oh, Forties: see ya!
Saturday, January 12, 2013 at 10:03AM 
I'm starting a new job next week, the day after my birthday. It's super-sweet to consider that on my first full day of being FIFTY, I start my dream job. Seriously. How great is that? Not only did I gracefully end a job that really, truly, deeply wasn't working for me, but I get to step into a role that I've always wanted.
Insert mental image of me grinning ear-to-ear. That's pretty much the non-stop state of my face these days.
Right now I'm enjoying a pause between jobs, and reveling in a birthday weekend in Tahoe with my girlfriends -- good food, gorgeous snow, and so much love and cards and laughter til my belly aches.
The timing of all of this is genius, if I say so myself. Starting a new job at the beginning of a fresh year and at the start of a new personal decade, just ties in so sweetly with all of the mulling I've been doing for the past few weeks, mulling over what last year was about, what I learned, and planning what 2013 could bring. So as it turns out, the scope of my annual mulling-exercise has expanded: I'm not just thinking about 2012, but really thinking about the whole decade of being in my 40s.
What were my 40s all about, anyway?
These were some significant years for me, for sure.
- I started yoga on my 40th birthday, so basically it's my 10-year yogiversary coming up. Although I'm not practicing now the same way now as I was for most of the prior decade, still wow, what a huge contribution the practice made to my life in those years -- it's like it added a piece I didn't even realize was missing back into my life, gave me friends, community, travel, growth, so so much.
- I became an empty-nester. My son graduated from high school and college and is now a remarkable adult whose way of being in this world continues to amaze and delight me. You could say we did a good job as his parents, but I think it's more true that we did some things right and avoided doing a lot of things wrong, so that he stayed the little person he was when first born, a little over 25 years ago, into a patch of sunlight on a cold November morning, sweet from the start, sweet to the core.
- I started this blog right smack in the middle of my 40s, in 2008.
- I got my County Mouse on, got serious about gardening and started keeping bees.
- I worked like mad, growing my career through a string of jobs, three total, each of which was its own sort of crucible from which I emerged with more skills, more scars and stories of crazy people, more wisdom.
- I got cozy with cancer, got introduced to death. In one notable year-long period in this past decade, a close friend, my sister, our dog and then my husband all had cancer. The close friend is fine, the dog survived but has since passed on (RIP, beautiful pony-boy Jasper, still miss you), my husband made a full recovery. Only my sister's cancer is terminal. She's still hanging in there, as far as we know in my cut-off shut-out branch of the family, but hasn't much time left on this earth.
Basically, in my 40s, shit got real.
But real isn't code for bad or dark or negative. It's just another word for, well, real.
If I had a magic wand, I wouldn't even change any of it, except I would save Jasper from suffering, I would endow him with the ability to live forever, a part of me like the Dæmons in Golden Compass, my own little Pantalaimon.
And now with all that behind me as I round the corner toward FIFTY, the prospect of which a couple of years ago used to wake me from a deep sleep, sitting up straight in bed and blurting out, Holy Shit, in two years, I'm going to be fucking 50?, oh how I appreciate it all for giving me exactly what I needed, what I needed to be thi exact person that I am, with everything I've lived through and learned.
It's like my friend Marianne said, beautiful as ever Marianne who turned 50 two weeks before me, once she had her birthday, she just stopped giving a shit about things that bothered her before, like all the striving and climbing and pushing were over. We're at the top, we made it and from here it's easy. We just get the enjoy the fruits of all those year of labor, especially, for me, the last decade.
As weird as it is to consider that I'm chronologically 50 in 2 days, as much as it continues not to really make sense or feel true, still I know it's right. I earned this. I'm glad to be here saying Thanks and So Long to my 40s, staring out the window at sunlit snowy trees knowing that today is going to be another beautiful day, another day of love and laughter, falling and getting right back up.
XX
Reader Comments (1)
I too turn 50 in a few days. Know what it's like. Feels good on a bitter sweet way...