The Day I Turned 50

     The day I turned 50, no one knew except maybe my mother. Even if they'd known, no one except maybe my mother would have cared. There's no love in corporations, not compared to the love I feel from people when I perform music. As a corporate technical writer, my satisfaction came from within me as I realized my highest mental potential, my competency as a learner, prevailing over everyday challenges to turn out the Navy deliverables on schedule.

     When I turned 50, no black balloons fluttered around my office door; no jokey birthday cards predicting my demise waited to be opened. No one sang "Happy Birthday," or gave me presents. No one baked a cake for me with my name on it. I wore sunglasses to hide intermittent tears. I didn't tell anyone it was my birthday, fearful I would cry amidst happy birthday wishes. For me, it was a day of mourning. A day marking the passing of my youth--the crossing of the peak of the mountain and the beginning of my descent down the backside.
     When I turned 50, my choices were between two courses of action that would eventually kill me. Menopause had already begun two years before, and I'd read every book I could find on the subject. I knew my choices were to take the estrogen hormone pill that would stop continuous hot flashes, keep my bones strong and cause breast cancer--the disease of my mother and her mother--or to get through it without medical intervention. That would be the certain path to heart disease, dementia, osteoporosis, and the wrinkled face of an old woman. I chose hormone replacement for the highest quality of life, strength, and good looks in the moment. No more fanning away my hot flashes with paper plates. The predictable threat of breast cancer would not require action for another 8 years.

Pookie and I, Oct., 2012

     When I turned 50, I lived in a small apartment with only my young cockatiel Pookie for companionship. He was practicing daily to learn to communicate with me. He rode around on my shoulder talking to me and singing with me. He would lay his beak on top of my nose and emit a long, raspy kiss sound from his throat followed by a high-pitched declaration, "I uv oo!" I didn't believe humans were meant to live alone, and the thought that I might have to live the rest of my life alone was intolerable. Pookie couldn't take the place of a life partner. Today he's still with me, and he's managed to do just that.
     When I turned 50, my heart's propensity to choose undesirable, unattainable men had left me bitter and cynical about men and my own ability to choose a loving partner and sustain a loving relationship. When Ron (not his real name) stopped speaking to me 6 months before, I had no choice but to move out of his home. I vowed then that no man would ever again break my heart. Ron was still my employer, the project manager of the team of 40 engineers I worked among. Throughout the long office days, he stayed away from me, while still keeping me employed, thankfully. Some days I watched him walking down the hallway along with my co-workers, all headed out to a restaurant to enjoy lunch together. I wasn't invited. Once he appeared on a Sunday morning and caught me in the office packing up my personal belongings. My intent was to finish up one of the deliverables, write a resignation notice, and disappear from his life forever. He talked me into staying.
     Both of our jobs ended when I was 52, when the Navy closed down our project. Ron helped me pack and waved good bye as I drove off to Milwaukee, to my new technical writing job. A month later he left for Malaysia to help build the airport there. Ron turned out to be my last passionate love. Every time a new love possibility came into view, I remembered what Ron did to me, and turned away from the opportunity to start again. Today Ron and I love each other, but it's a different love, a separate love--separate paths down the backside of that mountain. We know our vast differences, and love is unconditional. Loving him doesn't hurt. Or does it?
     When I turned 50, I was grieving alone for the loss of my mother. My sister who lived in the DC area and my mother's husband John were in denial about Mother's dementia. John refused to attend my Alzheimer's support group with me to learn how to care for her. She got lost when she drove to the beauty shop in the car; she fell off her bicycle on rides around her neighborhood; she fell off the ladder when her husband left her home alone. She stopped going to church and spent her days sitting by herself in the living room while her husband rebuilt computers in another room. On Fridays I joined them for their evening card game of Hand and Foot, listening to Mother's constant chatter that circled back around to the same subject, her questions to me repeated in the same inflectional pattern as though she were asking them for the first time. "Are you working anywhere, honey?" she would ask me again and again, while John expelled exasperated bursts of breath and rolled his eyes. Once when Mother left the room, he whispered to me with intense conviction, "She does NOT have dementia. If she would just TRY HARDER to remember instead of asking me everything. . . ."
     When I turned 50, I didn't go to visit my mother. The day before, I did something so painful and destructive, I will regret it for the rest of my life. I was in a face-to-the-wall depression, the flip side of my bipolar mental illness that neither the  antidepressant nor my skilled and caring psychiatrist could avert. Mother was still remembering to look at her calendar every day and gave me a small birthday gift when I visited her the day before. As I was walking back down the driveway to my car, Mother called from the doorway. "Won't you come to see me tomorrow on your birthday?" "No!" I shouted back angrily. "You brought me into this miserable world and I hate you for that!" I slammed the car door and sped away. I don't know if she remembered me on that birthday, but I remembered her and what I'd said to her. Mother didn't remember my birthdays after that year. As the years passed, I could see the confusion in her eyes when I visited her. Once when a nursing home attendant told her I was her daughter and asked her my name, Mother stared at me for a few moments, and in her characteristic dry humor, blurted out, "Yoo-hootey." I don't blame her for forgetting me. I've wanted to forget me, too! She died 15 years later, two months before I turned 65.
     In a recent interview with late night show host Carson Daily, Depok Chopra said that when a loved one dies, you become aware that "the Prince of Death is stalking you. It throws you into the present and gets you out of your dream." There's nothing like a Mother's death to awaken her daughter from the dream.
     When I turn 69 in a few months, I'll spend the day alone in my apartment, or maybe with a few friends. My extreme mental highs and lows have evened out to manageable levels without the need for medication. Memories of my mother's and my painful lifelong dance have dimmed, replaced by a new understanding of how we each reacted to the other. I've forgiven myself and her. I hope if there's an afterlife she's forgiven me.
     I'm no longer driven to achieve my highest potential. It's okay to sit for hours in my recliner chair watching "Long Island Medium" or "Storage Wars" and clicking numbers into the Sudoku game on the iPad in my lap. While I still sometimes mourn the losses of my singing voice and mental organization skills, I can look back and say, "Wow! Was I ever good! And to think I did all that!"  While I still sometimes long for the freedom I enjoyed when I was young, I also see how that freedom fed my mental illness, and I'm grateful for a quiet mind and uncomplicated lifestyle. While I still cry when loved ones die, and I'm deeply saddened by wars and mass shootings and extreme weather events that cause casualties and leave people struggling across the planet, I also accept their fate and mine as part of life.
     Like all living creatures on earth, every human being's life has an ending, including mine. My natural curiosity makes me wish I knew exactly what will take me out, but my imagination always shows me an unlikely sudden death riding in an elevator that snaps loose, or crossing a train track. I no longer feel an intense drive to continue to make my life count for something to justify my existence. It's okay to leave my life as it is, a quiet whisper in the universe.
     When I turned 50, I wore sunglasses to hide my tears. These days I still wear sunglasses, but only outdoors and only to protect my eyes from sun. Whether I'm alone or with friends or volunteering to help out somewhere, life in this moment is only sweet. I look back at my years in a hectic, productive life with a thankful heart for the opportunities that opened to me. I look ahead and say, "I'm up for it." I look at this moment and feel the presence of a grace that wraps me up and lifts me over my own daily struggles and physical pain. Life is not a dream; it's gritty and real; it's all there is; and for just right now, it's still mine.