Today is my birthday. I am 53 years old. When I was about ten, I determined that that was the age I would be in the year 2000. Well, here we are.

I was born 260 days (37.14 weeks) after my parents were married. I considered the implications of this in “My Face Before I was Born.” Growing up, I never had a birthday party -- my mother had some deep-rooted negative notions about making oneself the center of attention, and I think she felt awkward inviting other children to an event that required them to bring a gift for me. 

But my birthday was always observed at home. I remember few specific gifts, except a magic set when I was nine. When I was 11 the downstairs was being repainted. All the furniture was moved out of the living room, and a few weeks before my birthday I was bouncing a ball in there, liking the way the smack against the hardwood floor reverberated off the bare walls. One hop went too high and slammed into the ceiling, which the painter had swirled with a sponge, lying on his back like Michelangelo on a plank set between two tall ladders. My mother came running in, berated me sharply, and declared that I certainly was NOT going to get for my birthday what I was GOING to get before this stupid stunt.

I was certain then that that was the year they were going to get me the pony, or if not the pony, at least a two-wheeler bicycle. Since I never got either one, I could be right.

In 1968, when I turned 21, a young man took me to dinner at Tom Paine’s Restaurant in Lancaster -- expensive and so elegant that there were no prices on the menu that they gave the woman. My date was a cosmopolitan prep school boy who lived in a posh apartment on Central Park West. I ordered a screwdriver, because it was the only drink I knew the name of.

Another year, a boyfriend gave me a cobalt glass vase. He brought it filled with flowers. Oh lady, lady of ladies -- I remember days that felt like it was rainin’ daisies -- he wrote John Sebastian’s words on the card and if I hadn’t already fallen in love with him I would have done so right there. I still have the vase, and the daisies, pressed into a volume of poems by Leonard Cohen, a gift from someone else.

In 1971, that year’s boyfriend gave me a television set, a cute little 5-inch B&W that popped up out of its case and also had an AM/FM radio and ran on batteries as well as AC. I still have that, too, although it no longer works. It’s in the basement with other useless items I can’t bear to part with.

On my stack of books to read is Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s Getting Over Getting Older. The author is a founding editor of Ms. magazine, and a foundational voice in the modern women’s movement. An earlier book, Growing Up Free: Raising Your Child in the 80’s helped give words to the intuitions I already had as I awaited the birth of my daughter in 1985.

The book came out in 1996, when Pogrebin was 56. I bought it as I turned 50, but for one reason or another have yet to delve into it. As I prepare to start up with my “corporeal matters” journal, it seems like a good time to begin reading thoughts that I know will be positive and upbeat without being corny.

I’ve always had a good attitude about age and my birthday. I’ve always looked younger than I am, although I think that is beginning to change. And I’ve always felt younger than I am, certainly emotionally. The key word there is “younger,” as if feeling or looking one’s true age is to be avoided.

When my birthday comes around I like to look back each ten years, see where I’ve been, compare those emotional places with the place I’m in now. In 1950 when I was three I was still an only child -- my sister would come along in about seven months. My earliest memories are tied to her arrival, so I can only imagine what it was like to be just three.

At 13 I was in 7th grade, just getting interested in boys, although they were not interested in me. Eddie Gillis was the object of my affection, but his heart had been won by an eighth grade girl named Molly. Part of his attractiveness was in the fact that he was taller than I -- I had attained my full adult height (5’4”) by fourth or fifth grade, which made me tower above most of my classmates, especially the boys. Molly was taller still. Perhaps she had more need of him.

At 23 I made a decision to change my life -- one year out of college, I’d taken a job in my father’s school district and was living at home with the expectation that I would soon be moving to the western part of the state to join my life with that of a man I’d met in college. It was near my birthday that I received word that he’d made some decisions too, which included marriage, but not to me. Within a few weeks I’d found a new teaching position in a different school district (OK, I’ve never been one for RADICAL change) and five months later, the day I’d planned to get married, I moved into my own apartment.

At 33 I was still in that job, but now in my own house, had been for four years, and was looking at my fifth wedding anniversary in the fall. I liked the job and I was doing well. I liked the husband well enough too, in the way you like a really pleasant kid in a late afternoon study hall. There was a comfortable predictability to my life, but also a certain restlessness. I didn’t know it then, but I was starting to make changes in who I thought I was and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

That movement meant that by 43 I had ended the first marriage and begun a new one. Our daughter by then was four years old, and I had everything I ever wanted. Harbor and springboard, I’ve called this life. In May I took my first trip to Europe, and I began to write again.

Now here I am -- same house, same husband, daughter now headed for 15 and asking tons of questions about road rules and driving techniques every time we go anywhere. I’ve made peace with some of the demons that haunt me -- some of the others I rather like. Through circumstances I never would have envisioned, I put the public school teaching career behind me and now describe myself as a full time writer. I’ve applied for a “Mature Woman’s” grant from the National League of American Pen Women to facilitate work on my historical novel. (Had it been called “Older Women’s Grant,” however, I might not have applied.) I feel “mature” but also infused with an energy that can only be described as “young.”

This year I gave presents. I bought thank you cards for my husband, my daughter, and a few other friends, to tell them how glad I am that they are part of the best years of my life. Happy Birthday to me, and thank you to my readers for being another part of the best years of my life.