I’m not comfortable with turning 50.
Before I turned 30, I thought, I gotta get my shit together. So I arranged to get my teaching certificate before I turned 30.
Before I turned 40, I thought about Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate,” and reassured myself that I had moved to New York City, and had lots of good friends and family to celebrate with.
Fifty feels like, oh, shit, how can I get this old, someday I may die.
It feels like everyone older than me is becoming alarmingly old.
You know how Oprah used to always tell us that when you got older you “came into your own” and you “stopped worrying so much about what other people think”?
I think she just experienced that because she is rich as fuck. Richer than fucks, actually. Richer than all the fucks.
(Love you, Oprah.)
A friend gave me a cornucopia of 50 themed gifts, which was so, so sweet, and that helped. There was swag. I had someone in my life who cared enough to go hard on the fun stuff. That friend also went pretty hard on my 30th. I shoulda known.
I have a hard time giving myself permission to feel bad. In education, we are constantly fixing things, and my job sustains in me a ridiculous level of optimism. Kid just got arrested for stealing a car? Well, we can turn it around! You just punched someone in the face? Well, you won’t do that again, will ya? (They might.)
I talk myself out of having feelings with wariness about ingratitude. You may be 50, but a lot of people are dead before then. It’s just luck to get to be 50.
Still, it’s a very Buddhist birthday for me, looking at what I can’t control: aging, time, death.
Today our students’ social-emotional lesson was about what you can and can’t control. “I really need this one,” I said.
“Take notes,” one of the kids said. So I did.
I’ve made a lot of progress in letting go of things like what administrators do, what kids do when they’re not with me, and even some progress in, people might vote in dangerous lunatics.
But then I’ve always had an overwhelming fear of death.
Not always. I have had plenty of times I’m in my spirit, and I know for sure that life isn’t something you hold onto or keep in a jar. You just ride it. Whatever the situation is there, you’re carried along. My ego fades a bit, and I live in a sane place, where God is real, and spiritual things are much more real than figuring out how to set up my new cell phone (don’t ask) or whether or not someone’s going to get upset that my students failed another nonsensical standardized test.
I understand being past grabbing and squeezing situations. I do know how.
On this occasion, I’m trying to make room for my ego, and my petty lil self, to grieve. It sucks to get older, in many ways, even in the great health I’m in, with all the security and joys I have.
It sucks to be mortal.
In my experience.
I set up my October display, right on October 1, controlling the scaries. My jack o’lantern faces, bought at Dollar Tree and painted with my orange acrylics, eyes and mouths made with black tiles. My photos of my beloved dead. Candles. I’ve got this, see?
I’ve contained it, controlled it, set it in its place.
The ritual helps. The ritual can also lead to a transcendent place. You have to let it work on you, and not compartmentalize it out of your awareness.
Sometimes Halloween stuff delights me. Sometimes I feel the death underneath it, and I don’t like it at all.
However I feel, I will have anyone who’s free over to my place on my birthday, and we’ll drink and eat and laugh and goof around.
This week one of my classes watched “Inside Out 2,” and like all Pixar films, even in the room with my rather squirrely students, I was crying at the cry moment: your friends love all of the parts of you. You have to love all the parts of you, and forgive them.
I’m making a place for sadness, mourning, grief, and trying to remember she’s just a soft, sad lady in a beautiful blue turtleneck. And she loves me.
