A birthday I'd really rather not think about

MELONE E-mail: Click here Archive

By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times,
published June 5, 2001

Now that the hurricane season has begun, I ought to be talking about preparing for it.

But taking the prospect of a killer storm seriously is impossible when you can't expect so much as a soaking shower to revive your yard, which could be mistaken for a wheat field post-harvest.

Anyway, I'm preoccupied with planning for another life-challenging event.

In a little more than a year, I'll turn 50.

Fifteen months, precisely.

What? You think I'm premature and obsessing neurotically?

I am the doyenne of neurotic obsession.

Already I'm thinking of the day I will march into the bank and declare that I don't want free checking.

Already I click the remote to another channel when those ads for vitamins marketed to people who are beyond the big Five-O.

Those ads feature people who look more or less like my friends, at least the Republicans among them, and at least once you get past the hair. The hair on the TV people is the silver of a helmet in a movie about Roman centurions slaughtering one another. And they have a lot of it.

Clearly some mix-up has occurred.

Already I am fending off the question of strangers who see me with my preschooler and ask in a well-meaning way, "Oh, are you her grandmother?"

I am cheerful and phony when I explain I am her mother. My cheerfulness skyrockets when I watch the stranger squirm.

Then I run home to my husband and ask, "Am I losing it? Am I losing it?"

He knows this question has only one right answer.

The magazines that come to my house periodically run stories about celebrities turning 50, and I am supposed to completely relate.

To what? The liposuction?

The many readers to whom a 50th birthday is a memory, dim or otherwise, will conclude I don't have enough to do. They want to tell me what it's like to be 80.

Thank you but no thank you.

This is the basic problem: Turning 50 was a natural event to other people. It just wasn't supposed to happen to me.

I was the youngest in my family.

I believed the college I attended would never graduate another class after mine.

I was certain that short skirts and sandals with skinny straps would never look ridiculous on me.

Never, never would I listen seriously as a friend -- speaking of course about herself -- used the word facelift.

In the next 15 months, in between mothering and writing, I am supposed to be planning a trip.

My husband asked me how I wanted to celebrate (no -- "observe," it hits the properly grim note) my turning 50. Take me to Paris, I said. I have never been anywhere except to a couple of newspaper-driven calamities. I want to walk where Hepburn and Bergman walked. I want to stay up all night and walk back to my hotel along streets glistening with rain. I want to fool myself into thinking that my life is a really good date movie.

Also in the next 15 months, I intend to throw out everything I have not used, eaten from or worn within the past year. By the time I turn 50 I intend to live on less.

I intend to pick one project to complete by the time I turn 50. It may be as grand as the fragment of a book written and kept in my laptop. It may be as homely and reassuring as refinishing our dining room chairs.

I intend to acquire one sports car, used.

I intend to stop worrying about my dress size, to accept that it is only human to feel always unfinished and, most of all, to stop wasting time.

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