The Years Roll By

This week I approach another milestone, another year ticked of the calender, older and i think maybe for the 1st time a little wiser. My birthday looms on the mantle piece at home in the form of a pile of unopened cards, keen to remind me that I'm another year closer to being dead, but that's a little morbid i suppose, i should celebrate this occasion with gusto.

Why then do i feel a trepidation with the coming cake and candles? I have never been a big one for birthdays, never understood the significance really. We spend money and write cards and cook meals and book hotels for what? To celebrate an event we don't even remember, i mean honestly does anyone remember the day they were born? What relevance does that day have? I feel it would be better to celebrate the day you left home, or the day you lost your virginity, or even the day before your first hangover. These are days when you started living, not the day you were pushed, screaming into this world.

Why not shift your birthday to the day of conception, after all pro life supporters would have us believe that the unborn child is living so QED birth is not the start of life. I'm going to go as far as saying i don't like birthdays, i have enough reminders all year that I'm getting older, the flecks of grey on the hairdressers floor, the inability to sleep through the night without a 3am trip to the bathroom or my personal favorite, the I'm standing in front of the fridge and don't know why memory game. I really don't need people sending me cards about senility, about baldness or sexual impotence to remind me the clock is ticking.

I understand in the young a birthday is cause for excitement, one of my, now not so young, charges celebrates her 21st birthday this year and is i imagine looking forward with great anticipation of that day, but 21 seems so long ago now, so many highs and lows, so many lost memories, forgotten faces & sleepless nights that i struggle to look forward to another year getting a little more grey & a little more forgetfully. Don't get me wrong I'm not someone who is trying to cling to their youth, pretending to understand modern music and wearing clothes that just, well, just wrong, but i don't embrace the onset of age either.

So i got to thinking why i have become this way, and i think i have it. I don't want to get any older, but then i wouldn't go back to being 21 again either. This is because I have reached a stage in my life where everything is right, everything fits & I don't want it to change. I think this may be to do with all those wasted years where things felt wrong or slightly misplaced, but now I have everything i ever wanted i don't want to chance that they might not stay that way. My good lady, the gym queen of late, and I have our health, our happiness and the life we both wanted, our children are growing up and embracing their own lives & although the hair may be a little thinner, but I'm feeling good about the way i look at the midway point, everything is coming up roses. So what can the future hold that is better than this? and because of that i have decided that i wont do the female thing and start counting backwards each year, I'm just going to stay here.