Birthdays. Some will rock you. Some will define you. Some will bury you, and then, like pressurized coal, you’ll be stronger and brighter for them. Some slip by without much notice. And the more we have the better, generally speaking. Someone told me this week, Congratulations! You’ve successfully navigated three dozen years of living! My first reaction was, um, ouch. Fair, but… I don’t think anyone needs their age added up by dozens. But my second reaction was, Yes. I damn well have. I’ve done it far from perfectly. To borrow a recent phrase from columnist Connie Schultz, no one wants to be defined by their greatest mistakes. And so we’ll skip over those, for the most part, “the dues one pays for a full life.” 36 years means you’ve had some valleys and some peaks, and it’s a sum total game.
Birthdays inevitably send you both backward and forward in time. Childhood birthdays with cousins around the table, and birthday cakes shaped like ball gowns and castles. My 18th birthday – a freshman at college – and my brand new college roommate ordered a pizza and put candles on it. It’s no wonder I still love her still today. And a few years later, my 21st birthday, with the same roommate, who’d arrived at the same place a few months before me.
Such different celebrations, just a few years apart, and yet so much living in between them. I’d lived away from home, and then away from the United States, fallen in love with Britain and quite possibly with a Brit, had left both to come back home where, to figure things out, I’d dyed my hair dark red and then blonde. I made plans, had them fall apart, and made new plans.
Once you have children, birthdays change, and not just because you’re now too tired to go out to celebrate, and even if you weren’t, it’s hard to find a babysitter past 10pm, and even if you could, who has the money after adulting for just long enough to acquire a mortgage, car payments and daycare. Birthdays change once you have children because you begin to account for time differently. You, yourself, feel like you’ve felt since you were 19 or so. Well, maybe 23. Once a year, you acknowledge that chronologically, you’re moving farther down the number line, but occasionally you have to do the math to remember exactly how old you are. Your children are the ones who are changing dramatically in front of you. 
They are the ones who remind us how fast time is actually going, and how it matters how we spend our individual days, because far too quickly, they become years for them, even while we, essentially, remain 23. Or certainly no more than 30.
And so, for this, the first year of my fourth dozen, I’m going to make a real effort to remember that the days go quickly, and that we don’t get them back. I’m going to take the time to smile over the people who stopped to wish happy birthdays, because they have made up so much of my sum total. How lucky I am to have a complex, beautiful web of friends and family who make up such disparate parts of my life, and yet who have marked it so indelibly.
Here’s to Year 36.
More bike rides, more dancing in the kitchen, more sitting on the front porch to watch the sun go down. Fewer knee-jerk reactions and rushes to judgement. More paring down clutter, mind and body, and more decisions that say, I’ll never be 36 again, so let’s do it right.