Four Great Things About Turning Forty
One
I am more sensible and life is less fraught. Yes, this sounds terribly boring, but I’m happier.
My boringness is reflected in my approach to my milestone birthday. My partner and friends harangued me in the weeks leading up to it, wanting to know my plans. I briefly contemplated a large gathering at a bar, in a similar vein to my thirtieth just minus the male stripper, but I decided I would prefer to work. If I picked up an extra shift on my birthday, I might be able to afford the botox that was three years overdue.
Then someone threatened a surprise party and I realised my best way forward would be to take up the offer of my dear friend, Tāmaki novelist Rosetta Allan. She would host a small soiree of our mutual friends at her inner-city home/haven. We’d order pizza, drink gin cocktails, and relax in the hot tub. Easy.
Two
I prepared for my birthday by drinking lots of water throughout the day and taking antihistamines (Another benefit of getting older is I have a reaction to alcohol that gives me full-blown head cold symptoms. Less inclined to drink = less inclined to hangovers and other negative health side-effects). If you’re younger than me, you may hope the story expands from here and my desire for a low-key gathering was thwarted. That I had a thumping party with DJs and a visit from noise control. No. I am too old for such things.
We had a beautiful clear blue-skied evening. Eleven of us, drinking cocktails and eating Hummingbird cake around a flaming brazier. No one fell over. Two large golden helium balloons floated above us, and at one point a gentle breeze fortuitously aligned the tip of the four inside the rather vulval-looking zero. A frisky forty, someone quipped.
Speeches were made. A high school friend talked at length of how I liked to sexy-dance when I was younger to wind men up, and how she was surprised I became a mother. I was able to laugh. At forty, I’m hard to offend. At forty, I care less about what people think of me. Four decades of lost dignity, and owning up to my mistakes means I have little ego left to protect. And the most wonderful thing of all: the people around me are people I’ve chosen, and who have chosen me. Give me a night of conversation and connection with them, over a gathering of one hundred acquaintances any day.
Three, This is the story of a balloon.
My daughter’s eyes lit up when she saw the golden four and golden zero floating in our lounge the next day. She particularly liked the zero, so she tied it to the arm of her teddy bear. For two days, it travelled around with us in the car.
On Tuesday, we stepped out of the car and she handed me Teddy with balloon. She did not inform me she’d spent the journey untying the string. The golden circle floated away from me into the sky, then caught by the wind, headed south. We ran down the side of the house and onto the lawn to watch it climb higher and higher. How wondrous, I thought, a form of littering, but what could I do? I snapped a few photos as it grew smaller and smaller, glinting in the sun. The disappearance of my vulval birthday balloon seemed to symbolise so much I couldn’t articulate. I felt happy. My child threw herself on the ground, howling that it was the worst day of her life.
How much less rocky, less extreme one’s emotions are at forty. I no longer expect perfection of myself and others, and I know that loss and gain, pain and change, are signs of a life well-lived. A friend sent me a quote attributed to Agatha Christie: “What are the years from twenty to forty? Fettered and bound by personal and emotional relationships. That’s bound to be. That’s living. But later there’s a new stage. You can think, observe life, discover something about other people and the truth about yourself. Life becomes real — significant. You see it as a whole. Not just one scene — the scene you, as an actor, are playing. No man or woman is actually himself (or herself) till after forty-five.”
Four
I work in newborn intensive care, where sometimes the beginning of life is followed far too close by its end. It is hard not to see this fragility, and be somehow changed by it. Like most of us, my younger version took risks with the usual culprits: substances, fast cars, strange men with fast cars. I carry with me the knowledge that with a different turn of fate, I wouldn’t be here.
So here is my mantra: getting older is a privilege not afforded to everyone and I will be grateful for my wrinkles and saggy parts.
Though I did get a botox voucher for my birthday, which I shall use happily.
Amy is an author, book reviewer, registered nurse, and occasional writer of children’s poetry. She lives in Titirangi with her six-year-old daughter, a fluffy white cat and a dozen pet garden snails. She has a Master of Creative Writing from the University of Auckland. Her first novel, Fake Baby, won the Wallace Foundation Prize and was long-listed for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. When not working on her second novel, she pulls shifts in Newborn Intensive Care.
