A brief inventory at age 45

I turned 45 on September 14. It was a good day, one that began with the discovery of a birthday card and a tiny china creamer stuffed with dahlias on our front stoop, an early-morning delivery from thoughtful friends. I’d taken off (paid) work for the day and, since we have childcare from 8 to 1 on Thursdays, would have the morning to myself. I thought I might read a book or take a long walk, but instead I wound up climbing back into bed and lying in a patch of sunlight until lunchtime. It sounds mildly depressing when I write it down, but it was really nice. In the early evening, we joined some friends for Chinese takeout and Negronis. After dinner, we crammed into their bathroom — four adults, two fifth-grade girls, and one eighth-grade boy — to accessorize ourselves with metallic temporary tattoos and stick-on rhinestones. Then we set out via light rail for the Beyoncé concert.

I’d intended to wear a mask. I’d started masking again in public places a week or two earlier, when Covid returned to the local headlines. But we boarded the train in a crush of people and my mask was out of reach, zipped into the pocket of the jacket I’d tied around my waist. I didn’t realize I wasn’t wearing it until a couple of stops into our trip. By then, still mildly intoxicated from my (single) cocktail and now too by the gorgeous and glittering sea of bedazzled Beyoncé-goers in which I swayed, I thought, Ah, well. Fuck it. And that’s when I, foolhardy optimist in a cheap silver cowboy hat, took a deep breath of someone’s COVID-19 virus-air. At least I think that’s where I got it?

The look of a woman who has just discovered facial rhinestones. (Photo by my friend Joe, whose son’s face I’ve hidden behind this black box.)

By some miracle, I had avoided Covid up to this point. Ash and I both had. Quietly, between the two of us, we’d wondered if we might be among those lucky few who just… never get it.¹ Well. Ash tested positive first. I was felled three days later, and Ames developed a fever on the very same day. Though the worst of it was over by maybe day 5, my body still — now, day 19 — seems depleted, like a creaky and lumbering thing I have to haul around.

A few days ago, I walked Gilbert to the dog park at Golden Gardens, a route we do often but hadn’t done since before I got Covid. To get to the park, we take the stairs down the hill from Northwest 85th Street. To get home, we have to climb back up, a gauntlet of 150-ish steep concrete steps set into a wooded bluff. Gilbert is always reluctant to leave the park, so it’s a given that the return trip will be a slog, with him stopping every half-dozen steps to gaze back down the hill and me swearing and straining in my own custom Sisyphus story, the version where Sisyphus angers the gods by buying a designer dog. Anyway, on our walk a few days ago, the stairs were… somehow even worse?! Gilbert was fine, Gilbert was Gilbert, but where my feet usually go, I had two sandbags laced up in Hoka sneakers.

I mean, it’s fine. It’s okay. The week we were sickest, I kept saying to Ash how relieved I was that it was September of 2023, not September of 2020 — that we had the luxury of getting Covid and being vaccinated, the luxury of not being afraid. Soon enough I’ll be on the stairs again and only feel like Sisyphus, not like Sisyphus post-Covid.

Sometime in the last couple of years I started losing track of my age — I’m stuck on 43, not sure why — but while we’re on the topic of bodies, the main thing to know about turning 45 is that it marks the advent of one’s Colonoscopy Era.² I was supposed to have mine on September 25, but I had to reschedule it by a few weeks because of Covid. I don’t exactly want to have a colonoscopy, but there was never a question in my mind that I’d do it. Turning 45, though it’s not technically a ‘big’ birthday, feels like a real achievement. Did I say this last year? It sounds familiar. I imagine every birthday might start to feel this way. When I was a kid, there were so many deaths in my mother’s generation: my uncle Jerry, my mother’s brother, died at age 43; a year later, my mother’s younger sister Millicent died at 41; and then my aunt Andrea, my aunt by marriage, died at 44. If I have written a lot about those deaths (and I have), it’s because dying ‘early’ — at the start of midlife, when most are still on the upswing — always felt like a real and present threat. Or maybe not so much a threat; it was a possibility I couldn’t ignore. Now that my cousins and I, that generation’s children, are well into adulthood, it sometimes shocks me that we’re all still around, that we get to keep going.

Not only do we get to keep going, but I’ve gone all-in on Life, Capital-L, becoming a mother again at age 44! I have two children! Accordingly, I now consume a larger volume of coffee. Where I used to have a single cup of Aeropress in the morning, I now drink the better part of a Bialetti Moka Express.

