When I lived in Chicago, my grandparents died in very close proximity. Collapsed by grief on the airplane home for their funerals, I remember feeling, really feeling, the texture of the seat and being surprised by it. Being comforted by it, by doing just this one thing, feeling the material.

Only in times of extreme grief did I give myself permission to live in the moment, back then.

I have a bad habit of cataloging all the tasks in every area of my life when my body is engaged in manual activities and my mind starts to wander. I've done it since the idea of homework was introduced in elementary school and I was shocked to learn I'd be responsible for something that needed to be done in the future of my own volition. I find it difficult to put off tasks that I know need to be done.

This summer, I'm focusing on feeling the texture of every piece of material. The sound of the wind rattling the leaves and the 17-year cicadas hissing in the treetops. Sunshine on my shoulders and the instant sweat evaporates when the wind picks up on my runs.

When I wake up in the morning (sometimes now drenched in sweat, thanks, perimenopause), I'm taking a least five minutes by my alarm clock to listen to the sounds of the house and find that floating place between sleep and wakefulness one last time.

Instead of listing in my head the tasks I need to accomplish each day, I'm trying to float, to prepare myself to be resilient to whatever might come my way instead of trying to head it off before it even happens.

I've always wanted to be that one zen guy in every trapped-on-a-desert-island movie who lies on the beach while everyone around him is freaking out even though they are all in the exact same situation. Now in my forties I'm realizing there is absolutely no reason why I can't be him.

I just have to make it so.

I can't resist going outside on summer nights.

No matter how old I grow, on summer nights, I am seventeen again, pressing my face to the thick air, listening to the tree frogs and the owls and the cacophony of insects that create a din where in winter there is only silence and cold. The cold sometimes creates a sound that is not a sound, but more a feeling.

The trees rustle where the boughs meet fifty feet above my head. I wonder who planted these trees or if they planted themselves. I wonder if the trees will still be here after I am gone from this place, and I am certain they will be. The trees don't care about my business. They'll offer shelter and shade to anyone and no one.

Summer nights convince me that I could walk away into them, walk for miles into their thickness and here on the edge of town I could disappear into the thickets where the deer live and the coyotes howl, pressing against the edge of the house rows. They ignore our presence and continue to be wild at the edge of it.

Once in high school I took a walk late on a summer night along the edge of a highway and out in the fields farmed by my relatives, I saw a million fireflies light up all at the same time. That they did that every night, that they still do that every night while I am sleeping or watching Netflix continues to center me and remind me that my little melodramas bloom and fade away like fireworks against their continuing thick summer night sky.

On summer nights, my favorite authors sat and thought and looked at similar fireflies and wrote their words, and sometimes I write some words, too, watching them explode against the screen before they fade away into the raging river of social media.

And I am struck by the mediocrity of my finest hour, and also comforted by it, because I am only just beginning to discover what so many more humans have known before me.

At my aunt's funeral last weekend, I remembered a documentary I saw about elephant mourning. Elephants are very intelligent, and when one of them falls, the herd gathers around it and touches it, sometimes moving to bury it under tree branches. They have even been known to do this for people. As I sat in the pew with tears streaming down my cheeks, I mourned my aunt who has been gone as I know her for years, taken by Pick's disease, but if I had a trunk, I would have raised it in respect for the woman I knew.

When I am gone, I would like an elephant funeral on a thick summer night. 

Outside, listening to the tree frogs and the owls and the night creatures going about their business, I realize again how silly my ego really is. I can strive to scratch against the surface that is history, but ultimately a wayward star can erase not only me but every human who came before me and would come after. It's a scary thought, but also an oddly comforting one. I am all of it; I am none of it. The only thing that matters, ultimately, is how I treat people while I am here.

When we're gone, people don't remember so much what we said or what we did, but how we made them feel. We store that feeling with smells and tastes down in the animal portion of our brains, so much that when I cracked open an old book of nursery rhymes my grandmother used to read me, I heard her voice and initially thought I was being visited by a ghost before I realized this was my brain at work, my memory associating her gentle tenor with the words on the page.

On all summer nights, if I am alone and the air is right, I am seventeen and there are millions of fireflies hovering above the cornfields. I am seventeen and I will be someone and I will conquer the world and people will remember my name.

