By Adrienne Garrison
@adrie.garrison

There is an image I found in a textbook once, in black and white. I can’t get it out of my mind. It’s a photograph taken in Germany after World War I featuring stacks and stacks of currency forming a low wall, piled together like bricks, the top layers of German marks fluttering away into the gray sky.

Money, once valuable, acquired by sweat, carefully saved and spent was suddenly deemed so completely without value that it was tossed in the streets, forgotten.

***

I am having a problem with turning 35. It’s just that I have no idea how I got here. There have been one hundred small griefs and disappointments in the last two years, and I have traded them all away for a desperate thankfulness to be spared a harsher suffering. Milestones, celebrations, dreams, and best efforts have lost value in comparison to the vast selection of hardship all around me. Piled up like lost currency are a treasured vacation with my 2-year-old son that never happened, a graduation from a hard-fought academic program, the pages I dreamed of writing thanks to stable childcare in the fall, a marriage that did not require my husband to have excessive exposure to an unknown virus … there they are, my great expectations, stacked neatly and traded away without a second glance month by month, year by year.

It had to come at a cost. And the breakdown seems to be happening now, when I can freely assert that, yes, I am 31 weeks pregnant with my third child. I can absolutely attest to the weariness marking two solid years traversing the landscape of a global pandemic. But I am not able to consent to being 35. You are welcome to call me 34 and 401 days, if you like.

***

“It’s not about vanity,” I say to my therapist, but this is not completely true, what with our recent purchase of a minivan and entering this pregnancy with ten extra pounds. What with the fine-lines-turned-wrinkles, the preference for stretchy pants, the sudden obsession with sunscreen.

My therapist has been with me a long time now, so she lets this one go and instead says, “You’re someone who places a high value on meaning in your life … finding meaning in adverse circumstances. Maybe part of this struggle is the sense that there is no meaning to be found in much of what we’ve gone through lately.” 

I pause for what I hope she will take for thoughtful consideration, then vehemently disagree, citing the lessons learned, the perspective gained, the “opportunity” to distill my focus down to what is most essential, what truly matters. It gains me the ubiquitous, ambiguous therapist nod, and our hour concludes. 

***

I felt fine about turning 30. I was ready. In my first job out of college, I’d taught alongside two early thirty-somethings, and heavens, they were chic. Their wardrobes were figured out. They had a signature style. They were beautiful, they knew what they wanted, and they were amazing at their job. Because of these women, probably, I never had any wobbly feelings about leaving my twenties behind. I walked confidently into my 30th birthday. 

The next few numbers were easily tucked into a blur of “early thirties” that included a second baby, a move, another degree, and the global pandemic. Age ain’t nothing but a number. Breezy thoughts like this crossed my mind and carried me all the way into early 2022, and then promptly dropped me flat on my ass. 

“What do you want for your birthday?” my husband asked. I had no feelings about this annual song and dance. The lack of attentiveness and telepathic capacity from him stopped irritating me a few years ago, when I promptly took celebrating myself into my own hands. (See: The 90’s Party of 2015, complete with pink sequined mini-skirt and slap-bracelet party favors.) His question didn’t bother me. Like I said, I felt nothing.

“Ask me in August,” I said. 

“But your birthday is next week,” he said, winning a half-point for effort. “What do you mean?”

“It’s just that I don’t feel 35. I have absolutely no connection with that number. I refuse to acknowledge it.”

He paused for a moment. Bless him. These times must feel like standing at a six-way fork in the road. “Well … how do you feel, then?”

“Pregnant,” I shot back. “And two years past due for a vacation.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “And you think by August, you’ll …”

“Yes. I need a glass of wine in my hand to turn 35. And sunshine on bare arms. And laughter. Those are my terms.” Can you imagine what it’s like to be married to a writer? This kind of stuff … all the time. “And since I don’t have access to any of those things right now, I simply refuse.”

“Good plan,” he responds, taking a sip of coffee and his chance to exit the room.

When the actual day comes, I smile graciously at the Facebook comments and send happy emojis to friends texting me well-wishes. Bless them. So kind to acknowledge this moment that absolutely isn’t happening. 

I gather the kids and take them to open-gym at a gymnastics studio, letting them burn off their cabin fever. I take quiet delight in the fact that the friends I encounter there don’t mention anything about my legal date of birth coinciding with today’s date. I spread peanut butter and jelly on four pieces of bread, break up kid squabbles, and feel exactly the same as I felt the day before: heavy and tired. I feel like me. I do not feel 35.

***

I recently heard grief defined as sustained loss, whereas trauma was defined as a loss of control causing mental, emotional, or physical harm. I was deeply familiar with both of these specters ahead of the pandemic, but the collective experience of trauma and loss makes me so much more likely to hold my pain in comparison—”comparative suffering,” they call it. You hear it woven into every prayer request from a friend, in every coffee shop date to catch up with someone you’ve missed, in passing at the grocery store: our personal pain tucked into a wrapping of justification for how it could be worse and why we shouldn’t really acknowledge it when so much of what is happening in the world is much more terrible. 

Against the backdrop of everything broken in the world, what is a birthday anyway but a chance to see how lucky you are to be alive, to be thriving, and even—in my case—growing new life. I see that, and I feel that, but after all these months of devaluing my heartache, it seems my fortune has lost meaning as well. I just feel empty. 

It will pass, I know. And maybe that’s why I’ve reassigned my birthday to six months from now, in a warmer season, when my body is my own and I can meet 35 as the gift that it is: a story unfinished, a collection of days suffused with meaning, a bright flare of hope that occurs when each one of us is born. The years of our lives are not something stacked up and forgotten, blowing away in the wind. Each birthday is an invitation to begin again, believing this year, this time, there will be space for all of who we are in this tangled, beautiful world. And in August, I will be ready.