When I bought the Bialetti in early 2022, it had seemed impossible to get the brew right. My electric stove was always too hot or too cool, and whatever I did to course-correct, the pot would boil too hard, spewing espresso like a geyser. For a couple of months, the Bialetti sat on a shelf in the hallway closet. But then, deep in a Google-hole, I found a video that broke down the brewing process into steps that actually worked — and that I could remember and replicate while also doing the myriad things an adult person has to do in the morning. I’m now maybe six months into my Bialetti lifestyle. I love this coffee. I like to drink it from a teacup, though I guess an espresso cup would be logical. Whatever is left in the day’s pot I pour into a jar and put in the fridge for Ash to have the next morning, cold, with milk.

In my 45th year, I took up journaling. And I AM STILL JOURNALING! I just pulled up the essay I wrote about it, and apparently I started on May 23, which means that I am now 4.5 entire months in. I’ve filled four (thin) notebooks. I still use the six prompts that I mentioned in the aforementioned essay and which I will now list here for anyone who is journaling-curious but not enough to click on the link above:

YESTERDAY’S GREAT MOMENTS (3 things)

YESTERDAY I LEARNED (3)

I AM GRATEFUL FOR (3)

WHAT WOULD MAKE TODAY GREAT (3)

I AFFIRM (2)

I MIGHT FEEL BETTER IF (2)

Here’s something you might want to know, from today’s journal entry: Helen Rosner’s “Roberto” soup lives up to the hype — and it serves more than two! I’d say it serves six. Highly recommend.

I still exchange a photo of each day’s journal entry with my friend Ben in Memphis — and as of late August, Matthew is journaling this way too, so he and I also exchange photos. I cannot say enough about having partners in this practice, both for accountability and camaraderie. Plus, I get to learn new and exciting things about my friends, like that yesterday Matthew listened to OK Computer while lying on his living room floor, which, it turns out, is his favorite way to listen to music. I had no idea.

I am 45! I like it, though I would like Covid to give me my stamina back. At 45, I eat more peanut butter than I have ever, ever, eaten before. I drink less alcohol. I can change a tail light on a 2015 Subaru Impreza. I have helped someone give birth. I am capable of receiving a flu shot while holding a baby on my lap! I have a preferred brand of string cheese.

At 45, I notice that I am more generous than I used to be. It could be the Zoloft, but I think I can claim some of the credit too. Journaling has helped me to think about generosity. Something that Ben often writes in his journal is “Generosity is the path to abundance.” He explained to me that he thinks of giving not only in terms of money or resources or things, but also of time, of attention. This year, more than any other in my life, I have been on the receiving end of others’ generosity — first after Ames’s birth, and more recently, while we were sick with Covid. We have been given bags of groceries, home-cooked meals, restaurant meals, bunches of flowers, hours of care for Ames, big-sister gifts for June, carpool coverage, dog-walks, a shield-sized loaf of levain that was still warm from the oven it had baked in, and three entire nights of sleep at a time when we were desperate for it, when friends came over and took care of the baby all night long. While we had Covid, the friends who’d surprised me with a birthday card and dahlia delivery left a Tupperware of homemade chili on the doormat. Tomorrow I want to return their little china creamer, filled this time with flowers from our yard.

I have thought so often lately of something Ross Gay said last year in an interview with Sara B. Franklin, an interview I’ve mentioned here before. Gay was promoting his then-new book Inciting Joy. Though the book has the word ‘joy’ in the title, it’s just as much about sorrow — the way that sorrow, when it is shared and acknowledged, can give rise to joy, and how that joy can be “an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity.” One of the through lines of the book is, as Gay puts it (and as I shall emphasize by formatting as follows):

What happens if we share our shit? Fundamentally?

In the word ‘shit’ here I read everything you can think of: sorrows, joys, yes — and also time, attention, material resources, money. Sharing shit as a repudiation of capitalism. Sharing shit as friendship. Sharing shit as care! Sharing shit: a way of life! Sign me up for another year.

1. June had Covid during the Omicron surge of early 2022. We chose not to isolate her because it felt harsh to isolate a kid, and to our surprise, neither Ash nor I got it. When June got Covid a second time in early September of this year, we did have her isolate, and I don’t think we got it from her this time, either. There were a solid 2.5 weeks between her testing positive and the rest of us getting sick. Covid math, whatever.

2. The American Cancer Society recommends that people at average risk of colorectal cancer start regular screening at age 45. This doesn’t HAVE to be a colonoscopy, I should clarify; it can also be a stool test. But a colonoscopy is more thorough and more accurate, and I like thoroughness and accuracy. FWIW, Anne Helen Petersen did a great service for all humankind when she wrote this essay about her colonoscopy.