Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s 40!

Me, that’s who. Today, Saturday June 7, is my 40th birthday. (This is being written before Saturday because I don’t want to spend my birthday doing this.) I was born in 1968, one of the most turbulent years in recent history. The Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy (who died the day before my birth), protests and riots, the Chicago Convention, Nixon. “Sympathy for the Devil” and 2001: A Space Odyssey were both released that year. Those two pieces of popular culture neatly encapsulate both the darkness and the hope of the year of my birth.

Hope was abundant that year in the Apollo Space Program. Apollo 7, in October, was the first manned Apollo flight and a welcome success after the tragedy of Apollo 1. Apollo 8, in December, was the first mission to leave Earth orbit and travel to the moon. Humans left the relative safety of Earth’s orbit and traveled to another world!

I decided to look up other people who share my birthday. Here are some of my favorites:

• Beau Brummel, 1778
• Paul Gauguin, 1848
• Jessica Tandy, 1909
• Dean Martin, 1917
• Tom Jones, 1940 (yes, that Tom Jones)
• Liam Neeson, 1952
• Prince, 1958 (yes, that Prince)

Thanks to Brainy History for some of the dates.

I grew up in Claremore so I was literally steeped in Will Rogers lore. The Will Rogers Memorial Museum was not far from my house and every time we had out-of-town visitors, we’d drag them there. Heck, I even had my formal wedding portrait shot on the museum’s wide veranda. I don’t think I’ve seen any more of Will’s movies than the snippets they played in the exhibits, but the title of one really stuck with me–Life Begins At Forty. I remember thinking how impossibly old forty seemed even as my parents neared (and passed) forty themselves. How could life begin at such an advanced and decrepit age?

Well, now that I’m here, forty doesn’t seem so advanced, maybe just a tad decrepit. But I get the title, I finally get it. At the time that movie was made (1935) people tended to marry and have kids fairly young. My own great-grandmother got married at 13 and had my grandmother at 15. So if you get married, say, at 18 and have kids in your early 20′s, then by the time you turn 40, the kids are grown and gone or nearly so. The next phase of your life (one sans kids) would indeed start at 40. Now more people are holding off on having kids, waiting until their mid-30′s to mid-40′s, much like I did.

Even though I got married at 23, Monkey wasn’t born until I was 34, then Pumpkin came along right before I turned 37. I had plenty of time to live one sort of life, one sans kids, and get thoroughly set in my ways. Parenting infants can feel like a kind of timeless limbo, but things start to pick up once they become toddlers and preschoolers. So it does feel like a different phase of life is beginning. Plus, I’ve only got two more years of school then I will re-enter the working world. I finally feel like I have a concrete direction for my life, not just nebulous wishes.

Even though I live in same old ghost-ridden house, I am still married to my best friend after all these years, and I’ve decided to keep at this whole motherhood-thing, I feel like I’ve been given a fresh start, a do-over. Maybe life really does begin at forty after all.