MIND MOVES Marie MurrayWhat is most celebrated and most dreaded? What do women conceal and men rarely reveal? What do children add to and adults subtract from? Well, the answer is age.
Our relationship with age is most peculiar; we add to age in childhood, fake age ID in adolescence, conceal our years in middle age and return to proud declaration once the biblical four score and ten or celebratory centennial arrives.
Between those stages how we view the passage of time depends upon a variety of factors - our personal self-esteem, our achievements relative to our age, the degree to which the culture we live in reveres or reviles the aging process and finally the identity we have created for ourselves, or that has been created for us, at different life stages.
Age-related judgments of us begin early, with parents comparing developments in walking, talking and toilet training. Children are also reminded to 'act their age' according to hierarchical age-based behavioural expectations; encapsulated in the classic admonishment to the eldest in the group that 'you're old enough to know better'.
Yet despite adult expectations, children themselves long for the incremental status each birthday brings, with promises of new competencies hitherto only observed in older siblings and playmates. So special is being 'older' that the five-and-a-half year old (the half is critical) soon becomes the nearly six-year-old who can look from the heights of 'elder' advantage on the lowly status of those who are 'barely' five. And to be six! What age attainment! As the verse goes, now that I'm six, I'm clever so clever, I think I'll stay six forever and ever.
Yet what was once the eagerly anticipated birthday in childhood may turn into a dreaded adult event. It is rare to hear an adult boast 'I'm almost 60'. Rather, it is 'the right side of 60' which still permits the declaration 'I'm in my fifties'. Because if one were to analyse our convoluted relationship with age, the pivotal factor in whether or not we wish to advance, diminish or dismiss our age depends upon the meaning a society attributes to it; in an ageist society, which privileges youth, years are not glorified.
Birthdays hold other intense psychological dimensions. They declare this is the day that this person, this unique life began. When others remember your birthday, they commemorate your continuance. They say, through birthday gift or card, that their lives are better for your presence, and that your presence on this earth is cause for celebration.
While childhood advances slowly, adulthood sprints with alarming alacrity. Birthdays mark this process: age of reason, of consent, age of majority, the 18th, the 21st, parties for the passing of the decades. These are important rituals signposting our lives.
Of course we joke about birthdays. We joke most about what we fear most. This probably explains the proliferation of macabre middle-age repartee; how middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle, or when anything new you feel is a symptom. It is the time when sexual prowess jokes emerge in proportion to the perception of threat to sexual capacity.
We also project our past ageist prejudices upon ourselves. When we enter the birthdays of middle age we encounter an era we remember our parents living through. We remember how old they seemed (then), to be 40, how antiquated at 50, how ancient at 70, in contrast to how young we now perceive ourselves to be upon arrival at those antediluvian ages. If, tragically, a parent died in middle age, then we cannot conceive of living beyond their life span. This is the birthday we do not believe we will achieve.
Birthdays are complex psychological processes, not singular annual events. Birthday parties reassure children they were wanted, they are loved. It is for this reason every child should have at least one, special, memorable birthday, a memo to adulthood so that regardless of their memories of childhood there is one seminal celebration to shield against moments of doubt.
Birthdays are markers. In the past, mothers forced to relinquish their children for adoption were left to imagine annually how their child might be. Many adopted children recall their birthdays as days that they too wondered from whom and whence they came and why. Parents who have lost a child grieve especially on birthdays for the years that might have been, for the milestones never now to be attained, for the life not fully lived.
Mothers who miscarry often note the date their baby should have been born with sorrow for a life denied. Even more silent is post-abortion mourning, emerging in clinical conversations but otherwise silent and suppressed.
Birthdays punctuate our lives. And as we get older it is more difficult, perhaps, to delight in the next milestone, on a life path whose end is becoming more visible, whose horizon is no longer protected by the optimistic myopia of youth. This is a path whose most sensational, scenic views may lie behind with uncertain terrain ahead. This is a path on whose sharp stones we may already have stumbled and whose steep and lonely incline seems daunting at its end. This is a journey which beloved partners and friends may have completed, leaving us to pick and trip our solitary way through its final stages, alone. This is the journey to journey's end.
But it is not yet over, whatever age you are. It is therefore important, always, to celebrate your birthday, make it a marker for what you have done last year. Make up magnificent plans for the year ahead. Without this magical thinking, birthdays are dreary days instead of marvellous possibilities. Psychological research shows we must dream in order to actualise our desires. Birthdays provide the perfect opportunity.
mmurray@irish-times.ie
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview, Dublin.