On aging.

Today is my birthday. I stopped celebrating my birthday years ago and starting thinking about it as an inevitable task, like renewing your driver’s license, it is something that you know you have to do but still put off acknowledging it until the very last second. This year, I decided that I deserved to celebrate and what I wanted to do for my birthday was hug my parents. So, we flew down to Florida and I am writing this blog post on their deck with the sun shining and the birds squawking (Florida birds seem very loud and aggressive compared to New York birds). My mother just came out to hug me and say happy birthday.

No matter how old we are, how many birthdays have past, we remain rooted in our need for family, for that connection with our past, with our very creation. We are unique as individuals, but our uniqueness has a home with our families, whose own uniqueness seems to complete ours and help us to make sense of our own reality.

We grow, we change, we age. We spend a fortune trying to reverse these inevitabilities, and my gift to myself is to accept them: my hair is going gray and has become curly, I look less like the me I have known and more like my grandmother every day, my joints send a constant reminder that they are in charge of the decision-making now. I can accept these things with grace and appreciate the process, or I can rail against it. My gift to myself is acceptance.

So, happy birthday to me. I have spent a wonderful few days with my family here in Florida. Family completes the circles of our lives. We are each flawed in our own way, but like a beautiful piece of art, those flaws are what makes the pieces have depth and intensity. It has been an incredible gift to spend my birthday with family; our collective aging adding layers to the stories and laughter.

Take today to love your family and to love yourself. Call your mother and tell her you love her. Put aside your differences. Give yourself that gift.