What 40 Means To Me

It was the summer of 1977 and I was ten years old. My thirty-four year old mother, recently diagnosed with uterine cancer, told me she would not live to be forty. This declaration was the result of the cancer diagnosis and the fact that she had lost three (of eleven) siblings to heart disease, cancer and alcoholism within a year of their fortieth birthdays. Despite the fact that the cancer was removed and the prognosis was optimistic, my mother lost a part of herself just as surely as she lost the cancerous tumor growing inside her. She was never the same after the surgery, though it’s hard to remember what she was like before. I think she might have been happy.

My mother came home from the hospital on August 16, the day Elvis died. The house was quiet and grim, as if she was the one who had died instead of one of her favorite singers. There was no happiness or sense of relief. There wasn’t even any hope. Not for my mother, and not for me. The memories are fuzzy after thirty years but it seems as if my mother told me—on a daily basis—that she was going to die.

“I’ll be dead by the time I’m forty. You’d better learn to take care of yourself.”

I had six years to prepare for what, according to my mother, was the inevitable. Due to my family situation (which is too complicated to go into), I not only believed that my mother would be dead by the time I reached my sweet sixteen, but that I would also be alone, homeless and have to depend on myself. I had a recurring nightmare of being alone in a big, dark room. I still have that dream sometimes.

How does a ten-year-old prepare for being independent? I saved my allowance, birthday and Christmas money, I learned to cook, I got excellent grades and I tried to be a good girl so that one of my friends’ parents might adopt me. It sounds utterly ridiculous now, but to my ten-year-old mind, it was a matter of survival. I was going to be alone. I was going to be motherless. I believed it just as surely as my mother did.

I grew older and my mother kept living, but her fortieth birthday loomed ominously. Whenever I tried to be optimistic, she quickly squashed my hopes.

“The doctors don’t know anything. The cancer will come back and I’ll be dead. Then what will you do?”

My mother turned forty two months before my sixteenth birthday. She was still alive. There was no party, no celebration.

“I’ll be dead before the year is out. Wait and see.”

I waited. My mother lived. She turned forty-one, forty-two, forty-three. I got married at twenty-three, my mother was forty-seven. She didn’t smile in any of my wedding pictures. I don’t remember my mother ever smiling much after she found out she had cancer. She didn’t seem to think there was anything worth smiling about since death was inevitable.

Her prediction of dying at forty was pushed back to dying at fifty. There was still nothing to be happy about. She was going to die, she just knew it. At this point, having moved away and gained some perspective, I decided that my mother wasn’t afraid of dying, she was afraid of living. She was afraid of everything and she had managed to instill some of that fear in me. When I told her I had opened an IRA and that I couldn’t touch it until I was fifty-nine-and-a-half, she wasn’t very supportive.

“With your luck, you’ll be dead by the time you’re thirty.”

I was twenty-six. My mother was fifty. I hung up on her and we didn’t talk for a month.

By the time I was thirty I had decided that the only thing I really needed to be afraid of was my mother’s negative influence. I’ve had almost no contact with her since 1997 and, as far as I know, she is still alive and well.

My mother is sixty-four.

I came to the conclusion a long time ago that birthdays were not the dire, depressing events my mother had convinced me they were. I have always loved my birthday, loved celebrating, loved presents and cake (chocolate) and blowing out candles. The older I get, the more I love birthdays.

“What’s to love? You’re just one year closer to death.”

I decided a long time ago that I would not live my life the way my mother has lived hers. Being afraid of everything, being afraid of growing older, of dying, of disease, is no way to live. I want to experience new things. I want to keep learning until the day I die and I want to know, when I finally do die (whenever that may be), that I’ve made the most of it. I want to smile.

My mother has spent thirty years waiting for death. Every cold was the flu, every flu was tuberculosis, every cough was emphysema (which didn’t convince her to stop smoking), every headache was a brain tumor. That kind of attitude makes it hard to plan for the future, to look forward to things, to make the most of any given moment because of the paralyzing belief that it might be the last.

I know forty is supposed to be a tough birthday to deal with, especially for women. My mother’s issues with dying aside, forty is the over-the-hill age that we’re all supposed to dread. We live in such a youth-oriented culture that being over forty is as good as being dead. I can’t be bothered with worrying about how old I am or how much time I have left. There’s too much I want to do first.

Because she was so convinced she was going to die by the age of forty, I believe a part of my mother did die that summer in 1977. The part that is youthful and hopeful. The dreamy part, the part that plants flower bulbs in the fall and waits for spring blooms. The part that saves for the distant future. The part that says, “When I’m fifty I will run a marathon.”

“When I’m fifty you won’t even visit my grave. You’ll have forgotten all about me.”

Part of me died that summer, too. I lost some of my innocence in that proclamation my mother made. I lost some of my youth. I lost my ability to believe that anyone will ever be there for me. I resent how my mother let her fear of dying (and living) overwhelm her to the point that she made me afraid, too. But waiting for my mother to die did instill some positive qualities in me. Resilience. Self-reliance. Independence. Good traits acquired in a very difficult way. I’ve managed to overcome the fear (for the most part) and hang on to the positive traits, but I often wonder if I’m too independent for my own good, too stubborn to lean on other people, too afraid to ask for help when I need it.

When I was ten years old, forty was the big, scary monster under the bed. Forty was a vampire waiting to suck out my life force. Turning forty was something to be feared. Forty was old. Forty was the end. Forty was dead.

I’m not ten years old anymore and this blog is not about my mother. It’s about me. I’m forty years old. I’m alive. I’m going to enjoy every moment.