its size, the only definitive thing about this generation, they say, is that it's the most diverse generation the country has known. Born into a world forever altered by World War II, boomers inherited, encountered and redirected social change. Defined by a sustained surge in the annual number of births, the generation even surprised the world by lasting for 19 years.
