I am turning 39 tomorrow. I have never had a hard time with aging, and actually am kind of looking forward to 40. It is sort of an “I am woman, hear me roar” age. At 40, you pretty much are who you are going to be, and it is time to stop apologizing and own it.
Turning 40 is kind of like a colonoscopy – the procedure itself is not really that big of a deal, but the prep sucks. This year – 39 – is my prep.
I can barely remember twenty, but I know that my life looks nothing like what I dreamed about then. At twenty, I was pretty sure that forty was nothing but a downhill slide to fat thighs, droopy boobs, and a pressing need to know when canned cat food is on sale at the dollar store.
At twenty, I obviously needed a good slap in the face.
What I didn’t know then – and I wouldn’t have believed it anyway - was that I would have heartaches so deep that I would never recover, and moments of joy so wondrous that they would take my breath away. Those moments would not come from sweeping adventures, but simply from living my life.
The weight of my experiences has settled into my hips and thighs as expected, but I like to think it keeps me grounded in my own wisdom. Joy has crinkled my eyes, and I have “sun kisses” across my nose and cheeks. I have scars, both visible and invisible, that have healed and hardened to make me almost unbreakable.
I don’t really have regrets, but I do wonder what happened to that young woman who thought that there was so much time and limitless potential. I never dreamed that I would settle in to domesticity so early and stay there, unquestioning, for the next 19 years.
I got married, bought a house, added dogs and cats – and then kids – to our family. I learned to say “no”. I tended to plan, to be practical, to put limits on life. I always thought that “later” I would take more risks; to be more present, love more freely, express my feelings more openly.
With each year that passed, I bound myself more tightly with my notions of what “responsible” and “successful” looked like. Somewhere along the way, I forgot how to say yes.
So, at 39, I have one year to make myself the woman that I can embrace at 40.
Last week, in the perfect synchronicity of the Universe, my yoga teacher gave a talk about the Hindu God, Ganesha. He is depicted with an elephant’s head and many arms. My first thought was, “Great – look at all those arms, wasted on a man…..As a mom, I could REALLY have made good use of those!”. And then, I noticed the central set.
Ganesha holds one hand out, palm upright, hand open to receive. “Bring it on!”, he seems to say. On the opposite side, the hand is depicted with the palm facing out, arm straight. “But, let me choose what I keep.” It is the dynamic tension of both yes, and no.
This year is about the hard work of excavating the hope and possibility of being twenty, then integrating that into the grounding and strength of being forty.
It begins with saying yes.
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