Time has been holding my hand these last few weeks.
Not in the way of an intimate friend, but in the way of an impatient parent trying to drag a slow-to-get-ready-child out the door so they won’t be late. It’s because of the birthday coming up that I don’t want to mark, because I don’t like marking my climbing age anymore.
I know I couldn’t have always seen birthdays like this, because I was a really young child once, and every really young child dreams of growing up someday. But for as long as I can remember, I have hated getting older.
It’s not the birthdays, exactly. It’s their number, the way they creep around every year, the way they whisper things like time is running out and you haven’t done enough with the years you’ve been given and you should be further along the writer path than you are today.
Birthdays, for a long time now, have looked down on me in disappointment, tallying up those years and stretching their hand across all my past, as if to say, This is all there is?
Yes. This is all there is.
I wanted it to be more, but time was never exactly kind, and days rushed toward dark, and weeks ran toward months, and whole years, when I didn’t really know what I was doing or where I was going or who I even was, slipped right through my fingers.
///
I don’t know exactly when those birthdays began breathing down my neck.
Maybe it was the ninth one, when I blew out candles on a ballerina cake my mother had ordered before an instructor told me I was too “chunky” to continue lessons with her, a day when my friends and family all surrounded me except for the one who had missed so many other days like this one, a day when “chunky” got all tangled up around “gone,” a day when I used my wish to say, I wish he would come home.
Or maybe it was the twelfth one, when I stood on our front porch waiting for my whole invited class to show up and only a few did, a day when there was no call or note or card from the missing one; a day when there were no candles to wish upon, because I was too old or maybe she was too poor; a day when I still made my wish on the first star in the sky: I wish I could be pretty so he would come home.
Or maybe it was the twenty-fifth one, when I had just quit a dream-come-true newspaper job to follow my husband on a church-planting adventure, a day when I decided I would just spend my time writing, a day when I peed on a stick and it said yes, a day when I still made my wish on the candles my husband lined up on a cake he’d made himself: I wish I could publish a book.
Maybe it was all of them, because a tenth birthday came around, and he did not come home; and a thirteenth birthday came around, and my beauty, or lack of it, did not bring him home; and a twenty-sixth birthday came around, and I had not published a book.
Birthdays did not feel like friends at all, even to a 9-year-old girl. They felt like fingers pointing to all the ways I had disappointed time.
///
I wish I could say it’s different this time around, but it’s not.
The day after my birthday rolls around, my job will end. It’s the first time I have never worked for someone else.
And all that space feels more like an expectation, not a possibility, because there is a birthday climbing on my back and whispering in my ear, Another year older, and what have you done? The answer is not much, and so this birthday takes my words and cackles and throws all those other years, when wishes didn’t come true, right back in my face.
So when my husband asks if I want to celebrate with friends and family, I say no.
Who wants to mark another year gone when there is nothing to show for it? No published book, still. No job. Not even a family that is “put together” and “doing it” and functioning past the overwhelm that raises tempers and flings words at each other we don’t really mean.
Only an aching back, because kids have pulled all the joints out of whack. Only anxiety that still claws at a neck, even though I’m practicing meditation and exercising and learning to change my thoughts and popping that pill every day.
Only a collection of dreams and wishes that never came true.
///
When I was 8 years old I saw the movie The Goonies (still one of the best movies of all time), and I remember how, for days, I dreamed about all those skeletons.
I would sit in the bathtub, and my mom would come check on me, and I would see a skeleton walking through the door. My little sister would be fast asleep in her bed when I came in, and I would see a skeleton lying between the pink sheet and the purple-striped blanket. I would imagine my dad, wherever he was in the world, slumped in a corner, in skeleton form, looking like One-Eyed-Willie, except there was no treasure waiting on a lost ship.
What I’d seen in a childhood movie had thrown reality at me, proven that one day we would all die, and one day we would all turn to skeletons like the ones Mikey and Bran and Mouth ran into. Death terrified me, because it looked like those brittle bones, and sometimes it looked even scarier, like the wax figures lying in a casket, and neither one was what I wanted to be.
When I imagined getting older, I imagined death. And just like that, a little girl broke off what should be a happy relationship with her birthday.
She didn’t want to grow up. She didn’t want to get any older. She didn’t want to die.
///
So, you see, getting older has never been exactly easy for me. I was never the girl who couldn’t wait until she turned 10 or 16 or 21, because every one of those years felt like a step closer to death.
And even this week, when another birthday has come and gone, it passed with more dread than excitement.
It’s silly, when we get down to the heart of it, that we fear getting older. We, especially women, can feel time ticking so loudly—this many years until I can no longer have a baby, this many years until my hair turns all gray, this many years until they will no longer think of me as “young.”
What does it really matter?
Because there is a great gift in getting older, too, a wisdom that begins to settle into our bones when we realize that life is not really about these little things—having a job or not, publishing a book or not, making a name for ourselves or not.
Life is really about who we become in all these years. Who we become in our families and in our communities and in our selves.
Will we become people who believe accomplishment and accolades and just-right circumstances tell the whole story of who we are? Or will we become people who believe that our true worth is really tied to who we were created to be, who we already are when we peel away all the layers a world can wrap us in?
We are all born with a diamond down deep inside us, and the diamond is brilliant and visible for a time, and then the world covers it in a great heap of armor, and then we spend the rest of our years trying to uncover it again so we can see and know and believe the treasure we already are, without the qualifications and accomplishments tagging behind our name.
And if getting older means uncovering more of that brilliance, one shovelful at a time, then I want to embrace this getting older—because it’s another way I love myself.
So this year, on my day, I didn’t check for more gray hairs and moan about the wrinkles that have begun to gather around the corners of my eyes from smiling too much at my boys, and I looked, instead, toward the gift that time holds out to me every single birthday: one more chunk of a diamond revealed.
And then I whispered my wish.
