Last week I celebrated my birthday. I found it deeply offensive to turn forty-five, as it’s the oldest I’ve ever been and that number just sounds #ancientAF. It’s half of ninety, for God’s sake!

For the occasion, I asked a best friend whose kids are TK and LB’s best friends (this has all been legally noted) to pick the boys up from school and take them to hers. She responded with a yes, but her kids responded by getting Covid, so while shivering through a swim I pondered whether to cancel either the fancy lunch or the boozy movie that TH and I had planned.

Obvi the fancy lunch had to go.

Another friend stepped in, which is how, on the afternoon of a Friday birthday, I found myself with TH, three glasses of Mumm deep at a viewing of Nope. After that, we bought my favo(u)rite grocery store layer cake and stopped at said friend’s by to a) drink more champagne; b) eat the cake; and c) collect the children.

It was a good day.

I’m still offended, however, at being this old, even as I know how lucky I am to still be here, convinced as I was as a child that I would die early in melodramatic fashion (I watched the movie Beaches a lot). But with the offence I have to acknowledge the benefits of making it out of my 30s, and especially out of my 20s–a decade fraught with insecurity and bad choices.

There is a settledness now. Paired with it is a lack of excitement that makes a 1pm movie (in recliners! with table service!) a real treat; that makes Fridays in de rigeur and Saturdays in a consummate joy. I buy half- and quarter-bottles of wine at Dan Murphy’s now so that I don’t overserve myself (which, these days, is anything more than two). I get told (by the masseuse at the spa in the mountains that I rush off from to buy the kids Domino’s so the adults can have dinner down the hall on their own which is a wild night out) that my feet need more arch support and I’m carrying my right shoulder higher and that side of my back is in knots so I concentrate my back pillow there and buy shoe inserts and it turns out she’s so right. I feel my knees start to give way on runs, bone grinding against bone, and wonder how much longer I can do that. I put the kids to bed and wonder if I’ll still be here when they are forty-five.

I am still me, annoyingly. But I am also something different. I recognise love in so many forms I didn’t know it could take. That all the “disruptions” in my life have actually been kept promises that led me further toward a home that may feel foreign and transient but is deep and real and, often, not geographical at all. I have learned to accept, sometimes even embrace, what has pinned me against a wall (or rock, as it were) and brought me to the end of myself. I have learned that at that point–the end of self–a desperation is formed that leads to new life, because so much can grow from the seeds of desperation, depending on what you use as water.

I have found a deep sense of belonging, and not where I expected–yes, within the folds of family, but also on the edges: among the different, the misunderstood, the homed yet wandering, those in touch with both deep grief and deep joy. If faith, as Frank Lake said, is a “desperate gaze in a counterintuitive direction,” then count me a fanatic because that is exactly how I have learned to direct my eyes: desperately, and counterintuitively.

Turns out the view is rugged, terrifying, beautiful–and abounding in grace.