This morning at 12:37 am my 56th year of life ended and my 57th began.  With this day comes feelings of gratitude, joy, amazement, and a need for some quiet reflection.

Age has never really been a big deal to me.  I have no problem honestly telling someone my age (except the young cashier at the movies who kindly gave me the senior discount, presumably because of my white hair, when I was 49) if they ask.  I always tell my students exactly how old I am.  Scary that I am now approaching the age of some of their grandparents!  Why hide it?  My age is what it is.  I either look it or I don’t.  I either act it or I don’t.  The number itself is not going to change either of those things.  Because of my attitudes about age, milestone birthdays have come and gone like any others.  I have acknowledged them, but not overly indulged them.  Not that my 56th birthday is a milestone by any means, but I have found myself thinking more about birthdays  today than I have in past years.

If we think about our earliest birthdays, they are really milestone celebrations for our parents rather than us.  Our first birthday is a milestone because all firsts are a milestone.  Our parents celebrate this milestone because they successfully figured out the whole taking care of a baby thing, procen by the fact that we are still in their care and not that of CPS.

On our third birthday, they are again celebrating because we all made it through the “terrible twos.”  It may not have been pretty, but we all made it to us turning three years old.  And still CPS has not been called.

On our fifth birthday, most moms celebrate with tears of sadness and joy.  Sadness because we are now old enough to start school and we won’t be at home all day.  And tears of joy because we are old enough to start school and won’t be at home all day.  Moms are kind of funny that way.

Once we start school, we begin to understand birthdays on a more personal level.  Now there are friends and parties and gifts.  The world of Chuck E. Cheese and bounce houses and pony rides and scary clowns is opened up to us.  These are the memories that we carry with us into adulthood.

Between the ages of five and twelve, birthdays are all about food and fun with friends and family.   Then comes age thirteen!

It may be this passage from age twelve to thirteen that gives the number 13 its reputation of being unlucky.  Parents often approach their child’s thirteenth birthday with fear and trepidation caused by the unknown that comes with raging teenage hormones and a relentless quest for independence.  The parental merit badge earned by surviving the terrible twos in no way prepares one for successfully maneuvering through the teenage years.  As “children” we see celebrating our thirteenth birthday as a magic moment, one that brings with it rights that only twenty-four hours earlier had eluded us.  Looking back, this is most certainly not how my thirteenth birthday unfolded.    What came, in my case, was more parental scrutiny about everything – where I was, who I was with, what I was doing.  Maybe I had more freedom, but that is not how I remember it.  Admittedly, thirteen was a long time ago!

Then comes the big sixteenth birthday.

After this morning’s reflection, I realize that this is where my disassociation with milestone birthday’s began.

Back in 1977 when I turned sixteen, everyone got their driver’s license on their sixteenth birthday.  Driver education was taught as part of the physical education curriculum.  Every one had to take it so as soon as the calendar said that you were sixteen, you were prepared to go get your license.  This truly was a rite of passage; the freedom that we thought was ours at thirteen now really was ours.

Except for me.

Because of my vision, I cannot drive.  While all of my classmates were busy taking driver training, I got an extra six weeks of health education – hormones, birth control, STDs.  I suppose that you can look at it as they were all learning all of the rules, responsibilities, and hazards  of being a teenager behind the wheel and I was learning all of the rules, responsibilities, and hazards of being a teenager in the backseat of a car. 🙂

Another thing that mitigated my excitement about  turning sixteen was the fact that because I had skipped a year of school, I was a year younger than all of my friends and classmates.  By the time I actually did reach age sixteen, doing so was old news among my peers.  In some ways, I think this helped to blur the reality that getting a driver’s license, experiencing that rite of passage, was something I was never going to do.

With my eighteenth birthday in 1979 came my right to vote in the 1980 presidential election.  I exercised my right.  I was one of the 6.6% of the population who cast their vote for John Anderson, the Independent candidate who ran against Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.  Today I am a political junkie, but back then I knew virtually nothing about politics.  Like so many today, when I cast that vote,  I was a woefully uninformed voter.  I suspect that my choice to vote for the Independent candidate was a first step in my life journey of taking the road less traveled.

On my 21st birthday, I had just graduated two weeks earlier with my undergraduate degree, was preparing to begin graduate school, and had just started dating the guy who I would eventually marry and with whom I’d raise our two girls.  I was at my parents home for the holidays and away from all of my friends (one of the pitfalls of a Christmastime birthday) so my 21st birthday came and went, like so many others, without pomp and circumstance.

Yes, I was now old enough to legally purchase liquor, but I was not a drinker.  And, even if I had been, having to ask someone to drive me to the liquor store seriously deflates the feeling of being an adult!

During the year after my 21st birthday, I got married, moved to Texas, and started graduate school.  Now I was a real adult, one without a driver’s license and one who still had not made a purchase at a liquor store.

For most, after age 21, the “decade birthdays” become the milestone celebrations.  Even those have never been a big deal for me.

On my thirtieth birthday, my oldest child was a week into the terrible twos.  Remember what I said earlier about parents, the terrible twos, and survival?  Enough said.

On my fortieth birthday, I was in the throes of parenting.  My girls had just turned nine and twelve.  Their birthdays are December 22 and December 23.  Between normal life stuff, the celebrations of their birthdays, and Christmas, by the 28th everyone was tired of celebrating.  Understandably so.

Turning fifty should have included a big celebration.  A half of a century old.  My girls had both made it to adulthood.  I was a newlywed (again), having remarried the year before.  There were plenty of things in my life to celebrate.  I did so quietly.

I didn’t feel fifty, not that I knew what fifty was supposed to feel like.  I guess I thought that I was supposed to feel “old.”  I didn’t, though Weber did present me with my own AARP card on my fiftieth birthday and take me shopping for bras at the outlet mall where they give discounts to AARP card holders.  Perhaps at that moment I should have reconsidered that whole newlywed thing!  As I write this now, it sure does sound like an “old people” experience.  Lol!

And here I am on my 56th birthday…contemplating birthdays, wondering why I have never done so before.  I am truly grateful for all of the years of life that I have had – the good ones, the not so good ones, the really bad ones.  They have all formed me into the person that I am today.  I am thankful that I am here to see this birthday as I know that so many peoples’ lives have been cut way too short.  In some ways, I feel guilty about not having honored all of my milestones birthdays in a bigger way.  In my heart I know that I have not taken them for granted, but the fact that they have not been accompanied by grand celebrations make it feel like maybe I appear ungrateful.  Are outward celebrations a way of publicly saying thank you for the gift of life?

Perhaps my reflections today are coming from the place of knowing that I am on the downside of the mountain of life.  At 50, I could have been standing on the top, the apex.  Living to be 100 is possible, though maybe not probable.  Living to be 112 is most certainly not likely to happen.  So I find myself firmly in the second half of life.

In four years, I will reach another milestone birthday.  To honor my journey toward sixty, which will culminate on December 28, 2021, I am going to write about my years from 56 to 60 in weekly blog posts.  Doing the math, I realize that this means over two hundred posts.  I have no real idea what I will write about.  I have no idea what these next four years will reveal.  The only idea I have is to make this commitment today and hopefully discover things to write about that will help me to outwardly honor the gift of my life.

Thank you for reading.  I invite each of you to journey with me as I officially begin Sailing Toward Sixty.