On 41

Some people love their birthdays and I love that for them. I am not against my own. Birthdays happen, every year apparently, so they ought to be enjoyed. For me, that tends to be discreetly. Sometime last week I turned 41. My daughter’s 4th is next week. That her enthusiasm for our shared number is really just a run up for hers makes it no less appreciated.

Last year’s 40 came with a low grade feeling that I would or should have some serious thoughts. I tried. They didn’t take. The only things that came to mind were obvious or obtuse. Deep thoughts around dates , on a calendar or part of a couple, have never been my thing. If I’m being honest, my mirrors of self reflection around age only go skin deep. It is an exercise in vanity. A pull and pinch here, a close examination of a spot, a side eye peak at myself in profile. It’s inspection more than introspection. And at 41 , I’m thinking I like the way I look a lot more than I did in my 21. 

“Tu n’es pas belle, tu es charmante,” an older man told me when I was 22. I was living in Paris then so the french part made sense. And I understood the words, but I did not hear the compliment. All I heard was the first part. You are not beautiful….RUDE.

I was working the door at a club, the arbiter of who gets in not the enforcement, and was used to see all sorts of tactics to get my attention. At that time my French was poor enough to give me that aloof air of cool that was a requisite for the job. But I wasn’t cool or unflappable, I just didn’t understand what people were saying to me.I had cut my hair into a Jean Seberg style pixie. It was cute for a minute… at least until the cut grew in, only growing out not down, until it became a hair helmet.

In a way, I was your classic American girl in Paris, blissfully lacking in any type of self awareness. Not as emulable as Jean, not as intolerable as Emily. The initial offense I felt from the comment has long since warn off, the nuance of it settling in, as I, too, have settled in to myself. The man was right. I wasn’t beautiful. I wasn’t yet myself.

When you’re young you think beauty is bestowed and bedrock, innate and immutable, something you are or you are not. . But this kind of beauty is earned. It is a manner of being in this world. It comes from being in this world. And it almost entirely about change, what we chose to and what we chose not to. 

In my 20’s everything felt so dire. Big full blooms or nothing. What comes to mind now are the multiflora roses that grow wild in the scrub with the honeysuckle and the bittersweet.. They are often called rambler roses, but if you try to harvest and take them with you and they will go brown and odorless before you reach the end of the road. But on the vine they are sweet smelling small blooms, lasting as long as the weather agrees. No way to save longer, they are only to be appreciated without regret and loved where they live.  A friend’s mother once told me that her 40’s were the best decade of her life. It’s a great time for self expression, she said. You look the best you are going to look, you feel like yourself, you’re strong, the kids get under control, creatively you know who you are. She has been right about many things. So far, she seems right about this, too.