Reports from a meh birthday

29 and feeling *fine*

Today I am twenty-nine. It is an unremarkable birthday. Thirty feels substantial, like maybe I’ll finally be taken seriously around here but twenty-nine is nothing but another incremental inch towards inevitable death and decay. Can you tell where I’m at emotionally?

I have not identified with my twenties in quite some time. The era of self-discovery, self-love, of “main character energy” seems to be in my rearview. See, I’m in my breeding era, my mothering era, my suburban era. I am currently on an online-shopping quest to find a good, inoffensive, maybe even cute, orthopedic sandal for my wide, swollen, pregnant feet. A sexy flirty shoe for the bloated among us. This does not feel like the search that someone still “in their twenties” would be embarking on. And yet — here I am.

I don’t want to complain too much about twenty-nine. I could be eighty-nine. There seems to be a lot more to winge about at that point. I am, after all, still young. At a birthday dinner with my niece this week she remarked, “Why are you so young? You act young, you look young, you just are young! It’s kind of weird, actually.” I said, honey, you can say that again. And it is kind of weird, actually, that I am young. I have always felt I will peak somewhere in my fifties, probably in the throes of menopause, carrying around a little portable spray fan with me for my hot flashes. This, I believe, is my inner age, when I will thrive. When my children are off to college, when I can send them care packages for their dorms and then visit them, host tailgates where I lay out an impeccable spread and introduce overgrown children to the concept of a stiff Bloody Mary. By then, I’ll have a whole closet full of sandals with good arch support! I’ll have years of wisdom and experience under my belt, and all my saggy bits will be more culturally acceptable.

At dinner, when my niece, who turns eight this week, asked if I was excited about my birthday, I said “Yeah, but your birthdays get less exciting as you get older.” She was concerned by this. Would she not be excited for her twenty-third birthday, her golden birthday? I said, no, you’ll still be very excited about that. How about her twenty-fifth? I said that one’s still good. So, when is it, she pushed, when does it get less exciting?

For me, it’s twenty-nine, for no other reason that I’m now far more excited for my kid’s birthdays than for mine. Now, I get to be the person who imbues magic into a day. Who can bake the cake, hang the streamers, go full tilt at the Party City. Things are no longer all about me (how stupid!).

Of course, that doesn’t mean I can’t harness my inner eight-year-old in a flash. I love stickers and candy and if pressed, could still rank my friends in a diary entry, as long as the diary had a lock and key, and I could write the ranking in colorful gel pens. I can easily find my inner seventeen-year-old, too, and pull from her deep well of angst and longing.  My twenty-two-year-old, with her hangovers and her cute outfits that showed plenty of tit, feels more alien than the rest of them but still, within reach. I like knowing that I am all of these people, and that they are me, but with each year that passes I get a little bit smarter and have seen a little bit more of the world and feel a little bit more certain of things.

Now, listen, I am not some martyr who has ceased loving being showered with attention, gifts, and treats on her birthday. I have requested a slice of grocery store chocolate cake from my husband, who is also bringing me to Barnes and Noble later and letting me get as many books as I can pick up in a 90-second window. And the real celebration starts tomorrow when we head out to Vermont for our first weekend away sans baby. We feel he’s finally mature enough to handle the house on his own. (My in-laws are watching him.) While there, we will be doing whatever white people do in Vermont: shotgunning maple syrup? Blasting Noah Kahan full volume on our station wagon’s speakers? Walking around in the woods discussing how our liberalism makes us superior? I’ll report back.

Mostly, what I want for my day today is to spend time with my son, who has no idea it’s my birthday. He doesn’t even know my first name. In many ways, he’s a terrible birthday companion. It doesn’t matter, though, because he’s my little buddy. My small pal. I think we’ll go out for lunch at our local diner and share chicken tenders and fries, with lots of ketchup on the side. Charlie likes to stick his fingers in ketchup and eat it straight up, which I respect.

Happy birthday to this girl, who received a golf set (??) for her birthday. With hindsight being 20/20 I can tell her whatever interest she may have had in golf was an absolute flash in the pan. That lazy eye also couldn’t have helped my handicap.                                                  

 And to this girl, who is shook by her cake.