I blame Barbie

It was my birthday yesterday. I am now 35, which is a strange age.
Too young to be middle-aged, yet too old to be young.
From my thirty second birthday onwards, people have been telling me that I'll be 'forty soon'
Hu-bloody-ra
Still, I feel young and fresh and happy and I think that's the elixir of life, surely ?
How we feel and think and live is more important than how we age on the outside ?
I'm not quite vain enough for plastic surgery. It would compromise my hidden inner feminist and I don't think the standardised custom-wrapped ideas of what women should look like as they get older are realistic. I've got a responsibility, as the Mother of two young daughters, to encourage their brains. My eldest daughter, who is intelligent beyond her years, developed a worrying fascination with a certain A-list celebrity of the size zero variety. I try to explain that her photos have been airbrushed and her waistline surgically enhanced and her diet probably consists of water and lettuce, but apparently she's 'beautiful, mummy'
I blame those bloody dolls of hers with the pencil thin waists and oversized heads.
She has a couple, given as birthday presents, donning what can best be described as hooker-wear, complete with fishnet stockings, pvc boots and acres of cleavage
( naughty lingerie on show underneath, naturally )
I never had a Barbie as a girl because my Dad, bless his forward thinking principles, thought they set a bad example for girls. Maybe Barbie is the reason I prefer dougnuts to lettuce leaves.
It's Barbie's fault I'm not a svelte size 8.