I turn 47 on Monday and (as happens every year around this time) I find myself a little sad. I don’t know when it started. There were years of birthday parties and dinners out with friends and a mailbox filled with cards. Not just texts and social media posts–actual cards. Perhaps it is a delusion to assume those days were a better celebration of another year of life lived than the clicks and likes of today. But, it’s a nice delusion.
My Nanny sent me a card every year on my birthday. Filled with her tight Swedish handwriting and silly jokes, often at her own expense, she always said how much she loved me. Last year was my first birthday without that card, without her. It was harder than I expected. Yesterday, I received an incredible gift from my Mama–a brooch her father bought Nanny in 1952, the year she gave birth to my mom. It included a small note about where and when it was purchased in Nanny’s handwriting. My mom is one of those thoughtful people who knows exactly what someone needs–she has that gift. She is also the most loving and honest person I know. Her birthday present wasn’t just perfectly timed, it was a reminder that we are all part of the things that come before us in a long and spiraling necklace across time. Nanny is always with me just like her mother, my Mimi, is, and my Grandma Olive, my Grandad, my Grandpa, and everyone else who led to me.
Don’t get me wrong: aging rules. I’m a better me at this age than at any time before. I’m less reckless and impulsive (note my ridiculous $20 tattoo from age 19 that will cost $600 to remove today). I am learning which battles to fight and which ones to avoid. I’m humbled each time someone asks for my help with something. I’m happy to work and think and love and try to be everything I can in this one wild and precious life. But each passing year I am more aware of what is gone. My loved ones who have passed, old relationships that are now just puffs of smoke on the dark screen of memory. There’s a movie of my past playing on a loop every day. I hear a song or smell a perfume or see a re-run of a tv show and suddenly I am 29 or 22 or 12 all over again. It’s a strange existence to be all these Shannons at once.
The running joke among my family and closest friends is that my memory is dangerous. I remember so many seemingly unimportant things. What I wore the first day of seventh grade (gray acid washed skirt, pink, white, and gray plaid shirt that belonged to my mom). The song playing when my friend JJ and I got into a fender bender on our way to work (“Slam” by Onyx). Every line from the movie Heathers. Maybe as a writer its a blessing to remember so much; details come easily. But remembering exactly how I felt at the highest and lowest points, and all points in between, makes being a human pretty hard.
At (nearly) 47 I have more in my life than I could have believed possible. A healthy family, a job that gives me joy so long as I don’t let it define me, friends who love me, a husband who makes me feel safe and adored and heard every single damn day. I don’t need a decorated house or a princess chair or streamers and balloons or a free dessert from Carlos O’Kelley’s to remember my birthday is a time to celebrate myself. Needing and wanting are two very different things. Just think how many of us don’t really need anything, yet we can’t stop feeding our bottomless well of want.
Still, there’s that small part of me that aches for all those versions of myself. The one who colored a dot-printer banner reading “New Kids on the Block” and hung it over the fireplace in Nanny and Grandad’s basement the year I had my birthday party there. The one who went out for sushi the year she got divorced wearing a dress that only fit because I’d been killing myself at the gym as a way to ignore how scared I was to be alone. The one who celebrated her 21st birthday in Ybor City certain I shouldn’t still be dating the guy I moved to Florida for but not ready, yet, to leave.
Maybe I get sad around my birthday because all those Shannons thought this one would be something else. Or maybe I get sad because aging calls for even more reflection than I normally do, which is already exhausting. Or maybe the sadness is here to make the brighter times that much more brilliant. To remind me when the good times come–as they always always always do–just how lucky I am to be here.
Shannon Carriger 