Thoughts on turning 57.

My birthday collided with a wedding last weekend. Here's how I feel on the other side of it all.

Blueberry pancakes make everything (even getting older) a little better.

I don’t remember my birthday being the demarcation line between mid and late summer, but I came home from a wedding last weekend and it was as if there had been a subtle shift in The Universe. Of course, retailers are feeding me posts on Instagram showing knee-high suede boots matched with flouncy floral dresses and every baggy sweater under the sun. Nordstrom needs me to know the cooler weather is around the corner.

But even Mother Nature, who has no monetary skin in the change-of-season game, had gotten the message. I sat on my front porch with my daughters last Sunday night waiting to go out to dinner for my birthday and heard the steady whir of crickets, which always conjures summers of yesteryear. When I was young or my children were young. The anticipation of the new school year and the endless possibilities that the turn of the page evoked.

I decided to google why the crickets seem to ramp up their singing as the summer draws to a close and discovered it’s the boy crickets trying to impress the girl crickets. In a world that seems to be dominated by couples, that seems about right. Even the fucking bugs don’t want to be alone.

I found it interesting that The Universe would present to me a wedding to attend over my birthday weekend alongside my group of college friends and their husbands to celebrate the marriage of our friend’s daughter. There are eight of us and despite divorces and a 9/11 loss, I am the only one of the group who remains uncoupled.

I struggled for months over whether or not I would go. While I was so honored to be included in such a special occasion and was so happy for my dear friend and her family, I also didn’t know if I could handle having my aloneness amplified as I turned 57. The discomfort that I felt around still being single after being divorced for over a decade.

For some reason, those emotional hot buttons seem to rise to the surface around my birthday and holidays. Like in The Hobbit where sunlight from the rising sun hits the mountain from just the right angle in the sky to unlock some secret ancient door within.

The combo of being the only solo person with seven other couples over my birthday weekend just seemed like a one-two punch for my tender little ego. Did I really need to be reminded of just how alone I felt on my birthday? Wasn’t turning 57 single traumatic enough?

I went back and forth and in the meantime told just about everybody I know about my dilemma. It would be expensive. I’d have to drive from New Jersey to Massachusetts alone on a summer weekend. It was my birthday the next day. I have nothing to wear. My upper arms are absolutely tragic. The list went on and on.

I showed my much younger teammates the save-the-date card I got in the mail over the winter on a Zoom call. It was a lovely watercolor of a gorgeous home overlooking the water along the coast where the wedding would be held in August, and they were like, “What is wrong with you? Of course, you’re going.”

“Maybe you’ll meet someone!” said my adorable 30-something manager and my even younger teammates nodded in agreement.

Later, I told one of my guy friends that I didn’t think there would be single men at the wedding and he told me that there would be plenty of unhappy married men, which made me laugh.

In the end, I decided that the FOMO would be worse than being the odd man out, and also — where else was I going? I wanted to get dressed up and I wanted to dance. So, I RSVP’d in the affirmative and got busy finding a dress.

The whole dress thing could be a long story in and of itself, but let’s just say that after a frock from The Real Real that didn’t do me any favors and one that came, like, overnight from England that my pal said was, “meh,” I ended up borrowing a shiny Anthropologie dress from my sister. Then, as it exposed my arms, I instructed my exercise friend, Dan, to help me get them looking less ham-boney and I did a million tricep exercises for a couple of months.

The weekend finally arrived and I dragged my feet so hard that Friday morning before leaving — even stopping at a little shop on the way out of town to buy earrings to go with my dress — that the 4.5-hour trip from NJ to the MA coast stretched to about 7. I landed at my hotel with enough time to throw on a sundress and deodorant and head out to dinner with my friends.

During the stop-and-go drive north, I listened to an audiobook and cried a bunch. I’d be thinking about the story and how the main character was an absolute train wreck and the next thing I knew, my face would feel hot and my eyes bristling with tears. It was like I was floating in a sac of tears surrounded by the thinnest membrane that the sharpest thoughts or feelings would slice through and unleash the torrent of tears as I drove north feeling sorry for myself.

The weekend went by in a flash. There were so many laughs with the husbands — a few that I’ve known for more than 30 years. There was an oversized strawberry shortcake and a hunk of key lime pie with a big sparkler that came to the table at lunch one day in honor of my birthday. And it was kind of funny dancing with all these women in our later(er) 50s who all jumped around together at every sorority formal in college in our Laura Ashley dresses, our arms tight across each other’s shoulders, screaming along to the song “We Are Family.”

