38, A Thought or Two

I have been 38 for almost a week now.  So far, there are no real earth-shattering revelations about the actual age, but I have spent a fair amount of time this week thinking about getting older and what that means for me, not just for my own life but as a woman in society.  I have been going over it as a mother and wife and as a friend of decades.  When I go over it in that way, maybe there are a few revelations that I have been shuffling around in my head.  Or maybe not.  But either way, I have turned 38 and it feels like there are thoughts to unpack.

I have always loved my birth month. Until I created my own family, February felt like a special month just for me to have my birthday.  I know that February is not necessarily a favorite of months, generally speaking.  It tends to be cold and dreary.  It is part of the post-Christmas/New Year’s hump, when everyone is back to school for the long haul.  There is, of course, Valentine’s Day, but there seems to be such resentment for the holiday, it makes the month feel even less special from the outside.  It certainly doesn’t have the warm hum of the spring months, as everything blooms and is newly in the world.  Or the embracing heat of those care-free summer months.  Even the fall, with its color changing magic and the holiday months seem to be favored above the month of my birth.  Despite all of the popular opinion, there is a sparkle of it, all on its own, that makes me want to embrace it with a big ole’ hug every time it rolls around.

When I was a child, the entire month of February, was marked with many, many days of rain.  Incidentally, this is also, by far, my favorite type of weather.  Without fail however, on my birthday, the skies would cease their crying and open up. The sun would break through as is the heavens were welcoming me to the world year, after year. Nowadays, I would give just about anything for a rainy February but then, with just one sunny day but then if felt like the sun was shining just for me.  I would stand in the middle of the playground at school and just soak up the sun, let its goldenness envelope and warm me.  It made me feel like I had found a special spot in the world that knew I had been born on that day.

I have carried that golden spot that was my birthday then oh so happily into my adult life.  I skated through each year, loving my magic day, feeling like the most special person on earth.  Until I turned 26.  My 26th birthday was the last birthday I would ever have with my mother.  A year and half earlier she was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer and given only six months to live.  Instead of being subject to her diagnosis and letting it overwhelm her, she fought with every inch of her soul and body and knew that it would not defeat her.  We navigated the following year and half believing in her and her determination, there was no doubt that she was going to survive.  On my 26th, it seemed that her path had a bright horizon, that there would be any more birthdays to celebrate with her.  And then, only weeks later, she turned and the bright future that she had was suddenly dashed out.  My mom died at 64 on March 16th, 2010.  And, all of a sudden, my birthday meant almost nothing.

Losing my mother at 26, made me grow up instantaneously.  Yes, I was 26, not 19, or 12, or 6, but I was not a grown up yet. In fact, it was really her diagnosis at 24 that catapulted me into the state of adulthood.  There is nothing like the impending death of your mom to make you look at the world and the frivolous things in a very different way.  One’s twenties are theoretically the decade in which you find yourself.  When you take a year off from college and travel Europe.  When you party so hard that you wake up the next morning with glitter all over yourself and a hazy memory of the night before.  When you graduate college and find a low paying internship and learn how hard but how rewarding finding your true career path is.  In your twenties, you are supposed to search and stumble and find who you are so you can move forward in the world as the “you” that you have grown to be.  I didn’t do that.  I was supposed to be that grown, fully realized person without any of time to get there.   

I took over my mom’s place.  I cooked the holiday dinners.  I made Thanksgiving dinner, cooked a whole turkey as a vegetarian, with no idea what the heck I was doing.  I couldn’t pick up the phone and call her.  I just had to bumble through.  I cooked that first Christmas dinner after she died and wept into the cookie batter.  I was so overwhelmed, and sad, and tired but somehow, I managed to create every piece of that Norwegian Christmas.  All by myself.  All by myself, became how I existed in the world.  I didn’t have my mother to guide me in planning my wedding; creating all of the beauty I knew she would have loved.   I didn’t have my mother to cradle my teeny baby in his newborn hood in her arms while I tried to catch a sweet nap.  Losing her meant that I had to take care of each of these things alone. Not really alone because I had friends and my wonderful husband and my dad was still around but, at moments, I felt so tragically alone.

I spent so much of the last 12 years, trying to be the grown up, trying to take on my mom’s mantle, I lost who I was without that. It is intimidating to be so close to 40 and to just be realizing that I need to stop looking at who I am supposed be under the shadow of her legacy. I need to learn who this person is without being the person whose mother died at 26 and whose father died at 32. I get to be a person that is just truly and wholly me. It is certainly scary to think that I am supposed to understand all of this now in the midst of being the mother to four, and the wife to my sweet man, a daughter-in-law, a sister-in-law, and a friend. And for some reason 40 hanging over my head makes it even more impending.

The point of all of this being, when I turned 38 last weekend, I couldn’t really believe that I am almost 40 years old.  I still think of myself as being about 27.  I feel so young and so old all at once. There are things that I feel like I totally missed out on and there are things that I feel like I have been carrying for all my life.  At 38, I have lost both of my parents, not yet found a true career for myself, said goodbye to my childhood home and innocence, moved across the country to a brand-new state, and survived a global pandemic.  But at 38, I have also spent ten years being a wife to the most wonderful man in the world, given birth to and am raising 4 beautiful children, owned three houses that were each exactly where our family needed to live at that time.  I have lived so much life and yet I have so much life left to live.