I pull out of the school drop-off line and listen to the creak of the motor pulling the top down off my car. I read somewhere exposing yourself to natural light first thing in the morning is the best way to wake up, and I didn't want to wake up this, her last day of fourth grade.

I woke only begrudgingly, soaked in sweat for the second time last night, my first tshirt and shorts lying in a still-damp heap at the foot of the bed. I wasn't drenched from a nightmare; I'd been having dreams all night of college, back when I could wave an arm at a group of near-strangers and invite them on an adventure or to play a game, and they would come with me. Back when I could walk into a room of people and start conversations halfway through with people I'd never met before.

The soaking comes from getting older, from the prelude to the change. The dreams come from writing about that time in life when anything seems possible: age nineteen.

I should've stayed up when I rose first to change my clothes, when I woke shivering to find myself damp and cold but also hot in that confusing way that seems to be my new normal. I should've stayed up, because when I did finally rise, it was hard from the middle of a deep sleep, and being ripped from that lovely dream where I was at a party and everyone was smiling at me and we didn't have anywhere to be or anything to do the next morning because finals were over and we were floating in the knowledge that we'd secured our spot at college for another year, that we didn't have to be real adults yet.

Instead I pulled on the third tshirt of the night/morning and laced up my running shoes and made sure my daughter was wearing sunscreen and deoderant and fixed the broken garage door and drove to school. 

And then, as I pulled away, I dropped the convertible's top to let in the early summer sunshine and drove home, remembering the dream.

Not totally. Not really. Because today, I made it to forty. And my daughter made me toast on the red plate and sang to me. And my friends called and texted and joked and welcomed me to this decade of my life. And my sister and my best friend sang to me on the phone. And even though Beloved is out of town, I opened my presents via Facetime.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way.

1) No matter how much you want to embrace 40, it's 40. It's like 30's older sister. These birthdays that end in zeroes are tough.

2) Polar vortex

3) School has been cancelled all week, see: polar vortex. It's also cancelled tomorrow because we got a foot of snow in a blizzard yesterday and the salt is apparently not activating because blah blah SCIENCE so all the roads still suck even though they've been treated and plowed.

4) Both my child and my cat have been cooped up in this house since the Super Bowl and are ready to kill each other.

5) My daughter keeps making cookies. We have a million cookies. She keeps making more. And leaving the dishes.

6) The blizzard required a total of three hours over two days of snowblowing, because: polar vortex.

7) My husband is traveling for six weeks solid Monday-Thursday. This was week one.

8) I kind of hurt my back snowblowing. I think it's okay, but I'm not completely sure, because I'm old now.

So my sister called me as I was skating around town buying prescription cat food and hand warmers and cat toys and champagne in tiny little bottles to reward myself for making it through this week of frigid hell. I tried to tell her paragraph one, about how I know I should be grateful and in a better mood and all because all my limbs are attached and at least I work from home, and she was all: You know what? I think it's already too late. BIRTHDAYFAIL. 

And then for the first time today, I sort of felt better for real. 

Last month, the Arens family won an iPad in a sweepstakes put on by ClassWish. (They are awesome, go buy some books and the school of your choice gets part of the proceeds.) Since then, we have been using the FaceTime feature on it to talk to family back in Iowa.

We've noticed something. If the camera adds ten pounds, the pixelated oranges of FaceTime adds ten years, as well as sunspots, shine and huge pores (for white people, at least).

It's so bad that my mother commented once on how unflattering the view is of oneself, especially considering you're almost always looking DOWN on the iPad in your lap, thus adding double chins to the effect.

Seriously. Here is me right now, normal, head-on, not-great-lowlight-cell-phone pic.

We see a few fine lines and wrinkles, but otherwise, hey, I'm 38! I don't appear to be on the edge of death.

Now let's check out FaceTime on the iPad. (Note: It is crazy super hard to take a picture of yourself on FaceTime because you're in the picture holding the phone over your face and blocking yourself. I had to hold the phone like upside down and backwards, then rotate the whole thing to show you. You're welcome.)

Sunken eyes, shiny NECK? And OMG ARE THOSE JOWLS?

