40!

The long awaited 40th birthday arrived a week ago. As you’ll know - if you’ve at all been following this stop-start blog about mothering, the first 40 days post-partum, mothering 3 (read 300 kids) in a late capitalist world that cannot compute 3 kids so you’re constantly either apologising for too much noise, too much space taken up or too much chaos… or of course as is most often the case, all 3 those things at the same time - I have spent chunks of this year fretting about how I’ll celebrate my 40th birthday. Nothing would satisfy my desire for the kind of big, no expenses too much kinda celebration. My questions were - how will you mark it meaningfully? What will you do to really ensure you remember big chunks of the day? How will you make the day special for yourself? If you read the above sentence, you might wonder what is the distinguishing factor - what makes sentence 1 different from sentence 3; does each really pose its own, unique question? The answer is, NO. I have been wondering how I’ll mark this birthday in a meaningful way and I’ve been trying to ask it in a bunch of different ways? Initially I thought I’d plan an incredible trip - Club Med, here I come!, I thought, doom scrolling through the different options throughout December 2023 and February 2024. Post Sanaa’s birthday at the end of January my enthusiasm for a family trip stopped abruptly and for a few months I just sobbed in therapy about how my birthday would be a bust this year and how I imagined 40 would look so much shinier than this chaotic excuse for a post-colonial, post-apartheid, millennial intellectual dream. This torture, this constant push and pull between what was real and what I imagined to be real in the other ‘84 childrens’ realities was really starting to wear me down.Obviously EVERYONE else has a guest list of 50… or more… EvERYONE else can afford a big party with no excuses or costs cut.

I realised it could not go on like this.. I was kind of driving myself loopy with all these unreasonable and untrue expectations and I was undoing all the love I have for myself. It was in June I started to pull it together (mildly) - much of it, like grown up peer pressure, spurred on by receiving a slew of invitations to other 40ths throughout the year - some inviting me to book a flight (or not but the celebration would be elsewhere), some suggesting I book a room (or not, but knowing that the celebration could be more fun this way) and some telling me to show up and be open to whatever would happen on the day. They all either purposefully include or exclude children. I decided on a series of small, meaningful (for me) celebrations: a dinner, a dance party in the living room with my kids, a special supper on my birthday, a trip home to see my family and the beach, a massage, lashes, lots of glamming up and so on. I had a blast in the run up and I’m still having a blast. I felt anxious just before the big day - and ready with many plans of how I’d make 1 August an exceptional day…

I arrive home from a spa afternoon, a cheap but delicious lunch alone and a proud feather in hat for how much I’d achieved by simply knowing my city so well… I feel satiated by my 30th decade and at ease. I check my armpits to ensure there are no lumps, just so there are no hidden surprises (cue end of There’s a slight niggle in my belly… exciting times await… I wonder to myself what this excitement is. What does it mean to me to be excited and happy and expectant when not about a child or my children? These questions and feelings were all unusual to me, and it struck me as simply new, to be thinking about myself and my own desires in such detail, with so much decadence and in a way that was not fleeting and fast, and almost not allowed.The following day would mark my 40th year on earth!

And so, this is how I came to choose a series of decadent acts, chosen by myself and whatever I felt my greatest desires to be, ensconced in PINK! There were moments that some of it seemed outside of the realm of what’s allowed for a mom of 3 - glitter coats, sleeves and faux fur collars not excluded… But I’ve loved every moment of it and 40 seems not as scary as I’d imagined, not even close.

It feels like a further sinking in of complexity, beauty and delight in the most ordinary of ordinary things. I salute and congratulate myself often, I am talking to myself the way I want those closest to me to talk to me, I value my parents in ways I never imagined possible. I value my kids and my partner and realise, unequivocally, that if you can’t figure out your own happiness then, more than ever, nobody else is going to or can do it for you. What a huge disappointment of capitalist life, then, that we have been hard wired by pop culture to think that the movies are real… When our own movies pass us by, bright montage by bright montage, in a haze of dust, because we do not deem it valuable or fabulous enough.

My ongoing theme thus is the pink bubble and a montage of wonder with each frame.

Nothing has really changed about my life - I’m still breastfeeding, I’m still exhausted and I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. But I’m here, I’m 40, I am fabulous and I am (mostly) in my pink bubble of love, grace for myself mostly, and ambitious joy for those who love me almost wholly without question. And gosh, what a gift that is.

• For all that planning and fretting, I spent my actual birthday on the couch drinking mimosas and watching the Olympics. I felt most spectacular with lashes and threaded eyebrows (and upper lip, which the therapist tsk tsk’d about with the two pieces of thread in her mouth and hands - ‘too long, too long.. not nice for a lady!’). We had lasagne for supper and a dance party with the kids who moaned bitterly about the old music that wasn’t cool. The following evening I hosted a dinner for a few close friends and then we stayed out till 3am! It was wonderful! I took as long to curate and source this outfit as I did to actually come to the conclusion of what I wanted to do. Hurray - ageing and wisdom and all that.