A brief inventory at age 44

Yesterday I turned 44 years old. I woke up to find that my spouse had decorated: they’d taped to the kitchen window a duo of hearts cut from red origami paper and affixed to the front-hall wall a giant number 44. Ash is very good at celebrating birthdays. Then they left for the gym, and I made a cup of coffee and rinsed a bowl of cold blueberries, and then I decided to put on some music to mark the occasion, because I never put on music in the morning. I chose an album by Mary Lattimore, a contemporary harpist, because it reminds me of a friend I haven’t seen in a long time, a friend I think of as living well. So I sat down on the sofa with my black coffee and my prelude-to-breakfast blueberries and a novel, and a small crowd of finches assembled at the feeder outside, and Mary Lattimore played, pensive and autumnal, from a little Bluetooth speaker on the kitchen counter, and after about ten minutes of this, I thought, oh shit, I’m going to cry. Then I remembered: I’m 44, and I can change my mind when I want to. I turned off the music, and the day got better.

I took off work and made only one plan for the day, a morning walk with a friend. I requested a route that we’ve done a number of times together, through her neighborhood and along the shore at Discovery Park, a little over six miles in all. The first time we walked the route, sometime earlier this year, I was astonished to see the mileage on my phone when we were done; they had passed easily, accumulated without my noticing. Now I always request this route when we walk, because it feels good to be reminded of what I’m capable of. This wasn’t my experience of my body thirty years ago, or even twenty. I was never an athlete, never experienced myself as fit, not like the girls on the school soccer team or even my own mother, who was then a personal fitness trainer. It’s only now that I feel fit, a version of fit, a version that is meaningful to me. I can walk a couple of miles in my hilly neighborhood and call it just a little walk with the dog; I can ride a horse with a little less exhaustion each time I do it, though I did almost puke from exertion on a particularly hot day last month; I can walk six miles with a friend and not be sore the next morning. I do not run. I do not go to the gym. My lower back is tight most days, because I work at a desk. Earlier this week I spent a couple hours reading on the sofa, and it was terrific until I looked up from the book and discovered that my neck was now impossibly stiff. Over dinner, Ash and I entertained ourselves by searching the Internet for solutions to reading-related neck pain. It turns out you can buy a giant adjustable floor stand that will hold your book for you:

— if you can manage to look at it without seeing McCaulay Culkin in the poster for Home Alone:

We did not buy it.

I am 44! I am making better choices. I do not rag on my body much anymore. I do not wish it were different, or at least not very different. Sure, it’s true, I may never not be on acne medication. I have been on acne medication for two-thirds of my total years on Earth. But by and large, my body works very well, and I don’t think it’s fair to pick on it. I do wish for fewer ingrown hairs, especially in the places I can’t reach without help. I wish for less puffiness under my eyes, or undereye bags, or circles, or whatever they’re called. But I suspect it’s not going to get any better than it is today, and I am not very interested in fighting it. It seems more useful, more peaceful, to fight the idea that I should fight it.

I am always willing to spend money on books, on travel, on food, on flower bulbs and compost, and on the people I love. I never think twice about the money that I spend on the people I love. It is always worth it. I say this as someone who, a mere twenty years ago, used to come home from the grocery store to the apartment I shared with my boyfriend and, calculator in hand, neatly divide the grocery receipt into My Stuff, His Stuff and Stuff We Share, and then make him reimburse me for the second category and exactly half of the third. I have been many people, and I expect I will be many more.

As a kid I never had a lot of friends at once, always preferring just two or three close ones. I imagine that most people find me reasonably easy to be around, but some probably find it hard to pin me down to an actual friendship. I know I’m this way; I think it’s because I like so much to be alone. All the same, I have more friends now, more people I love and value, than I ever imagined for myself. Most of them I only see once a month or so, if that, and some of them I talk with only a couple of times a year, but we are friends because our expectations are well-matched. Neither of us expects more or is easily offended by a phone call unanswered. God, I hate answering the phone. I never want to talk when the phone rings, only when I am the one initiating the call. I know this is not a nice way to be. I’m working on it. I thought for a long time that there was something wrong with me, something hard and mean, that I wasn’t as good a friend as other people. I do think some people are especially gifted at friendship. I am not, but I am trying to spend less time flogging myself for it. Oh, I definitely still start to, still reach for the mental cat o’nine tails, but I can stop myself faster. I am getting better at remembering to be a friend in ways I enjoy – making plans for coffee or walks, taking time to text a little hello, picking up the phone when I feel able.

