Celebrate Yourself!

[Guest guest]

Celebrate Yourself!

By Lesley Dormen

We adults should take a cue from kids when it comes to our

birthdays -- making them days of delights and wish fulfillment as

well as basking in the glory of who we are, and who we might still

become.

Time to Reflect

There you are, spinning the greeting-card racks, trying to find the

perfect card to acknowledge a friend's fortysomething birthday. On

one rack are the so-called funny cards, each one " humorously "

addressing a theme about female aging: the hilarious loss of muscle

tone, the comedy of forgetfulness, the laugh riot of lying about

your age. On another rack are the hearts-and-flowers cards assuring

your pal she's not only getting older, she's getting better, and

furthermore, she's the wind beneath your wings. (Yuck. Is this a

birthday or a coronation?) You spin yet a third rack, trying to find

something that speaks to the witty, wise, complicated, compelling

flesh-and-blood woman you know (and are yourself, in fact), the one

planning to treat herself to either a Botox shot or a Buddhist

retreat for this year's birthday and who has instructed her friends

to skip the gifts and donate money to a charity instead.

Is it any wonder the greeting-card industry has a hard time getting

it right? Whether a woman is 27 or 67, when her birthday rolls

around, she's likely to find herself holding a psychic party bag

filled with contradictory emotions. Yet disentangling those fears

and hopes and dreams -- and figuring out how comfortable we are with

ourselves and with the fact that we are getting older -- can lead to

a greater self-awareness, and hopefully a new sense of satisfaction.

But first, there's the matter of mortality. However sweet the

spotlight, delicious the cake, and splendid the presents, a birthday

is a reminder that time is passing, that this day -- this us -- will

never come again. " Birthdays remind us of our impermanence, " says

Phyllis Koch-Sheras, PhD, a clinical psychologist in

Charlottesville, Virginia. Accordingly, we want to seize the day --

or pull the covers back over our heads. Impatient as children are

for the privileges that come attached to age -- first bike, first

bra, first driver's license -- even they can sense the ending that

is wrapped in each of their new beginnings. One woman vividly

remembers that line of demarcation more than 30 years later: " At age

9 I thought, 'Well, this is my last birthday where my age is a

single digit. It felt like the end of childhood to me.' "

In fact, your birthday is the perfect time to reflect on the person

you are and to examine your goals. Birthdays have been occasions to

take inventory since the invention of the calendar, a word that

comes from the Latin root kalendae and means " the day on which the

accounts are due. " Now the accounting we do is personal. " Just about

any birthday can nudge us into taking stock, " says Carol Goldberg,

PhD, a clinical psychologist in New York City. " We compare where we

are with where we thought we'd be at whatever age we've reached. "

It's common to use a birthday to set goals for ourselves -- lose the

last 10 pounds, push for a promotion, quit smoking -- but this only

serves to undermine the pleasure principle so intrinsic to

birthdays.

Why Celebrate?

If we can instead tap into their potential for delight -- the way

kids experience them everywhere -- the rewards can be rich

indeed. " I like to make a fuss, and the one year I skipped

celebrating, I wound up feeling sad about it, " says Sandor,

a fundraising consultant who lives in New York City. " So last year,

I went to dinner with friends. Someone brought sparklers, and when

we lit them, you could see delight on the face of every single adult

in the restaurant. We were all transformed into children. I had a

ball. "

Treating that one day as the sugary rose on the year's cake, an orgy

of wish fulfillment, ego stroking, and gluttony, is exactly the sort

of childish behavior we should refuse to outgrow, says Sheenah

Hankin, PhD, author of Complete Confidence: Playing the Game of Life

with a Winning Hand (Regan, 2004). " Your birthday is a day to

celebrate the year gone by in whatever way that feels special to

you, glory in what you've achieved, and toast the year that lies

ahead, " Hankin says.

Why is it so hard for us grown-ups to wallow in the cheeky, sneaky

pleasures of blowing out a birthday candle or delighting in a brand-

new trinket? After all, this is a time when many of us are

abandoning society's fixed ideas about what any given age

is " supposed " to look like, feel like, and signify. We live longer

than any previous generation. We're far more health- and fitness-

conscious. The smoke-and-mirror effects of wrinkle creams and

cosmetic surgery have blurred reality even more. Could it possibly

matter how many candles are sparkling on the birthday cake when

every 40-year-old first-time mother, every 50-year-old college

freshman, every 60-year-old marathon biker expands our understanding

and experience of age?

Milestones are always tricky and always will be. When we're young,

birthdays serve as reminders of imminent adulthood and all of its

intoxicating freedoms -- " I'm 16, now I can drive " and " I'm 18, now

I can vote. " Once we settle into midlife, birthdays are reminders,

no matter how positive our attitude toward aging, of less exciting

markers. It can all be a little stunning, as when the day arrives

that you definitely can't read the menu without glasses...your

doctor or boss turns out to be younger than you are...you realize

the guy standing behind the Starbucks counter isn't flirting with

you at all but with your 13-year-old daughter.

Everyone brings to birthdays a perfectly normal human vanity. And

even as we compare notes on this astounding and mysterious journey,

we can't help but be anything other than our own idiosyncratic

selves, variously insisting that 40 was a cakewalk and 50 a shock --

or was it the other way around?

The philosopher Kierkegaard's famous observation that we live life

forward but understand it backward is a birthday paradox we're all

destined to appreciate. " I have this photo of myself on the beach in

a bikini from the summer I turned 40, " says 48-year-old writer Fran

s. " I remember hating this picture. I thought my thighs were

too heavy and my stomach wasn't flat enough. Today I look at that

picture and think, God, I look great! No, I didn't look 18 -- when

you're 18, you're a miracle of nature -- but at 40 I had a nice body

and didn't even know it. " Others cling to the thought that we'll

never look as good as we do on this birthday right now -- until we

get to our next birthday and think exactly the same thing.

In other words, age is in the eye of the birthday beholder. " When I

was 38, the terrible year of my divorce, I felt ancient, " says a

friend. " Now I'm 48 but feel light years younger because I'm so much

happier. " And then there's my favorite birthday mind-bender: Another

dear friend, this one in her late 60s, confided in me that she

routinely adds five years to her age and, as a consequence, is

always being told how wonderful she looks.

Does Age Matter?

On any given day I'm one age on my driver's license, one age on my

yoga mat, and a third age in my head. Researchers at Brandeis

University in Waltham, Massachusetts, wanted to know if feeling

younger was tied to feeling happier -- having higher self-esteem and

better body image and being more satisfied with life. They predicted

that as women continued to age, their subjective age (how old

they " feel " inside, regardless of their birthday) would continue to

drop. Well, they were right about that.

But the researchers had also expected that the older women with the

greatest discrepancy between their actual age and their inner age

would be the happiest with how life is going -- and they were

completely wrong. It turns out that the women who were most

accepting of their age, and had no interest in disowning it to

anyone, were the ones who scored the highest satisfaction with their

lives. Conclusion? It isn't how young we feel but how in sync we are

with our chronological age itself that determines our feelings of

well-being.

So when another birthday rolls around, don't ignore it. Don't obsess

about your age or your undone list of lifetime " to-dos. " Do what I

plan to do each October 13: Wake up happy and proud and primed for

the pleasures the day will bring.

Sparklers would be nice.