Baby Boomers want everybody to believe they’re redefining middle age. Sixty is the new 50, 50 is the new 40, 40 is the new 30. Were not aging – we’re learning how to count backwards by 10’s . . . Dead, 80, 70, 60, 50.

Everybody knows the baby boom started after the big one. That’s what they called it – WWII – the Second World War. Yup, those GI’s came back from Europe in waves and they had one thing on their mind – giving their wives the big one. And they didn’t do it just once. Next thing you know there are babies everywhere. The average number of children in a family back then was twice what we have now – which is 2.5. How in the heck do you have a half a kid. Is it stuck – didn’t make it all the way out? I can count backwards by 10’s, but I’m lousy at figuring fractions.

Anyway, the baby boom started after WWII, but nobody is quite sure when it ended. The bureau of statistics puts the boom years between 1944 and 1965. Just beware of the pecking order. The sixty-somethings think us young punks are just posers – that makes me a wannabe boomer. Really, they get quite touchy about it. They say things like, “I’m 60, I’m a real boomer! Just don’t label me middle aged.”

Not middle aged? Do you know anybody that’s lived to 120? I’m going to be fifty this year. I don’t think I’ll be seeing 100. Forty five- now that seems like a nice middle aged number. But living to ninety? Forty. That’s a good solid bet – most of us should make it to eighty. So forty, the new thirty, is middle aged.

I started asking people “What do you hate most about reaching middle age?” Guess what? Nobody hates it. Yeah, they all love being middle aged. More sex, no children at home, more freedom, no children, more money, no children.

Who are they all trying to kid? More sex? More sex? I can’t even stay awake to see Leno anymore. When are all these old tortoises finding the time to screw like young bunnies? It sure isn’t in the morning. It takes me at least an hour just to straighten up and walk without shuffling. Trust me, the cereal in my bowl isn’t the only thing that snaps, crackles and pops at my breakfast table.

No kids? Unless you’ve sold the farm and moved to a homeless shelter, chances are good at least one of your kids is living with you – again. They just keep coming back, kind of like the energizer bunny in reverse. After my daughter graduated, she moved six states away – for about six months. One day she called and said to me, “Mommy, I just want to be a kid again and have my parents take care of me.” I was forty-three. I told her good luck on that, I wanted the same thing but her grandma and grandpa weren’t buying it.

More money? Not as long as you have a child that breaths life. “Gee mom, I can’t make my rent this month. My car needs repairs and I can’t get to work without it.” Or how about this one – it’s my favorite, but you have to imagine the waterworks. “My dog needs an operation and I don’t have any money. It’s not fair. He shouldn’t have to suffer because I’m poor.”

The $500 dog needs orthopedic surgery for a genetic hip defect. It’s not bad enough they paid $500 for a defective dog when they could have gotten a healthy mutt from the shelter for 20 bucks. They also had to pay for the pooch’s vet check, it’s shots, to have it’s dew claws removed – whatever the hell those are, and to have it’s pedigree registered.

Can’t afford the dog, can’t make the rent, can’t fix the car, buy new tires, fill the tank, or pay the phone company. But they have satellite TV, GPS, and cell phones that take pictures, play music and surf the internet. They have computers, digital cameras and ipods, ‘cause those features on the cell phones aren’t really serious.

My daugheters have pedicured toenails and bikini waxes 12 months out of the year. We live in Northern Wisconsin – who the hell sees your toes or your bikini line when it’s 20 below zero? They pay more for their underwear than I spend on food and shelter. I know, I know – they have to look good in case there’s an opportunity for some action. Give me a break. At their age if they’re not married or shacking up, they’re bar trolling. At two a.m. nobody gives a crap if your toes are painted and your who-ha is neatly groomed beneath your Victoria’s Secret, lace-trimmed, butt-floss. And you can sure as hell bet they aren’t going to remember the next morning.

So that leaves us happy-to-be-middle-aged boomers with more freedom. Freedom to do what? Live our dreams, like in those investment commercials? Travel to foreign lands, dive the deep oceans and climb the highest peaks? See the pyramids? Get real! We’re all still working our backsides off just to keep the medical benefits. We’re taking Celebrex for arthritis so that we can move without wincing in pain. We take Viagra so we can still get a little action and we take Zocor to keep our cholesterol down so we don’t have a heart attack when we do. Without insurance, the cost of staying forever young would kill us!

I’m fifty – that’s not forty. At forty, I didn’t need glasses to read. If I had needed glasses when I was forty, I would still have been able to remember where I put them when I took them off. I could remember a lot of things at forty – names, places, phone numbers and words. No special words, just those ordinary every day words that I now find have completely disappeared from my vocabulary when I want them and then pop up at two am in the morning.

At forty I didn’t fall asleep in my chair after supper. I didn’t have to ration my lovemaking to once a week because at $10 a pop for Viagra more than that would break the budget. Of course at forty I wouldn’t have given second thought to the $10 toll – I’d have given up something else – oh say, eating.

