Driving 44

 Year four and it’s happening again. The first year, it started a couple weeks early but that’s understandable. It was uncharted territory. I looked up at the wall and imagined what horrors lie beyond. I felt pretty certain I would be greeted on the other side with chin hair and a mandatory uniform of mom jeans. Now, having made the official transition and then some, I can honestly say that getting there is far worse than being there.  

Second time it bothered me far less. I was still enjoying the new car smell and the fact that it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought. In fact, it kinda rocked. Still there was a twinge, a bit of discomfort.

I turned around and it was happening for a third time. I laughed about it, wrote Haikus for 42. The anxiety was appreciated and laughed about. I blinked and I was 43 and I’m not sure I remember… Wow. I literally do not remember what I did for my 43rd birthday. 

But now, here I am, SIX WEEKS OUT from 44 years of livin’ and I have to say, I’ve got equal parts pride and paranoia going on. I mean, I love the 40s. They are fantastic. You literally feel better than ever mentally. Of course, you forget a lot, that may be part of why it’s great. Again, I do not remember what I did for my 43rd birthday.

It's not that I don’t want to be 44. It’s just that I want the perks of being 44 with the perkiness of 24. I want my now wit, wisdom, complete lack of tolerance for people who expect me to be anything but what I am and the ability to see them coming from a mile away. And, I want yesterday’s look. That’s not how it works though. I watch Dr. Who. When you go back in time you are what you are now. Only the epoch has changed. You can’t be younger or taller or an ocelot or anything. (I so want to be an ocelot when I grow up.)

Here’s what I’ve decided about it all. Getting older is like driving. I know, it sounds ridiculous, stay with me. You come into the world a passenger. You don’t have any say where you go or what you do. Then one day your parents try to feed you something you have made a conscious decision that you don’t want and you put your hand up. You take charge. That’s when the keys jingle, the keys to your life actually being yours. Next thing you know you’ve taken your first step, grabbed the keys off the hook and you’re on your way.

Up until you are a teenager, you are oblivious to the drive.

It’s a beautiful time. But turn 13 and it’s off to the races. You just want everything to go faster. Problem is, you don’t know how to drive. You crash and burn a lot. There’s tears, angst, and weird smells filling the car. You don’t ask your parents for help because they’ve suddenly become complete idiots who obviously know nothing about driving. So, you ignorantly swerve down the road of life with your head out the window yelling YOLO, thinking you are going the speed of light, thinking you are light, you are the sun and the world revolves around you. You’re not. You’re sputtering, you’re coasting and the only things revolving around you are the people trying to stay out of your path of destruction.

Turn a corner and your in your 20s. It’s a tough time actually, harder than being a teen because you are in your “getting there” phase. Whatever your “there” is, an education, a career, financial independence, a home of your own, a spouse, a family, you want to get there and you want to get there fast. If you’re lucky you have parents who have miraculously lost their ineptness and can guide you a bit. You may even find yourself trying to get back in the car with them once or twice.

Suddenly, you get to your “there.” Most likely part of that place involves you having someone join you in the drive. Some days you’ll be madly in love, some you’ll be just plain mad. You will hold on tightly one moment and the next wonder just how fast you have to take a corner to throw them out of the car. It’s normal. Keep looking ahead.

Maybe you’ll have a baby, a little helpless passenger who can make no choices on their own yet control every single choice you make. The tunes, the thermostat, the size of your butt in the seat, it all changes. Even the car changes. You may wake up in a minivan in a cold sweat, horrified.

Scarier still is the day that little passenger jingles their own keys. You watch them grow and wreck and make completely stupid driving decisions. You spend half your day screaming at them to get the hell back on the road and the other half begging them to just stop driving, to just for one second go back to being that little passenger that loved you completely and smelled of utter perfection and life unsullied by the road.

My 40th birthday Lazer Tag party. My friend Kim won. She
just hid in one spot at shot everyone as they went by. Cheater.
And, Winner. She's wearing the shirt I'm wearing. It reads, "It's
my 40th birthday! Where's my spanking???"

Then, you get to where I am: the “gotten there.” Life’s not easy, but you’ve learned how to drive, you get it. You’ve learned to navigate the potholes, the detours. You run off the road on occasion but you’ve got insurance, you can handle it. And for some reason, maybe someone you love leaves the drive of life, maybe you finally notice the road map of veins on your legs or wrinkles on your face and you realize how completely fast it’s all going. You sit back, set the cruise control and begin really appreciating it all, the journey, the landmarks. You take mental pictures, take in the smells, take people closer, and just take longer because you see that the road is never long enough.

Then you remember all the things you’ve passed along the way that you never took time to regard. The radio station gets set to the songs you heard in high school and college. You take a good look in the rearview mirror, looking for yourself and finally see how beautiful you were. Your thighs were completely normal. Your hair didn’t need to be bleached. You didn’t need to be tan. You really didn’t need to be how you thought you should be and all you really needed to be, you were. It's a beautiful moment.

You look at the wrecks from which you never thought you’d recover and you see them for what they really were. You see what you caused to happen, what you allowed to happen and what just happened. You see the truth, the wins, the losses, the not quites, the absolutelys, the shoulda-coulda-wouldas, why-did-i-evers and the wow-I’m-so-glad-I-didn’ts. And because of them all, despite them all, you’re still here. And here, now, you realize you’ve finally got this driving thing down.

Then you look back ahead and everything just keeps going faster, it’s wonderful and terrible all at the same time. You finally appreciate what’s ahead and what’s gone past. You finally love the drive. You are changing lanes, drifting around curves, downshifting and loving that basically nobody born ten years after you has any idea at all what downshifting even is. 

You don’t want to stop driving. Ever. You want to run your car into the ground and when they bury it , you want the smoke from your engine to continue seeping out of the ground in steady, winding plumes.

But, all the same, you want to slow down.

Slooooow dooooown

I just want to slow down. 

So, I guess that’s my main issue. It’s not getting older. It’s just that it’s happening so fast and I want it to take longer because I love it. I want to be 43 a little longer because I’m old enough to know how great it is. The days are long, but the years are short and the long day of yesterday I was too young to appreciate how short years are. I had no idea that tomorrow I’d be staring 44 in the face…and that below it would be a neck that really isn’t even trying any more. 

Yes, don’t let this philosophical homily make you think for one second part of my issue isn’t plain old vanity. I feel so good and strong both mentally and physically. I feel more

"Do you want whipped cream" is one of the dumbest
questions ever!

like me than I ever have. Is it crazy for me to want to look the way the real me feels? Doesn't everyone  want their outside to feel as great as their inside? Of course. It’s like when the barista asks if I want whipped cream on my coffee drink. Why do they even ask? Of course. Of course I want whipped cream, and for a neck with some guts and for my butt to stay where it is and to think that the cute guy at the store is looking at me and not the much younger, prettier girl behind me and her obedient neck. 

But, I digress.  

I’m happy with my drive. Neck and all. Life’s not easy. Don’t think for one second my life is easy. No really good life is. Great lives are full of detours and potholes and flat tires and sunsets you wouldn’t have seen if you weren’t broken down on the side of the road. I like where I’m going. I’m at peace with where I’ve been. I’m very much happy with who I am. And, I suppose if my only payment for the blessings I have and the wisdom I’ve earned are wrinkles and incidental gravity damage, it’s a small price. The drive is worth it.  

(Who DOESN'T want whipped cream!!! Seriously!)