Readers: you have never been to a prettier wedding or seen a lovelier couple than the pair we celebrated that weekend. The tent perched atop some beautiful body of water with sailboats bobbing in the distance, flowers that looked picked right out of a cottage garden sprung from the center of each table, and the inside of the tent glittering underneath little lights and woven shades that had been strung from the ceiling.

It was all so drop-dead gorgeous but what I was really struck by was how happy I was for my friend, the mother of the bride, and her family. The first time I met the bride was at another wedding decades earlier when she was just a few months old and still nursing and kind of miserable and so her parents brought her along (because those kinds of things make sense when you’re a sleep-deprived new parent). Almost 30 years later she’s now an amazing young woman and I thought about all the work her mom had put in to get her — and three other siblings — where they were that night, dancing and singing and celebrating each other.

I sat by myself on the freezing cold 10:30 p.m. shuttle bus that drove us back to the hotel with all the couples sitting around me, talking softly to each other. We stood in the hotel lobby and said our goodbyes as most of us would be leaving early the next day. And then of course there were a lot of happy birthdays, with midnight looming not so far away. Each time someone gave me a big hug I felt a little more alone for no reason but I could feel the membrane around me really starting to stretch. I made it into the elevator and waved goodbye as I stepped off on my floor without any tears but when one of the gals came to my room to give a little gift from a few of the girls, I burst a little. “Now are you glad you came?” asked the friend I’ve known since grammar school and it all came out. “I don’t know,” I cried and apologized and said that my birthday always gets me worked up.

“Don’t be silly,” she countered, “everyone hates their birthday!”

She comforted me a bit more and reminded me that birthdays (and weddings) can be hard for many different reasons. This dear friend of mine lost a son to suicide and I am sure the wedding pressed a lot of her buttons, too. In fact, I bet there were a lot of people under their tent with hot-button issues coming to the surface. Everybody has things, I reminded myself.

I started driving before the sun came up the next morning and arrived home in the prescribed 4.5 hours to a house full of my grown children (plus a friend) and blueberry pancakes. There were mylar balloons tied to the stair rail and cardboard stars fluttering along the edge of the front porch. All day, the kids catered to my every whim and I felt so valued and loved. I was reminded of how all that hard work I had put into my own children over all the long days that piled into decades had paid off for me, too.

All this week I could feel that subtle shift in the air as I walked my dog around town. Something about the clouds in the sky and its shade of blue reminds me that September is right around the corner. The air felt a little less oppressive as we walked along the sidewalks and I admired all the hydrangeas standing guard along the front of the homes I pass. How their big creamy flower heads are turning a soft blush that deepens as the days go by into a dark crimson.

Somehow, I have set up my Headspace app to serve up little inspirational morsels on my phone (and watch) throughout the day. I don’t always read them when they pop up but when I do, they always remind me to slow down. To be more thoughtful about what I say and do. This week, I was sitting at my desk working when I saw one come up on my watch and I lifted my phone to read what it said. “Focus on gratitude and joy. Be kind to yourself,” I read, and I smiled and thanked the Headspace gods. I remembered all that I have — invitations to share in a joyful celebration, dancing with dear friends in a shiny long dress and a plate full of blueberry pancakes and children who are so good to me. Who make me feel anything but alone.

So, chirp away crickets, I hope you find someone soon. I’m chirping softly, too, but the difference between us is that your days are numbered. Soon, your whirring will be silenced whereas I will still be here. Singing quietly. Waiting.

sunday shares: read + watch + cook + buy

Terrible people. I listened to two novels about fairly terrible people over the last week. The first that I referenced above was The Guest, which was a little more somber. From the publisher: Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome. Things do not go well. The second book was Bad Summer People, a more lighthearted murder mystery, which opens with a dead body under the boardwalk of an enclave of overprivileged Manhattanites summering in an enclave on Fire Island and is filled with bad behavior.

Give me all the Sondheim. My mom turned 80 not long ago and to celebrate, I got us tickets to go see Sweeney Todd on Broadway because we both have a penchant for Sondheim shows. Nowadays, it takes a lot for me to feel like it’s worth lugging myself into the city for something, but this production did not disappoint. Gorgeous singing. Costumes. Acting. Mrs. Lovett steals the show.

Cheap and easy. I got my daughter this little set of gold earrings for (literally) $10 on Amazon and stole a pair from the set and honestly, I love them. Trendy and not too flimsy. Also, $10.