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I entered a new decade. The last time it happened, I was yanked, kicking and screaming over the threshold. This time, the panic didn’t really begin until a few weeks beforehand, and it was more of a quiet panic. Like my body thought it was supposed to panic, so it stepped up and did its job, but it performed halfheartedly because it didn’t feel it deeply.

It is weird having a milestone birthday. There is nothing you can do with the day that is big enough, but you feel like you have to try.

We took the pressure off the day by planning something small for today and then scheduling a big trip later in the year. With two weeks of days on the trip, I figured I could choose one that seemed to be already going well and declare it my birthday day celebration.

So, I am eating cake and celebrating making it through another year and into a new decade. There’s a lot to celebrate.

Pretty much every birthday post has been called “Happy Birthday to Me,” so why buck tradition and name this post something else?  I mean, yes, I’m also lazy, but that’s beside the point.

Oh how I wish I could go back to 39-year-old me and slap her:

It’s my birthday, and I’m practically 194 years old.  I told the twins that I’m now an old crone, with shriveled up ovaries that don’t work.  Josh pointed out that my ovaries didn’t work back when I was 27, so this isn’t a new development.  “Fine, then my hands are gnarled and liver spotted.  And my hair is grey.”  They didn’t even look up from their nutella-slathered challah.  That’s how old I am.  No one even looks up from their challah when I talk because my voice is so frail that my words just crumble to dust in the air.

Now, NOW, I am old.  I am so old that all my grey hair is white and sticking out at odd angles.  I am so old that if I bite into anything too hard — like sandwich bread… or air — my teeth fracture into thousands of tiny bits.  I am so old that my body is shriveling and now I can wear Gymboree clothes again.  I am so old that I can’t hear anything if the water is running.  All I can do is say over and over again to the speaker, “You know that I can’t hear you when the water is running.”

I am 41.

41 hurts less than 40.  40 was exquisitely painful, and 41 is more like a pap smear than an HSG-of-a-birthday.  It’s like, yes, both have the pinch of the speculum, but 40 has the pain of the shooting dye while 41 is more like the poke of a swab.

This past weekend, I went to Josh’s college reunion, which I’ll unpack in a separate post.  But it’s bittersweet revisiting a college, even if it’s not your college.  It makes you think about running to class after oversleeping and ordering pizza late at night and highlighting textbooks and moving apartments every fall.

I don’t really want to do the college years again; it was sort of hard to not know where I was heading.  But it’s nice to pause in that space, to look around, to take stock, to remember.

That is the good part of a birthday, too.  It’s a time to stop for a second and remember every birthday before this one, and be grateful that I’m still aging.  (Even if I am also slowly going deaf.)

In a few weeks time, it will also be my blogoversary.  My ninth blogoversary.  I’ll be entering my tenth year of blogging.  Oh how odd!   That something I could create while lying on my sofa, dictating what I wanted on the screen to Josh (because I sure as hell wasn’t going to figure out Blogger), could still be around this many years later.  Still puttering around like its writer, feeble but constant.

Thank you for being here.  It has been a bit of a shithole of a year.  Sometimes Josh and I dissolve in slightly hysterical laughter as if we are this close to losing it.

There are the friends and family who get me through crap on this side of the computer.  And then there are all of you who get me through crap on the other side of the computer.  And this safety net; strung between reality and virtuality, holds me up.  So thank you for getting me through another year.

It’s my birthday, and I’m practically 194 years old.  I told the twins that I’m now an old crone, with shriveled up ovaries that don’t work.  Josh pointed out that my ovaries didn’t work back when I was 27, so this isn’t a new development.  “Fine, then my hands are gnarled and liver spotted.  And my hair is grey.”  They didn’t even look up from their nutella-slathered challah.  That’s how old I am.  No one even looks up from their challah when I talk because my voice is so frail that my words just crumble to dust in the air.

We went to this odd beach yesterday.  Usually, when we’re in Chincoteague, you look out at the ocean and feel so insignificant in this vast world.  It feels like you’re standing on the edge of the planet, the last bit of land.  This beach was right before you cross the Bay Bridge.  So you’re sitting on the sand, watching all the cars crossing the water, going to other places.  It makes you think about other places.  But the beach was also only 45 minutes from home, so it won when we were looking for something to do on a Saturday.

I didn’t feel that vastness until we tried to park in downtown Annapolis, inching forward in a long line of cars until I told Josh that we needed to leave.  There were just too many people.  There is no ice cream in the world worth navigating that many people.

I have no clue what we’re doing today.

I am funny about my birthday.  I know it’s supposed to be a happy day; I mean, the universe gives you a freakin’ wish on your birthday and you can use it on anything you want.  And it has to come true, just because it’s the day of your birth.  But I always feel this strange sadness, a combination of perhaps too much cake and the lethargy that comes from any excitement.  The quietness of a balloon deflating.  I don’t love getting older.  I’ve been a big fan of my thirties, and I’m not exactly thrilled to be on my final year.

I’m 39.

Happy birthday to me.

