Just after midnight, while I was sleeping, the entire world conspired silently in my favor—-to bring to close the last difficult year of a long difficult decade.
Suddenly, in a rush of December air, I was 40.
I opened my eyes to stillness, before the morning shook to life. I did not know quite how to feel.
I chewed on my lip and looked at the wall.
The window by my bed revealed a fine blanket of light snow. Gray tree branches crisscrossed the sky against the cultivated glow of neighborhood porch lights. Why did it feel as though one days’ time could suddenly define—in an instant—how I defined myself? It didn’t make sense.
And still, in between the backyards and sneaking up the sturdy brick walls of my house, there crept a sense of weariness. A shifting in the wind of doubt.
It was right out of a Joni Mitchell song. It was winter outside my window and suddenly I was getting old.
I scrunched my eyes shut.
I felt small in my body, as though my brain couldn’t actualize how I had lived so long within these bones and flesh and still knew so little.
I worried about the things that women of a certain age aren’t supposed to mention. Invisibility. Vanity. The coming winter with it’s heavy shadows and aching bones, to begin each day.
I considered the commitments I had made, passively or decidedly: to this life, this man, the walls of this house. My house, with it’s crumbs on tables and doors that stick, the voices that yell and comfort and call out expectantly for the borrow of a book, the offer of a video game, the negotiation over a ride to the swimming pool.
All the things I have done, some terrible and others wonderful—and all the things I have left to do.
I thought then, of the women I knew who were older than I, a few years or a decade or more. How much I admired the ease in which they carried themselves, how I noticed them and wanted, sometimes to be them too. How beautiful I knew they were.
I sensed my husband gently begin to wake up. I felt him reach across the bed for my arm.
I pulled the heavy comforter over my head, wild hair splaying not-yet-silver in the not-quite-morning light.
A beginning is defined by its newness, in the way every unfolding moment is fringed with certain impossibility. When you start something different—a day, a year, a decade, a job, a marriage—it’s always a chance to grow. How can growing be a thing of sadness?
It is, I think, sometimes a relief to acknowledge that what has passed is gone.
It is a gift to be given a fresh start. Of course, there is fear when the answers aren’t clear. When the world tells you that you should be afraid to grow older. But I’ve also found freedom in the blank space of change. In the experience of discovery.
No one starts a game pitching for a hit. No one steps up to the plate gunning for a loss. And so with a ringing anticipation I speak to myself kindly. I remind myself how glorious it is to be one inch deep into a new decade and know that possibility still reigns.
Before the sun was all the way in the sky, I closed my eyes to sleep again, hard and deep, like a child sleeps. Later, when I give myself over to this new dawn, this fifth decade of being, I will not look down at my hands or let myself shrink in the cold bright light.
I will be wide open to whatever comes my way. The nothings and everythings that map a life well lived.
I am 40 years old but really, I am newly born into a grown up woman, the one I am only beginning to be.
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