Tomorrow is my birthday, and I’m pleased to report that from 6am everything will change. Not with a bang but a whimper from the cot next door. The lists of things to do before an arbitrary fat age will be ticked and filed – planes jumped out of, enjoyed, deadly fish eaten, digested, love found, consummated. And I will move, open-hearted, on from decade-old wrongs: the person who always said “Nice to meet you” having met me literally eight times before, the woman who tried it on with my boyfriend when I was in the loo, the bus driver who called me “Sir” – all will dissolve and I will stride forward into adulthood as if juice-cleansed.
Free from hate, my posture will right itself. And rather than stooping (as I’ve read begins to happen in middle age as bones soften and dreams shatter, their debris sitting heavy on the shoulders) I will grow an inch. 35. What did I think I’d be doing at this age? By this age everyone’s mum had, what, three kids? A worrying lump? A new career in online marketing? Everyone’s dad had taken up tennis and got into energy drinks and left the family for a girl from your big sister’s drama class and moved to a room above 7-Eleven where he got free sandwiches hence him smelling of tuna.
Everyone was not only an adult but an old one, three lives under their belts. Unlike us, in our trainers-to-work and our freezing-our-eggs, they were forced to grow up. And they survived. Some of them. So rather than mourn a youth, I am choosing to embrace an adulthood. On I stride, confident that the pain in my lower back is no longer a kidney advising me to drink fewer drinks but something more deathy. And that’s good! Age is good. The alternative is getting embarrassing.
With age, I’m promised, comes knowledge. The things I will know tomorrow, Lord. The languages I’ll learn on that app I accidentally paid for last summer. The patience I’ll have. Tomorrow, when I become an adult, I will know how to talk to people at parties. And what parties. Parties with specific glasses – champagne “flutes”, whisky “tumblers”. Laughter twinkling like fairy lights across dim kitchens, a small crowd gathering around me as I tell the story about the placenta.
As adults we are allowed again to talk with enthusiasm about things that are important to us. The last time was when puberty was slapping us around the face with its big wet hand and we sat in huddles crying about the environment, writing poetry about love. Tomorrow I can find the feelings, dampened by decades of exhaustion, and return to them with a learned passion. Beware, person who politely asks me how I am when I walk into the office next Monday. Because I will tell you, and I will leave little out.
Everything will be better tomorrow. When, at 6am, I’ll wake suddenly OK with injections. I will be confident in my ability to cook a really quite serviceable chicken soup. I’ll be able to drive. When light filters in through our Ikea blackout curtains, the lawn outside frosted with crisp packets, I will be a woman. Finally.
Extending youth by choice – ignoring the lack of jobs today, the lack of homes and family close by, ignoring the reasons why some 40-year-olds are forced back into their mum’s spare room – feels ridiculous. If we can grow up, then hell, we should. So hooray for these fine wrinkles, for the soft pocket of skin under my chin. Hooray for birthdays, when friends are obliged to buy me dinner. Tomorrow everybody I know will briefly flash to me as a helpless newborn, yellowing at the Royal Free, and therefore feel kindly towards me. I will use this to my advantage, harvesting drinks and emoji, but, in my new adulthood I’ll feel kindly towards them, too.
There will be no embarrassment, from tomorrow. No shame. That thing will happen where I become “comfortable in my body”, even the crappy bits. I will look in the mirror and see elegant wisdom where before there was just nose. The world will become my oyster rather than my bit of phlegm in a shell.
Time is ticking. Sure, I’ve enjoyed increments of ageing (baby, hospitals, ISAs), but with only 12 hours before all adolescence dissolves, I feel I should be as kiddish as I can before nightfall. Hence me quickly having an opinion about Nando’s. Hence me writing this on a cocktail of legal highs. Hence me writing this on Snapchat. Apologies for errors. See you in adulthood.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