I have spent a lot of time feeling that other people knew something that I didn’t, that other people knew how to live better than I did, how to love better than I did, that I was chronically behind or lost or clueless. The first time I went camping as an adult was in 2017, and as though that weren’t hard enough, camping for the first time at age 38, I also accidentally froze an entire cooler’s worth of food because I’d had the brilliant idea to chill it with dry ice instead of ordinary bagged ice. My divorce had been finalized for two months; Ash and I had been together for seven months; and June was just shy of five years old and kept tracking dirt into our borrowed tent. Lying between them on our borrowed air mattress, I woke up in the night and couldn’t stop crying. The other families on our camping trip were all still intact, thriving, growing, while mine had broken apart, and though I knew I was the immediate cause of that breaking, the one who actively blew it up, and though I also knew even then that Ash and I were beginning to build a new family, still I felt I had fallen irredeemably behind, that I’d never feel the same sense of belonging among them again. Of course I was wrong, mostly. Some of those friends fell away, though not for the reasons that kept me awake that night. Some of those friends are still with me; they are reading this, even. What I felt that night was only a feeling, not reality. For most of my life, I never even knew there was a difference. I wonder if I would have learned that, had I not made the messes I made. I also learned that I love to camp, all the crying notwithstanding.

I always wanted to be one of those low-maintenance types, a woman who hardly needs a thing. I am not the only one who dreamed of this; many of us have been the crane wife. As a child I watched endless commercials for makeup, hair dye, diets, the myriad products promising to make me into the right kind of woman. But I wanted to be the right kind of woman without working so hard; I wanted it to come naturally, without all the striving and the sweat. More than that, I believed it should. I remember visiting a friend of Brandon’s in Chicago when he and I were still newly dating, and using her bathroom, I was sick with jealousy to find that the only things in the medicine cabinet were a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bar of Dove, and a tube of lipstick in a soft and pretty shade of pink. There wasn’t even a rogue hair stuck to the soap. I wanted that: to be so effortless, to make the trappings of my self small enough, simple enough, that I’d fit in my own pocket. A few years before, when I’d moved to Seattle at age 24, I remember how proud I felt that the entirety of my belongings could fit in a two-door car. I couldn’t imagine ever needing more than that, ever allowing myself to need more than that. 

But it turns out that most things worth anything to me have started in desire, with wanting something and working to claim it. Turns out, I need a lot. What I have needed most, though, is to believe that what I need, what I want, is valid – and to surround myself with people who believe that too. I am getting better at both. I am 44. Next year I will be 45, and with that comes a colonoscopy. Next year I will be 45, and I will have two children, one of whom will be an infant. Everything is very real. My life, my world, this whole world, is messier than I would have ever chosen. I know I could have made it simpler, but then I wouldn’t have gotten when I wanted. Anyway, you know what is extremely messy? Camping. Camping is a dirty, messy way to travel, and to do it comfortably, you need a lot of stuff. Like with most everything worthwhile in adulthood, you make the investment only half-knowing if you’ll stick with it; you can’t know until you buy in. Here I am, here we are: bought in. My life will never again fit in a two-door car. We’ve got two tents, camping cots, a bin for this, a bin for that, sleeping bags, a camp stove — but even with all that stuff, or maybe because of it, I feel oddly light, almost nimble, fit to the task at hand, suited to the life I am choosing.

Over Labor Day, we camped in the woods of Lopez Island with friends. It was dusty, and the mosquitos were so bad, they even bit our faces. But climbing out of the tent in the morning in my dirty jeans from the day before, my people still asleep behind me, I saw myself as from afar, and thought, There she is! Who would have thought! I could go on like this forever.