The Symmetry of Birthdays

I’ve always liked the symmetry of our birthdays.

As if we planned it.  This year my dad turns 78, I turn 48 and my son 18.

Every year something rises to the fore, the growing child, the aging parent, the next stage.

Forty eight it turns out, is not the year I inch closer to AARP, it’s the year he leaves home.  Everything takes on the tinge of this event that is still several months away, but still there.

It reminds me of the scene in When Harry Met Sally as she weeps about turning 40.

“And I’m gonna be 40” she says, amid hysterics.

“When?” Harry asks.

“Someday.”

“In eight years,” he deadpans.

“But it’s there.  It’s just sitting there.  Like this big dead end.”

I don’t yet know what I am feeling about this next phase, but I keep watching for it, around the corners of our daily life.  A recent New York Times piece gave me the green light to feel something.  The article about empty nest dads articulates some of what is coming as our first born speeds down the runway toward college.

“The empty-nest transition is harder on fathers than conventional wisdom might have us believe. Men’s experience of this life passage has changed dramatically from what they might have felt — or admitted feeling — 40 years ago.”

I agree with the sentiment, but why was this article written by a woman?  Is no man capable of explaining why a child leaving home is deadening?  Terrifying?  Sad.

According to her there is a happy reason for all this unhappiness:  

“Fathers occupy a more central place in family life than they once did: Since the 1960s, fathers have more than doubled the number of hours they spend on housework and now do about a third of household chores, according to the Pew Research Center.”

So that’s it, the extra run of laundry, the additional sock repaired brought us closer to our children?  I think not.  Dads are parents too.  Actually, dads are people too.  It’s less about the chores that we complete and more about the hole that exists in our days and the redefinition of a role we acquired the day these children scream into our lives.

It’s all about the clock.

I have heard more men talk with sadness about how their weeks have been defined by their child’s soccer schedule, a joint commute to school/work or the shared sporting event.  The first big hit comes when they get their driver’s license, a couple years before they leave and our time with them is carved into even smaller pieces.  If we are not their driver, their coach, their ticket purveyor, who are we?

“Men’s identity is now invested in a more intimate, hands-on fatherhood; fathers see themselves not just as breadwinners but as caregivers and confidants, and feel deeply attached to kids they have changed and bathed and driven.”

A driver’s license is a license to stay away. They no longer rely on us to pick them up from school, the haircut, tennis practice is now something to be shared with friends. The household rhythm is off, the empty seat at the table, the un-dented couch cushion.  But what will be a year from now?  A therapist might call this anticipatory anxiety.  No shit.  

As we age our birthdays become less about us and more about things outside ourselves, the age of a parent, the number of candles on our child’s cake, the lines on a face, the distance between visits.  This birthday is not about who I am today, but of what’s next.  

Until now there was a crude road map for what to expect when you’re expecting, schooling, skinned knees, grit, grade school, high school. 

But not now. 

What is life like on the other side of that door?  The door they’re about to walk out of?