Happy Birthday to Me (she said quietly...)
So, today's my birthday....and things have been very quiet....
and you know, it doesn't really bother me.
I haven't got any phone calls or any big fusses or gifts (well, just yet on the gifts). Dad sent me a nice gift at the beginning of the month, when he remembered, and that was really okay. It made me happy and it made him happy to know it was good enough.
It doesn't really bother me, actually, that no one--including me--is making a huge gigando fuss over my birthday. For a lot of years, I always thought it meant more to my Mom to have a sugar-crusted birthday cake from the bakery every year on my birthday than it did to me.
There was one year I remember, in my 20's, when I was working in Princeton, that I think I had 4 birthday cakes over a three-day period. Talk about birthday cake overload!
Always being the "young one" in places I worked, where there were many Fatherly Dad types, I always ended up with cakes.
At the time it was annoying. Now, I look back on it, and those are some really great memories. I had some of the most wonderful Father figures a girl could have :-) and I know it's because of those amazing august men that I have no fear of men in the intellecutal realm...
Although I find, as I get older, men's ways can be really kind of weird...
That's another thing that I think is causing me to not be so concerned about birthday celebrations this year. Not that I want birthday dirges, mind you--but I'm one year closer to 50 and certainly have mixed feelings about it. Most of those mixed feelings have been stimulated by the nonsense the Today Show has been doling out over the past two weeks as a way to try to make middle-aged women feel included in pop culture. They've had programs celebrating menopasue, with the catchy phrase "It's Not Your Mother's Menopause!" to a segment with a bunch of forty-somethings stading around in a kitchen kvetching over their impending menopause...
Oh, and then there was the 60-something swan that, when younger, was the plain jane, now a silver-haired fashion model.
Oh, and a pathetically plastic surgeon'd Raquel Welch who at 66 (!!!) is supposed to be the representative of the paragon of beauty in old age.
I don't think it would even be on my mind if it wasn't on the tv and in my face...
Makes me think "now I know why so many people (including me) like Ugly Betty. We're sick of groomed-within-an-inch-of-their-lives vapid idiots of any age..."
At least I am...
The over-emphasis on menopause is driving me bats too. When I was in my thirties, it was a pop-culture over-emphasis on menstruation. I can't begin to tell you all the new agey books I *still* have on the "magical time" that menstruation is supposed to be.
Oh, geeze! When are women going to get away from worrying so much about our reproductive cycles and just enjoy life! Is our reproductive cycles and the bearing of children the only definition of who we are as women? I always thought that feminism was supposed to show us the women we have the potential to become, without worrying about our reproductive cycles and whether or not we're in or out of the childbearing phase...
Doesn't seem to be that way, though.
If we're not lauding our reproduction via some form of mysticism, we'r looking at it from a health perspective.
And worrying our asses off about cancer of this or that organ, or the withering of our uterii...
And you know, at 46, I'm really sick and tired of hearing it. All of it. The mystical and the medial. Period.
I think it was those great Fathers in my life, who made me feel that there was more to me than my reproductive cycle. Among those Fathers--who'd buy me so many birthday cakes I'd fear my eyeballs turning pink from all the red dye in the buttercream roses--I learned I could think, that my gender didn't matter if I could use my reason, and that I had the potential to do something extraordinary with my life.
Even now, I pick my women friends carefully (or they pick me) because I really don't want to be bogged down in endless discussions of the one part of me I have no control over--my reproductive cycle. Sure, we talk about the weird things that are happening--like not being able to eat fast food every day because our metabolisms just can't deal with it. But we also talk about other things--the social things--that happen as a woman gets older. We've talked about our growing ivisibility and our pop culture irrelevance. We've talked about how weird it is to NOT have guys beeping the horn or wolf-whistling....
And I've felt the loss of those Fathers. Profoundly. Many of the men I know now, who are much like those august men of my youth, are now very close in age to me, maybe only 10 or so years older, or they're even my peers. They're not really mentors any more.
Some can, obviously, be lovers,--but to have a lover who's also a great mentor is a rather delicate thing...
I liked it better when they saw me as a daughter they could mentor.
It is through those relationships that I understand the myth of Athena...
Being Athena was more of a wonderful mystery to me than my reproductive cycle...
So, I think to myself, "what is it that I want this year?" And, I can't quite answer that right now any more than I could have answered it on any previous birthday. Maybe what I want is to get out of freelancing--it's wicked undependable and I hate the complicated personal bookkeeping....
I'm just glad there's no real hairy-canary celebrations. No gushy-mushy cards and tchochkies. Just a few small thoughts from friends....
A birthday is what it is--I'm a year older, and perhaps in some ways a year wiser. If I listen to pop culture, I'm one year closer to the End of the World. If I tune them out, I hear the pleasant voices of my Fathers. I close my eyes and see their smiles. And I know there's more to me than the impending end of my reproductive cycle....there is much, much more to my life than that...and that I must be strong to make it happen...whatever it might be...
and you know, it doesn't really bother me.
