This post appeared on my previous blog, mariasmind.com, at the beginning of June, 2021. My birthday is now, but three of my siblings have their birthdays at the end of May, beginning of June: a glorious, sun-filled, freshly green time of year. Birthdays, especially the milestone ones, must have been on my mind. I have arrived at one of them, so here are my thoughts again about birthdays and getting older, with, of course, some diversions along the way.
How we perceive and react to our birthdays, especially how we approach the milestone ones – the ones that mark our journey to legal adulthood and the subsequent round-number ones – is a complicated amalgam of how our society perceives them and our evolving feelings about ourselves and getting older. Birthdays can also be a time to reflect, recalibrate and celebrate progress. I’m sure I’m not the only one who creates resolutions not on January 1, but increasingly and more meaningfully, in the period leading up to my birthday. I have found this strategy especially helpful in dealing with the more recent milestone birthdays. Although a person’s day of birth, and then birthdays, do not have the same value in all societies – for instance, I know the name-day or saint’s day (onomastico) of many of my family, because my devout mother places emphasis on them as equal, if different, to a birthday – they are generally agreed-upon, logical, numerical signposts to mark our progress through the journey of our lives.
George Carlin, arguably one of the U.S.’s most revered, influential comedians, spent much of his long career astutely pointing out how society uses words to camouflage. He talked about how the language, specifically the verbs, we use to talk about how old we are at different stages of our lives reflects how we think about getting older. He reminded us of our eagerness to reach adulthood – the notion of suddenly, magically, fully-formed adulthood or “becoming 21” – as distinct from the nebulousness of teenagerhood when our personalities are in flux and unsure. Reaching 21, which I daydreamed about and impatiently and idealistically wished for to sustain me through my mostly miserable teenage years, meant independence, control of decision-making, my life. That year turned out to be extremely important, but with hindsight, I finally understand that the decisions I made were the outcome of my teenage choices, priorities and immature self-awareness rather than a distinct division from the years that preceded my 21st birthday. It was a major signpost along my journey, not a new journey.
Of course, our birth date, the day, month and year we were born, is a convenient bureaucratic strategy for categorizing us in our increasingly Orwellian world. Under the guise of the anticipated thrill of receiving birthday greetings from people who may barely know me, even Google keeps prompting me to provide them with my birth date! It is also a reminder that I’m getting older as I scroll further every year to find my birth year. Often, when I am asked for my birth date as an identifier, I think that the inevitably younger person asking the question is making negative assumptions about me – boomer, tech dummy, hardened opinions – most of which is true . . . I assume it at the gym as well. It’s the kind of place “where everybody knows your name,” but my default is to think that I get noticed because of my currently abundant white hair and that, even at my advanced age, I can do lunges and (modified) burpees. Silly and insecure, but it demonstrates that, despite my positive self-talk and hard work, inevitably I am influenced by society’s focus on youth and who should be working out at the gym.
Despite my age insecurities about how I exercise, as I get older, I am finding my birthdays, including the round-number ones that engender attention, increasingly easier to manage emotionally. Mainly it’s because I am increasingly at peace with myself and who I am becoming. This has been a gradual, but over time, major shift in how I perceive my age – symbolized by my birth day. It has taken me a long time and a lot of reading and reflection – I am a late bloomer – to achieve a subjectively honest appraisal of myself. I like to think that I am realistically hopeful and definitely excited about – to borrow Jane Fonda’s term – the third act of my life.
In the later years of his long career, Frank Sinatra often wished for his audiences that they live to a 100 and that the last voice they heard would be his. This toast reflects the general understanding that Sinatra was extremely popular and deeply influential, not only for his generation, and that his music was pervasive and linked to iconic songs, such as “My Way” and “New York, New York.” More specifically, it also conveys that one of the main reasons for Sinatra’s incredible and enduring popularity was his ability to personally connect with listeners about love – heartbreak, joy – and increasingly as he aged, his awareness and bravado towards getting older. Of course, 100 years, and sometimes 400 at the end, reflected his hope for long life for his audience – and probably for himself.
Although some people, as they get older, seem to have a genuine indifference to their birthdays and the increasing number of years of life that day initiates, most people have an ambivalent love-hate relationship with their birthdays. Some of us try to focus on the positives of getting older – wisdom (hopefully), self-knowledge, remaining healthy – while others are resigned to the inevitability of them. To return to George Carlin, he highlighted our societal fear of aging by making fun of the term, ‘senior citizens’ which he saw as a softening of the blunter designation, ‘old people’. Birthdays, like most of what happens in our life journeys, do not happen in a vacuum and none of us lives in a bubble – except the pandemic-imposed one – so almost inevitably our self-perception is coloured, consciously or not, by how we perceive ourselves and our age in relation to others, especially our peers.
Birthdays are an emotional, complicated, strongly-felt topic for most people, especially the milestone ones. How do you feel about them? Have your feelings about them changed over the years? Please feel free to share your opinion about birthdays in the comments section below.
Leave a Reply