The best part about reaching midlife is finally taking off the Superwoman costume and dressing up as your authentic self.

Authentic women are liberated from the pretense that they can be all things to all people. They know it's OK to hire a cleaning woman and to have Botox injections. They love their kids but also respect themselves.

There is a myth — admittedly nurtured by the women's movement — that we can bring home the bacon and cook it up to, that we can be brilliant in the workplace and superior on the home front.

Phizzzzat to that.

You can't have it all.

But women usually reach midlife before they accept their limitations, live with their choices and play to their strengths, say three women who have already shrugged off their Superwomen suits.

The three, Anne Taylor Fleming, Lynn Sherr and Erin Brockovich, are among 27 speakers dealing with midlife transition issues at the Sept. 30 WomanSage conference in Anaheim, Calif. (See www.womansage.com for details)

"We have lived through unbelievable change in women's lives," says Fleming, 56, a commentator for CNN and the PBS Jim Lehrer NewsHour. "But with the excitement comes a lot of reckoning."

Fleming, for example, put off having children, then tried and was unable.

"I actually have no regrets," she says. "I'm always sad I didn't have a child of my own but I also am thrilled I made a living and am a writer on my own terms.

One of the nice things about being an older woman is accepting yourself, Fleming says. Which doesn't mean seeing yourself as a finished product.

"So many women held themselves back, deferred their dreams while they tried to be Superwomen," she says. "Now they're ready — and they're entitled — to make one last run at that long-buried dream."

Brockovich, the feisty paralegal who's life was chronicled in a film starring Julia Roberts, says a strong sense of values counts for more than striving for Superwoman status.

"One day you wake up and the kids are all gone," she says. "If you're lucky, like me, you have work you love and enjoy.

"And then the kids come back. If you have given them a strong sense of values, they come back to talk to you about their adult issues. You will find they need you more than you can imagine."

Sherr, ABC-TV 20/20 correspondent, frets about today's young women who are criticized for working and not putting "momism" first. She talks about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg who told her, in an interview, "Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibilities of bringing up the next generation."

Sherr likes to refer to her favorite cartoon. It shows a mother hen tossing some eggs in the air while a couple of other hens gossip behind her. One says to the other: "How she's able to still manage a career and juggle her family, I'll never know."

The answer is simple, says Sherr. Some of the eggs may get scrambled. "Get used to it."