Today I turn 40.
Generally, I don't think much of birthdays. They are merely another mile marker on the road. They are another way to measure the passage of time and the movement from one era of life to another. My life has contained far more meaningful mile markers than birthdays. At the same time, this birthday is intent on trying to make me feel old.
More than anything it reminds me of those birthdays back when they represented points at which you acquired various rights. At eighteen you could be considered an adult for the first time. At twenty-one you were able to do just about anything, especially buy and consume alcohol legally. I work in an environment now where I regularly encounter girls who await these mile markers. They aren't from the mythological white picket fence house where mommy makes pancakes while daddy reads and laughs at today's installment of the "Family Circus" and thinks it actually represents something. They are from the world people who pretend to live in that world like to pretend doesn't exist.
The human survival instict tells us to go out and find what we lack by any means possible. No family is ever really perfect, but some are more off the mark than others. Some kids grow up before they are ready to grow up because they have to. Dad is in jail and mommy passes out drunk every night while sleeping with daddy's best friend. These are the kinds of things some kids have to deal with before they are capable of understanding why they happen in the first place.
I have a daughter. She isn't my biological daughter. I was once engaged to her mother, but that ended badly. Ashley was capable of understanding even though she was only nine years old at the time. Her mother thought her overwhelming beauty could overcome her shortcomings. Ashley never had a father, in part because her mother could not stop being who she was. Her "real" father never saw her and never spoke to her. The other boyfriends her mother had never paid any attention to Ashley because they were too busy trying to get in mom's pants. I remember Ashley and her mother arguing because Ashley wanted to call me "dad." She screamed at her mother, "He's the only father I've ever had and you want to drive him away." When we last saw each other, Ashley told me she wanted me to always think of her as my daughter. To this day I still call her my daughter, and I still would even if she hadn't made me promise. I haven't seen her in ten years. She's nineteen now. Those ten years probably moved more quickly for me than they did for her. I was told she became a cheerleader in high school and graduated near the top of her class. It made me very happy to hear this. Her biological parents never graduated high school. She is my daughter. One day I hope to see her again.
There is this girl who is seventeen. She is currently living in the place where I work. Some might say she is a pathological liar because she always takes minor incidents and blows them up into a large scale drama. She lied to me the other night, telling me she never drinks alcohol. I've read her file, which also tells me about her suicide attempt, which lands her in my kingdom. She went off the rails earlier this year, rebelling against the authority of her parents, school, and anyone else in a position of authority. She rebels in her current situation against authority. She's dyed her hair black, wears dark clothes and has an obsession with "Hello Kitty." She likes me because I'm the staff member everyone else calls "weird." I work third shift, so we usually write notes to each other. I tried to teach her one of my mantras, that life is a book still being written and you can divide your life into chapters. You still have the situations and characters from the last chapter, but at the writer you can find resolutions and move forward. A new chapter gives you a fresh page.
Eventually I'll explain to her that life is about negotiating your personal reality with what exists in the collective reality. She has trouble with that integration, but this is a kid with a lot of potential ahead of her and I'd hate for her to fall deeper in a hole because she can't handle the negotiations. She's having trouble with her own personal negotiations, the kind that often happen at her age, where you want to be an adult but you still like being a kid.
I think the measure of a life is how much impact you've had on the lives of others and how positive that impact has been. The road I've travelled since 1994 has been a very good one. It hasn't been an easy road, and there were many times when I could have chosen the easy road. I've given up jobs, security, money and safety because I don't think those things have anything to do with the meaning of life. People are the meaning of life, and if I stagnate, I stop being relevant.
I figured turning 40 would mark the end of an era. Maybe I would retire. Maybe I'd be too tired to go on. Maybe I would have done enough and could stop hanging in the gutter looking at the stars with the people I call my own. Maybe I'd stop being able to flirt with cute waitresses. Then again, I have a twenty-two year old co-worker I flirt with all the time who recently took a second job working as a waitress at the Chili's they built for me when I moved to New Hampshire. Life is still very good. It just keeps getting more interesting.