Dear Older Me — Happy Birthday
It’s 6:10 a.m. on the morning of my 51st birthday, and I feel the age setting in.
I stayed up late for work, took a late night support call, helped rescue a rain-soaked 9-year-old from his tent without a working rainfly, oh, and defused a trauma-triggered 15-year-old who stomped on my camping mat to pop it so the 9-year-old couldn’t use it.
Just another day.
It is my birthday, and I have a lot of things I want to do for me, so I have scheduled a vacation day… only to find myself tired from staying up late working on a PowerPoint presentation for work.
So here I find myself at 6:20 a.m., feeling the new ritual I have slowly found myself adopting over the last decade settle into almost perfect timing.
Except it is my birthday, and I am unable to complete the ritual this morning because my path to it is blocked by my son making breakfast in bed for me in the kitchen. That is why I find myself in the early dawn light, perched on the edge of my bedroom windowsill — because my ritual is to make my way every morning, urgently, to the bathroom.
So, the first moments of my birthday find me jumping out of my window like a teenager sneaking out of the house to run to the woods a hundred feet away and relieve myself without being discovered.
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Except I am discovered.
Five seconds into this adapted ritual, I find myself waving my arm like King Kong as a swarm of mosquitoes takes advantage of the fact that I am wearing only pajama shorts. But I complete the ritual nonetheless and find myself facing an even greater challenge.
Climbing up and back through the window before anyone notices, simply because aging bodies refuse to respect my own timeline for events.
Epilogue:
I spent the first waking hour of my fifty-first year pretending to be in a geriatric version of a Mission: Impossible movie, dodging mosquitoes, and committing minor acts of covert trespassing to successfully feign surprise when the knock at the door came, followed by a tray of cayenne-encrusted eggs, butter-saturated toast, and a chilled medley of chocolate chips and dehydrated mini-marshmallows.
Long after the food is gone, I choose not to leave the bedroom, as the ritual has already been completed, and I know that any unnecessary movement will aggravate the blossoming mosquito bites. Besides, I know the cast-iron battleground graveyard the kitchen will resemble, and I’m not quite ready for that yet.
Dear older me — apparently you’re still needed.
