The days are getting longer.

This is the opposite of what I’m used to. In Atlanta, the days are getting blunted at both ends, the summer season inching toward fall. Here in Sydney we are creeping upon spring. Also creeping up is my birthday, this weekend. My fortieth, to be exact. And among the things I never expected to be doing in my life? Celebrating it in Australia, where I now live.

It’s the same, but different.

Like the better part of an hour that I spend in the pool on Thursday mornings, that initial chill giving way to motion and warmth, a new kind of breathing–intentional and quick, timed. One leg moving after the other as always, arm followed by arm, but with the lightness of air giving way to the resistance of water. Learning to move the same, but differently.

I had imagined a large gathering–and I usually try not to imagine large gatherings–but for such a year, I wanted to be surrounded by the people I’ve known and loved for so long. The people who helped get me here. What’s shaping up, instead, is the same but different: a celebration at a local restaurant with a few people I’ve come to know within the last few months. I’ll be a bit more nervous, what with the lack of years of buildup and acceptance of all that is so…me about me, but so far so good. I haven’t completely alienated anyone yet. These are people who know–are getting to know–the me now, the one with a husband and kids and crows feet and anxiety and occasional dips of depression, the me who is adjusting to an across-the-world move and passes through varying stages of honesty about it. These are people whose faces are somewhat new to me yet were already known by a grace that put them in my path, even before I asked for it last year. This is something to celebrate: making it through life thus far, but even more, making it because grace kept showing up.

I plan to drink lots of champagne, is what I’m saying.

Like I did the other night; well, two glasses to be exact, before dinner, when The Husband and I were heading out to meet another couple. I’d considered, in the midst of my social anxiety flare-up, a Xanax, but I try to stick to OTC on double dates. So I entered the restaurant with my hard edges slightly softened and spent the next three hours getting to know lovely people who–along with their kids–were put in our path by the love that answered my prayer last year, those pleas gaining names and faces over the intervening months. We talked about life and struggles and all the other things you do when you’re wanting to be real, to be known, which I do–and don’t. Like everyone, I guess? Because the legwork is so hard and involves the type of vulnerability that isn’t so much a currency of our social media exchanges, the baring of cracks and crevices that time and life have worn in our hearts, the places where we hurt and are afraid. Oh, and we laughed. We’ve had such dinners with such couples before, different but the same, and I suppose there are people who just float through this stuff but I always have to talk myself down from treating it like an audition. Then the moment comes, and you’re sitting with real people and realising that life is happening. That it keeps happening.

Which is how you got to be almost forty.

There are people who say they love getting older, what with all the wisdom and knowledge and whatnot, and I think that’s partially true. I, for one, would love to pass on the hormonal changes and poor sleep and aching knees and gray hairs. But I think about the me from twenty years ago, and how she could run farther–and did. Like, away from herself and everyone else. How, even though she had more free time and got more sleep, she didn’t know herself. She was barely beginning to do that–and what a journey it’s been: jarring, unsettling, chaotic, but real. How it’s still happening, within the context of a family, a foreign country, new friendships, and a recently increased dosage of antidepressant (#thanksdoctor).

This weekend, I’ll get to stop and look around at all that. Besides champagne, isn’t that what birthdays are for?

On Sunday I sat in church while TH took the kids to their class, and we sang a song that I already know–that we sang in Atlanta all the time. It had been in my head the night before–chalk it up to prophecy, intuition, the spirit, or time travel–and it sounded the same now, but different: different voices, different accompaniment, different feelings. It had always made me cry before, looking around at the faces whose struggles I knew. Here, I’m just now getting to know them. The legwork is hard. But it’s happening, in spots and with people who pop up, who were already known even as I’m just getting there and they are too, with me. Sometimes it happens slowly, over several coffee meetings and tentative conversations until a dam breaks and the truth comes out: “You too? I thought I was the only one!” Other times it happens over a three-hour dinner fuelled by wine and our kids’ already-existing connection. The point is, it happens. It’s happening.

That evening we made it to the beach a bit later than usual, but it was okay because the days, they’re getting longer. Which feels wrong, yet right. The boys–all three of them–played on the sand in front of me, and I watched the water begin to glimmer as the first rays of moonlight hit it. The end of the day, with no more guaranteed even as they seem to keep coming surely anyway, the end of one thing becoming the beginning of another, different and the same.