Birthdays

“You’re 40! You’re 40! You’re 40! You. Are. 40! YOU are the oldest person in this house! And next year, you’ll be 41!”  

The staccato phrases burst from Evan’s mouth. He bounced up and down on his toes, his excitement palpable, hands clapping, then clasped tightly as he leaned eagerly forward to look me full in the face from shining eyes.  

From the well-earned wealth of his 6-year-old wisdom, Evan knew three things for sure:  birthdays are the very best kind of celebration; being older than other people makes you important; and next year’s birthday can only bring more fun and more status. His mom was surely ecstatic about her surprise 40th birthday party, while poor Dad would have to wait a few more years before HE was 40. Lucky Mom!  

Evan’s innocent wisdom could not imagine the idea of a top-out birthday, an apex birthday beyond which all would be descent.  

The age-guessing game is an established social means of evaluation. When we are children, it happens between the adults in our lives. “How old is Darlene now? Really? She sure is tall / her reading level is amazing for her age.” Our parents feel gratified and relieved that their child scores high on at least some parts of the developmental scale. As teens, it feels good to be admired by adults and by our peers for looking older and for being more accomplished than one might expect for our actual years. We boast to one another about not getting “carded”, about the college-age boys shocked to learn that we are only 15, about the employer who thinks we’re 25 when we’re really 21.  When we look and act older, we win – right? Right up to that point when we decide we’d prefer to be judged younger than our actual age. Then the whole point scale shockingly reverses. Okay, boomer.

And so I looked down into my child’s glowing, admiring face, feeling his pervasive joy at my birthday accomplishment, and I wondered whether I should be happy or not. Who was right? Should I feel and grieve the loss of my irreplaceable youth, looking over my shoulder like Lot’s wife, my gaze locked frozen onto “back then” so that I could never turn to the new now?

I like to tell the story this way:  Evan sold me. He sold me on being 40 with his eagerness and his quivering enthusiasm and his full-on love for me. He sold me on how special it was to be in that place, surrounded by family and friends, celebrated. He sold me because he didn’t need me to be as I was when I was 20; he needed me in the now. And the now was very, very special.

This January we celebrated my 60th birthday. For a few minutes I reflected, wondering whether I should, or could, celebrate. My abilities have declined from what they were when I was 40. No fancy skin care products can remove the wrinkles from around my mouth. I wish I had more energy and that my brain could retain more than it does now. My mother is no longer alive to celebrate with me – and neither are some dear friends who I loved, who will never experience what it means to be 60, to hold all that is hard and all that is good up to the light of these glowing candles. I looked around the room at my family and friends, at my Evan, and remembered (as I do every year) what Evan taught me. So I told them, with shining eyes, “I’m 60! I’m 60! I’m 60! I. Am. 60! I am the oldest person in this house! And next year [God willing] I’ll be 61!”