Birthday Wisdom.

Birthdays are interesting things. A time to take stock, sift through events from the past and look to the promise of the future. A time to make plans, throw away what hasn't been working in favor of brighter horizons, better opportunities.

Birthdays are also a time for tough love. Or perhaps they are merely a time of tough love for me. Especially this year. Having just left a '7' year behind me, and moved onto an '8', I'm pensive.

I've heard that seven-aged years, (17, 27, 37, etc.), are meant to be psychically super-charged. Events undertaken during these years are auspicious and the seeds planted destined to grow to greatness. But what of the years that precede or follow '7' years. Do they get bumpkus? Are they destined to be incrementally wonderful, or...?

I'm not a kid anymore, but then again, I don't really feel old either. It's strange. When I was younger, I yearned, as many teenagers do, to be 'older'. To be an adult...a woman. Then as I achieved all of these things, I found I felt no different, no older. I'm not sure I could ever really verbalize what I expected being 25 or 32 to feel or look like; I sort-of figured it would be a case of 'I'll recognize it when I see it' sort of situation. The problem with this logic is...I don't. I never have. I've stumbled through many situations, convinced X = X, only then with time and distance to realize that, X wasn't X at all. It was really Y, and it meant Z.

I guess I could undeniably say that at 38 years old, I have achieved 'older'. I am older now. It's official. Whether I feel that way, or look that way or even act that way, I am older. And it changes things. It changes my perception of other people and of what I want. It changes my perception of what I think I can get or even should hope for...and it changes my perception of where I think I will be in the future. And I don't like it. So much time is given to disecting the single woman's life. Is she too picky? Is she a slut? Is she expecting too much? Does she try too hard? I'm sure married folk and those in long-term relationships bear their own excruciatingly annoying burdens - burdens given to them by society and well-meaning types who only want the best for them, but it's exhausting. I find I can't defend my reasons for not wanting to go out every night or make myself painfully 'available' at single's events. I've never enjoyed such things and as I get older, their appeal is markedly less.

The truth is, I never anticipated being alone at 38. And now that I have this reality, I don't quite know what to do with it. I can't be the girl who wants to go out every weekend, yet I don't want to make myself a fossil on the shelf either. There's not much space in society for women my age, it seems. We are either desperate to be married, or cougars. Old maids who are of no consequence, or has-beens who were too picky.

I'm neither a cougar, nor desperate. Yet I do want to find a man with whom I can have a lasting relationship, and feel he is my equal both in spirit and expectation. Am I failing myself? Am I the one who is, truly, throwing marbles under her own feet? Like I said, sometimes X doesn't equal X. It's curious, this getting older. I don't know what the future holds for me, it's true. I certainly could not have predicted last year, or even the past 6 months. Nor would I change them. But given my druthers, I don't know if I'd have kept convincing myself that X = X after all.