Thirty-Five, I'm Alive

Making a wish at 2 years old

If I was living in the 1600s, when the life expectancy for a woman was about thirty-five, I’d probably be dead by now.  Thank God that’s not the case!  My birthday is tomorrow, August 12th.  Birthdays are no longer a big deal to me.  I don’t look forward to getting another year older.  If birthdays could come and go without making me older then I’d be in Heaven.  Don’t get me wrong, while I don’t want to add any more candles to my birthday cake, I still want the cake, the ice cream and the presents.   

I wonder how my parents feel about me getting older.  Of course, as I age, they age.   How does it feel to tell someone that your oldest daughter is thirty-five?  How quickly has this time passed for them?  I feel old as Zoey and Hunter get older.  I marvel at how I will feel when Zoey is thirty-five and Hunter is thirty-two.  I will have just turned sixty-six when this happens.  It’s difficult to wrap my mind around this.    

That old popular phrase “age is just a number” never used to apply to me.  I used to say it to people that were feeling bad about their age.  As I get older and the numbers creep higher, I’m beginning to understand the phrase.  I’m going to be forty years old in five years!  How the hell did that happen?  I don’t feel like I’m thirty-five years old.  There’s no book on how this is supposed to feel, so who knows? I still feel young and (knock on wood) my body hasn’t started to betray me yet.  In my head I feel eighteen.  Obviously, I’ve matured emotionally in many ways since then, but I’m still that young woman who feels like she’s just on the cusp of becoming something.  

One of my most memorable birthdays with my sixteenth when I received my license to drive.  My mom gave me permission to drive my five friends around in her big old blue Astro van.  I drove us to Video Shack to rent a VHS movie.  If I hadn’t already dated myself by revealing my age and driving an Astro van, then renting a VHS tape would have done it.  After picking a movie, (I have no recollection of the movie we rented) we piled back into the van.  We were having a good time laughing about something and instead of turning the wheel as I pulled out of the parking spot I backed up straight, bump, right into a parked truck.  I paused, unsure of what to do next.  One of my friends yelled “Go!”  I peeled out of the parking lot and drove a few miles before pulling over on a side street.  My friends jumped out first and rushed to the back of the van.  Their reactions told me what I already knew, I was in trouble.  I just had my first accident, while on my first solo driving trip, on my freaking birthday!  One of the back doors had a dent almost as large as the back door itself.  With the logic of a sixteen year old, I decided to stick with the plan of going to dinner with my friends, instead of returning home to face my mom.  I knew if I went home I wouldn’t be going back out again.  After dinner was over, I had to go home and tell my mom what happened.  I cried crouched in a corner by the front door, while my friends listened from the other room as my mom spoke sternly to me.  Many tears, on my part, and words on her part later, she drove to the video store.  She discovered the truck that I hit was owned by one of the employees.  Amazingly the other vehicle had no damage.  My mom told me I would paying to fix the dent, but let my friends stay over for the rest of my birthday sleepover.  

My twenty-seventh birthday was memorable in a much more romantic way.   Joe proposed to me.  I knew it was coming.  I had essentially told him I wanted to get engaged for my birthday.  It was nearing sunset and he asked if I wanted to take a walk to the beach.  I had a feeling he was going to pop that famous question.  I was nervous and I felt a bulge in his pocket that occasionally bumped against my leg as we walked.  I knew it had to be the ring box and not a “pencil” in his pocket because he was happy to see me.  Once we arrived at the beach Joe got down on his knee.  I too got down on my knees because I felt embarrassed as there were people around.  Of course, I said yes.  Later that evening we got drinks with friends to celebrate my birthday. I held up my left hand and showed them the ring on my pinky finger.  Yes, you read that right, my pinky finger.  The ring Joe bought me didn’t fit.  I wore it on my pinky until we got it sized.

Making a wish today (in the exact same place as when I was 2!)

In a moment I can flash back to myself at different points in my life.   For example, I can remember my first true heartbreak when I was almost eighteen.  In some ways I feel like my heart just cracked yesterday.  This was seventeen years ago and this break healed long ago, but time is so fluidic, it doesn’t feel that distant.  So many great and terrible things have happened since.  While I have matured, I’m still intrinsically the same.  I wouldn’t change any of the stepping stones I walked upon to get to where I stand today.  I still have things I want to accomplish, as I previously wrote about in my post Eighty Years Old/Death Bed.  I’m in a good place moving into my thirty-fifth year on this earth.  I’m a wife, with an awesome husband and a mother, with two amazingly adorable kids. I’m more confident and happier than I’ve ever been. So, Birthday, this year I challenge you to keep the candles coming, but don’t take it personally if I ignore their numbers as I blow them out.