I haven't got any phone calls or any big fusses or gifts (well, just yet on the gifts). Dad sent me a nice gift at the beginning of the month, when he remembered, and that was really okay. It made me happy and it made him happy to know it was good enough.
It doesn't really bother me, actually, that no one--including me--is making a huge gigando fuss over my birthday. For a lot of years, I always thought it meant more to my Mom to have a sugar-crusted birthday cake from the bakery every year on my birthday than it did to me.
There was one year I remember, in my 20's, when I was working in Princeton, that I think I had 4 birthday cakes over a three-day period. Talk about birthday cake overload!
Always being the "young one" in places I worked, where there were many Fatherly Dad types, I always ended up with cakes.
At the time it was annoying. Now, I look back on it, and those are some really great memories. I had some of the most wonderful Father figures a girl could have :-) and I know it's because of those amazing august men that I have no fear of men in the intellecutal realm...
Although I find, as I get older, men's ways can be really kind of weird...
That's another thing that I think is causing me to not be so concerned about birthday celebrations this year. Not that I want birthday dirges, mind you--but I'm one year closer to 50 and certainly have mixed feelings about it. Most of those mixed feelings have been stimulated by the nonsense the Today Show has been doling out over the past two weeks as a way to try to make middle-aged women feel included in pop culture. They've had programs celebrating menopasue, with the catchy phrase "It's Not Your Mother's Menopause!" to a segment with a bunch of forty-somethings stading around in a kitchen kvetching over their impending menopause...
Oh, and then there was the 60-something swan that, when younger, was the plain jane, now a silver-haired fashion model.
Oh, and a pathetically plastic surgeon'd Raquel Welch who at 66 (!!!) is supposed to be the representative of the paragon of beauty in old age.
I don't think it would even be on my mind if it wasn't on the tv and in my face...
Makes me think "now I know why so many people (including me) like Ugly Betty. We're sick of groomed-within-an-inch-of-their-lives vapid idiots of any age..."
At least I am...
The over-emphasis on menopause is driving me bats too. When I was in my thirties, it was a pop-culture over-emphasis on menstruation. I can't begin to tell you all the new agey books I *still* have on the "magical time" that menstruation is supposed to be.
Oh, geeze! When are women going to get away from worrying so much about our reproductive cycles and just enjoy life! Is our reproductive cycles and the bearing of children the only definition of who we are as women? I always thought that feminism was supposed to show us the women we have the potential to become, without worrying about our reproductive cycles and whether or not we're in or out of the childbearing phase...
Doesn't seem to be that way, though.
If we're not lauding our reproduction via some form of mysticism, we'r looking at it from a health perspective.
And worrying our asses off about cancer of this or that organ, or the withering of our uterii...
And you know, at 46, I'm really sick and tired of hearing it. All of it. The mystical and the medial. Period.
I think it was those great Fathers in my life, who made me feel that there was more to me than my reproductive cycle. Among those Fathers--who'd buy me so many birthday cakes I'd fear my eyeballs turning pink from all the red dye in the buttercream roses--I learned I could think, that my gender didn't matter if I could use my reason, and that I had the potential to do something extraordinary with my life.
Even now, I pick my women friends carefully (or they pick me) because I really don't want to be bogged down in endless discussions of the one part of me I have no control over--my reproductive cycle. Sure, we talk about the weird things that are happening--like not being able to eat fast food every day because our metabolisms just can't deal with it. But we also talk about other things--the social things--that happen as a woman gets older. We've talked about our growing ivisibility and our pop culture irrelevance. We've talked about how weird it is to NOT have guys beeping the horn or wolf-whistling....
And I've felt the loss of those Fathers. Profoundly. Many of the men I know now, who are much like those august men of my youth, are now very close in age to me, maybe only 10 or so years older, or they're even my peers. They're not really mentors any more.
Some can, obviously, be lovers,--but to have a lover who's also a great mentor is a rather delicate thing...
I liked it better when they saw me as a daughter they could mentor.
It is through those relationships that I understand the myth of Athena...
Being Athena was more of a wonderful mystery to me than my reproductive cycle...
So, I think to myself, "what is it that I want this year?" And, I can't quite answer that right now any more than I could have answered it on any previous birthday. Maybe what I want is to get out of freelancing--it's wicked undependable and I hate the complicated personal bookkeeping....
I'm just glad there's no real hairy-canary celebrations. No gushy-mushy cards and tchochkies. Just a few small thoughts from friends....
A birthday is what it is--I'm a year older, and perhaps in some ways a year wiser. If I listen to pop culture, I'm one year closer to the End of the World. If I tune them out, I hear the pleasant voices of my Fathers. I close my eyes and see their smiles. And I know there's more to me than the impending end of my reproductive cycle....there is much, much more to my life than that...and that I must be strong to make it happen...whatever it might be...
posted by Tish Grier at 3:40 PM
3 Comments:
there's a lot more of us than i would of thought ...
i just wanted to wish you a Happy Birthday (!!)
Happy birthday, Tish. :)
Tish--I've been "one poor correspondent" as the '70s band America once said, so I just saw this.
Happy Birthday!!! (Mine was last month, too!)
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