Photo Credit: Easement via Flickr

When I was little, there was an amusement park in Maryland called the Enchanted Forest.  I have a bunch of memories from visits to the park, but none as vivid as the last time we went right before the park closed.  We knew that it was going to be our last time there, and even though I was too old for the park by that point, I became obsessed with this idea of catching one of the goldfish in the fishing pond.  They gave you a piece of corn on the end of a hook, and you held it in the water until a goldfish bit down on it.  I don’t even think you got to keep the fish, so I’m not sure why it felt so important to stand there with this hook and corn doing something I actually felt was cruel to the fish and not much fun for the human.

My father stayed with me while my mother took my sister and brother on the Alice in Wonderland ride, something I really wanted to do — more than fish — but I couldn’t tear myself away from the pond.  I just stood there with my dad, dragging the line through the water towards the goldfish, begging one of them to bite down.  None did.  My mother returned with my siblings, and we left the park.  And I remember being so angry with myself for not going on the Alice in Wonderland ride, especially knowing I could never go on it again.

Photo Credit: Easement via Flickr

I knew that people had moved pieces from the amusement park to Elioak Farm, but I never went to Elioak, even though it wouldn’t be a big deal to look up directions on a map and find it.  I don’t know what kept me from going to see it any more than I know what kept me from walking away from the goldfish pond.

A few weeks ago, the twins and I drove out to Columbia to see a school.  It took us 45 minutes to drive out there on the highway, and I decided to try the backroads to get home to see if it was any faster.  We got behind a slow-moving truck in Columbia and followed it on the one-lane road for over an hour while I kept an on-going monologue in my head torn between the greatness of the school and the distance from our house.

And as we drove through Ellicott City, behind the slowest truck in the world, going a very cautious 30 miles an hour, I saw the sign for Elioak Farm and the castle just a few meters back from the entrance.

Photo Credit: Easement via Flickr

There it was, just this quick snapshot.  This click of a moment, like opening your front door to find yourself back in your childhood house for a few seconds.  I wanted to be back at the Enchanted Forest so badly that it felt exactly as if it were the 1980s, and I was walking to our car with all the grief of botching my final visit.  I wanted to be a child again, going up to the top of the castle and waving down at my parents below.  Seeing the pieces was like snuggling down in a too-large sweatshirt.  I almost turned the car around at the next street to go back to the farm, but instead I called into the backseat, “will you take me there for my birthday?”

So that’s how I’m spending my birthday this weekend.

Just in case you were wondering what I might do to celebrate turning 38.

And I don’t mean to sound morose, but I always get down near my birthday.

We interrupt my existential crisis to reflect on the actual birthday celebrating festivities and eat figurative cake and put up streamers and all of those sorts of things tomorrow.

Happy Birthday to Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Since my birthday falls between two weekends this year, I decided to claim both for my own.  This past weekend, we went to the aquarium sans kids and contemplated the jellyfish.  They just float through the water trailing gossamer tentacles, not concerned about paying the mortgage or procreating or growing old.  As far as I understand, based on information from the elderly aquarium volunteer, jellyfish do not have midlife crises.

They don’t check themselves in the mirror, fretting about grey tentacles.

Josh gave me the best birthday gift of all.  I’ve had a burning question that I’ve always wanted to ask, but didn’t want to be the one doing the asking.  On this visit, Josh allowed me to save face and took one for the team in honour of my birthday.  He marched up to the information desk and inquired if anyone had ever fallen or jumped into the stingray pool.

“No,” the aquarium volunteer informed him.  “I mean, there have been other things that have fallen in — cameras, cell phones.  But never a person.”

I’ve got to say that not only was the answer anti-climatic (I was assuming that the aquarium averages 2 or 3 stingray- or shark-inflicted deaths per year), but I didn’t really believe him.  People die every so often at the zoo when they climb into the lion enclosure and that takes actual skill to scale the wall.  Falling into the stingray pool is so simple that I contemplated showing him just how simple it would be by taking a running leap over the low railing (until I remembered that the pool is filled with stingrays and sharks).

Please don’t get me wrong — I’m thrilled that everyone is exiting the aquarium alive.  The answer just seemed suspect.

On that dark note, let’s go back to celebrating my birthday!  With cake!  And streamers!  And fish!

And more fish!

And turtles!

Josh took a picture of me by the bubble chambers.  He told me that I didn’t look happy.

Perhaps I looked a bit wan.

This was the picture that he told me was perfect; squinty eyes and all.

That is perhaps closer to how I feel despite my existential crisis.  That underneath all those layers of angst, there is a girl with an enormous fork, about to dive into a chocolate cake with birthday candles on it.

I am trying to come up with something fabulous for this upcoming weekend since I get a second birthday weekend.  Ice cream — definitely.  And force the family to listen to Green Day on continual play.  And perhaps purchase my first electric guitar.  And a splash park if it’s hot enough.  I’m open to any other ideas as well.

Perhaps we’ll just take a long drive, make a wrong turn, and see where it takes us.