At the start of Day One of faculty development workshops yesterday we did an ice-breaker activity. Everyone in the room had to organize themselves into groups based on their birthday month but—here was the one rule—you could not speak to anyone while doing it. After a few chaotic minutes, the groups were all set and I looked around at my August crowd and felt surprised, for some reason, by how many people have August birthdays. Everyone in my group seemed to have that special glow about them, too—that glow you can’t help but wear when it’s your birthday month. No one, wisely, asked anyone how old they are turning this month.
In case you are wondering, I’m turning forty-two at the end of August. Forty-two. I’ve only recently become very comfortable with saying forty-one--with the way it rolls off my tongue, and it’s jarring to think about trading it in for forty-two. I went into my new decade kicking and screaming ungraciously. I was sad about it. I felt old. I missed my thirties, my decade of having babies and tending to their every need. My thirties seemed to contain a type of energy and sense of adventure I would never see again—I was sure of that. I missed the dear friends I'd made in my thirties--friends I left behind when we moved to North Carolina. I would never find friends like that again, I thought. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised with my forties so far. The things I missed, while miraculous and beautiful and so worthy of missing, each in their own right, were also the things that were often the most difficult, the things that kept me feeling a little left behind, a little lost. The baby years, filled as they are with diaper-changes and nursing challenges and night-waking and dragged-out drained-dry sleep exhaustion and naptime failures and potty training and the passing of milestone after relentless milestone do not leave too much room for embracing the inner you.
When I think about my forties lately I think about the other beautiful and amazing and strong forty-something women I know. I think about how lucky I am to have what I have at almost-forty-two. I also think about the morning I recently spent in a J.C. Penney's fitting room, with two good friends, while we helped one of us shop for new work clothes. We tried on skirts and shirts and pants and dissected every outfit. We dissected our lives. We dissected motherhood. We dissected our curves and bumps and flaws—physical and otherwise. We talked about our bodies, about our kids, our work, our husbands, our fears. We emerged grateful and happy and bound together in new ways. I looked at my friends and hoped I looked like them: beautiful inside and out—flawed in all the ways that count.