Soon, I will celebrate one more year of living, and begin the anticipation of the next. It isn’t always an easy contemplation, the journey from here to there. I don’t usually indulge myself in birthday celebrations, as they are boringly and noticeably unimportant. I avoid all age related questions, so that I don’t have to be hearing “looking great for your age!”, or “any day above ground, is a good day,” or bowel talk. I don’t wish to share it, hear it, or encourage it, so I don’t discuss my age at all, in public, and threaten all my loved ones who think that my phobia is odd. It seems to me that everything is measured from one yardstick when contemplating age, and I want to conjure another one which has more detail in it, more depth, greater complexity.
I have a list of things I am not going to do, after a lifetime of to-do items that haunted me with my impotency to accomplish them. I don’t like having anything that I do filtered or blessed through the cheesecloth of at your age. I probably will, instead, forget such qualifications, and never look back.
At my age, indeed. I am not going to climb Mt Kilimanjaro, or even the back 14ers where I live. I am not going to join the Marines, but then, I didn’t want to do that when I was 20. I am not going to run a tri-athlon, although I could practice for it, and I could then do it, although probably not win or perhaps complete. I will also not become a surgeon, or a doctor, although I might still go and get a masters, a personal goal I haven’t fulfilled. The desire dimmed a bit, and hedonistic fun became a more pressing goal, although it has returned with some frequency. I am not going to have more children, although I toy with fostering the forgotten ones sometimes, feeling that I have something to offer and a need that is bitingly strong to provide something to an aching world, something that would make a difference. I am probably not going to have an affair, divorce my husband, leave my children, or grandchildren, nor will I pursue various other ideas that I have attached myself to, a barnacle, clinging precariously before a storm.
I have a list of goals that I would like to complete. When I ponder the remaining years of my life, and I will, unless disease or accident befalls me, have good years left, I need little more than I’ve been given, so I do question what lies yet in those years of diminishing abilities. What remains is a great deal that I wish to keep, having worked hard to become whomever I am today. I have failed when success was staring me in the face. I have survived when I would rather have not, I have thrived when all seemed imminently disastrous. I have raised hell, children, orchids and a compost heap. And I still haven’t turned out a successful tomato garden! All those and more are learning experiences that have enriched the person that I am, often bettered by adverse consequences more than positive ones.
I have enjoyed the company of smart, reliable, thoughtful women who have made life so very rich, trusted friends from childhood, and beyond. I have loved without reserve a special niece so like my own child, and then been given my own children in addition, step children as bonus. I have sheltered and sputtered in the circle of my extraordinary husband; I have made peace, after so much conflict.
I have been loved, generously and kindly, passionately, enduringly.
So when I turn another year older, I look outside my window at a change of wind, a coming storm, and a colder season. I will have outlived my brother, a sister, and even a nephew, to great distressing surprise. I am spending satisfied time with some of my beloved progeny and my spouse. I am speaking with others who have been willing to share themselves with me, more graciously than I deserve. I have loved my children with the single-minded focus that allows one to place another’s needs above the desires of oneself, although they will never believe that, nor should they.
I have also failed at living up to my own standards too, no matter my intentions. My selfishness has intruded, that is true. I have given my time and my energy freely to foster the beliefs that I have, spending much of it in the organizations which have mattered to me, then saving my life. I have made peace with a God, although quite of my own understanding. I regret little. Time which might have been spent with family and friends has been sacrificed willingly for something bigger than myself, and yet I yearn for the moments to have been deeper, more lasting, and more intimate with each of my loved ones. I wish that I were kinder, and more temperate. I wish that I had been thinner.