This is 50

This is 50, darklings.

I am a big believer in the magic of birthdays, this year rolling into a whole new decade. Having lost so many dear ones along the way especially in the last few years, it feels like a blessing to reach this milestone with such a reborn appetite for life.

As my best friend for more than half these many years reminded me this morning in her steady way, my life always changes in epic fashion around my birthday. It was more than three decades ago as I crested adulthood that I met one of the great loves of my life on Valentine's Day. Six years later our son arrived on my birthday as the best gift ever, moving me over the threshold into mother. I have met so many more of my ride-or-die's at our wild collection of birthday parties, another in the offing tonight.

Turns out this has always been the season I fall in love or birth things. I can tug on that thread through my life and watch swallows take flight. Last year on this day I launched Morsel. I began to fully inhabit a lifelong calling to weave words on paper in bigger places than these little boxes.

When I was approaching my forties, the claws of midlife under patriarchy scratching at my heels demanding I refuse ageing, I remember a wise woman telling me that in fact a woman's fifties were the promised land. I keenly see now how my forties were spent shedding a lifetime of false skins and it was not an easy wrench. All the accumulated armour, the rage and despair at a world that refused anything outside its brutal narrow gauntlets, faux friends and their one way streets, all the places I tried so hard to squish myself into that could never accommodate all of me.

In my mid forties I tore my life down to its bare bones. I retreated into an ocean cave. I rebuilt quietly without fanfare on a soft bed of integrity and tenderness. Befriending deeper shadows, finding refuge and mining even greater magics inside of me. I came home, in every sense, to love.

Today I am birthing my elder self to the unbridled delight of my littles, jubilant delivery inevitable. The lines on my face are the map of my life, the extra padding its cushion and care. I can't wait for what she has up her batwing sleeve.