At forty it didn’t take me a full hour to put on my face and do my hair. Let’s be honest, when you’re young, a pony tail, a touch of lip gloss, a little mascara and you look like a million dollar babe. At 50, without the full works you look more like a baby pug – all wrinkles and whiskers.

Oh yeah – I have whiskers. I remember that first time I found a three inch long, jet black hair growing out of my chin. I was looking in one of those 10Xs magnifying mirrors at the drugstore. I was mortified. It had probably been there for years screaming “Old Broad” to anybody who can still see without glasses.

I thought everything would be okay, this middle age thing wouldn’t be so bad if I could just keep my sense of humor about it. In my middle age, I have found that while laughter may be the best medicine, it isn’t the best thing to do on a full bladder.

So let’s recap. I’m a baby boomer and for me and all my fellow boomers, this is not our parent’s middle age. We’re living longer, acting younger and staying in our big homes longer than they did, thanks to pharmaceuticals, adult diapers, and offspring who never leave the nest.

Right this minute you are being toted along your life’s journey in a caravan of transformation. Your time has come. Let go of your neophyte twenties, release your toilsome thirties, wave good-bye to your frantic forties and embrace the metamorphosis of your middle years, your life center. You are not just experiencing mid-life; you are becoming a Middle Aged Goddess. More precisely, you are becoming a MA’d Goddess™, in every mirthful and powerful incarnation the title implies.

Regrettably, too many MA’d Goddess™ women, have not broken their chrysalis and spread their wings. Or perhaps, having taken a tentative flight or two, they fear straying out into their new world; capricious spirits haphazardly flitting about in circles, searching for true self. Should you be one of these wayward spirits failing to connect with her deity identity, your search is over. The MA’d Goddess™ lies within. You need only call her name and she will emerge, to take her rightful place of honor.

But who is the MA’d Goddess™? By what name is she known? She has borne the mantle of many a misnomer; Baby Boomer, Flower Child, Corporate Climber, Yuppie and the Sandwich Generation, to name a few. From the first post-war tide of Baby Boomers in 1946, up to the last gentle ebb in 1964, more than 38 million females were born into a generation of paradox.

Just as we were born in waves of proliferation, we came of age in surging tides that left a mark on the American landscape. In the Sixties we were the catalyst for social reform and higher consciousness. In the Seventies we pushed open the doors to women’s equality and stormed the bastions of the Good ‘Ol Boys. In the Eighties we conveniently forgot any conscience we ever had, and became vainglorious, corporate-climbers pounding against the glass ceiling. And in the new millennium, Hillary Clinton is breaking all the barriers as the first woman to make a viable bid for the highest position in the United States of America – Madam President.

We are mixed lot, with a lot in common.We proclaimed our mothers’ lives of homemaking and child rearing oppressive and granted ourselves freedom from the constraints of patriarchal society. We vowed to raise our children in a kinder, gentler and much more enlightened way than our parents had raised us – the next generation would grow up to be well adjusted, caring, productive citizens. Wow, what a shock we had in store when we found out kids don’t come with an instruction book – no matter what Dr. Spock said to the contrary.

In our late teens and twenties we clambered out the doors of our parents’ homes as fast as our stacked heels would take us. Our mother’s job was to make a home and raise the children. We decided we could do that and have careers too. After all, men had been doing it for years. We were blinded by the belief that we could have it all. Now we realize that only meant we’d be doing it all . . . all by ourselves. We go to work and then we come home to work some more. Whose brilliant idea was this anyway?

Middle aged? You’re not kidding. We’re stuck right in the middle of grown (well almost) children and aging parents. Despite our bests efforts, the kids seem to be making no attempt to leave the nest (and why should they when it’s so well feathered?) and the folks are evermore tugging on our heartstrings and our time. In their day, it was a child’s duty to pitch in when the snow needed shoveling, the grass needed mowing or the roof needed patching. They wouldn’t dream of skipping Sunday dinner with their parents and they can’t understand why you don’t have the time to help pull weeds in the garden or prune the lilacs.

We’ve come a long way, baby? It’s more like we’re the lost generation ~ lost in denial and wandering in the desert of despair. No wonder we’re so tired all the time. And hot flashes? It’s about time we got a little hot under the collar.

So what’s a MA’D Goddess™ to do? RECLAIM HER RIGHTFUL SPOT ON THE PEDESTAL. Join the gathering of women discovering the MA’D Goddess™ that lies within us all and slam the lid on this Pandora’s Box we opened. Repeat after me – “I am a MA’d Goddess™and I’m not going to take it anymore!

For a FREE download of Manifesting your Mid-Life, 10-Steps to A Change for the Better, visit http://www.madgoddess.com/ and join the Ma’d Goddess mailing list.