It gets worse from the lap angle.

Now I also have several odd slopes on my face and a comb-over.

Please tell me I am not the only person experiencing this phenomenon?

Halfway.

The average lifespan in the United States is 78.2 years. I will be 39 on my next birthday.

Halfway.

There is a part of me that feels as though I could go tomorrow having lived a full life.

There is a part of me that prays every night I will live to be the little angel's mother for a long, long time.

---

I have so many friends who have already lost parents. I have not lost mine.

I have so many friends who have lost children. I have not lost mine.

The average number of close friends people have is two.

I have more than that.

I am blessed.

Because I know and care about so many people through the wonder of the Internet and my job, I am subjected daily to their sorrows and their strengths. I realize, perhaps more than any generation before me, how completely normal everything that happens to me really is. I have bad days, I have good days, and that is normal. The universe is chaotic, and peace comes from within. I believe in God, but I also believe my God is both empathetic and hands-off. We learn from our chaos. We get another day, but the next day might suck. If we didn't have the low points, we wouldn't appreciate the high ones. There is a need to balance darkness and light.

---

My daughter is upstairs sleeping. I wanted her very badly, and then I didn't want more children. I hope she will not be upset with me when she is halfway, and I am as old as my parents, and she is looking upon potentially being the only one left when we are gone.

I pray she will have more than two close friends. I pray her friends will be her sisters and brothers, because even though I treasure my sister more than I can say, I'm also thankful for the other friends who have stepped in when my relatives can't be right by my side. I think people get planted for us when we need them, virtually and physically. I believe in paying it forward. I believe in answering the emails I get weekly from women struggling with eating disorder recovery. I believe in the woman I saw in the Serenity Suite crying for Susan Niebur when I didn't realize that was what she was upset about. I was talking with my friends when she started crying, and I hope she doesn't hold against me that I didn't realize what she was doing. I didn't lose Susan in that I didn't know Susan well, but I've lost my own Susans and I understand that pain. I'm sorry, blonde woman. I hope you don't hold it against me.

---

Halfway.

When I thought on goals for my life in high school, they were grandiose. This year marks my twentieth high school reunion. I have reached an age in which many professionals look like teenagers to me. I wonder if the people I bonded with in high school will come back or if they will stay secure in their new lives and their new selves, not wanting to be reminded of who we were at eighteen. I don't hold it against them if they want to forget. I was sick when I was eighteen. What does anyone know of me then? I don't even remember it myself.

Have I gotten old?

I am only halfway.

---

Last weekend, I listened to Katie Couric talk about how much more she has to contribute now that she is in her fifties than when she was in her twenties, and I understand. As much as I miss the elastic skin of my twenties, I don't miss the angst. I don't miss the uncertainty.

I wonder if I will feel even better about who I am in another twenty years.

I wonder if this website will still exist.

I wonder if my novels will be published.

I wonder if my daughter will still want to be held by me.

I wonder if I will be the person I want to be.

---

I am halfway, and for some that would seem a bad thing, but for me it feels glorious. If I am lucky enough to achieve the average lifespan in the United States, I will have another whole 39 years to become twice as good as I am tonight, twice as meaningful. My words will hold twice as much weight as they do tonight. My grandparents lived to be fifty-something and eighty-two or eighty-three, three of them. I never met my maternal grandfather, but my other three grandparents were strong well into their late seventies and early eighties. They had so much to tell me in their last years.

I am halfway, I hope. And I have so much more to learn.

Every year I think summer goes too quickly. But this summer is passing with very alarming speed. In July, I asked where June had gone, and it was a sincere question. Now next week is August and BlogHer '11 and the week off I thought was so so far away and then after that the little angel will be back in school, and I'm sitting here staring at the calendar vaguely remembering trips back to Iowa and fireworks and watering plants and a few languid afternoons treading water at the swimming pool and little else -- it's an actual blur.

I sometimes wonder what's happening to my memory.

Clearly the problem is rushing. When I rush, I don't really live in the moment. I started out summer doing a great job of not rushing, but in the ensuing months, life happened and it all went ass over ankles out the window.

I had a dream last night I looked outside and it was sleeting. In my dream, somehow I'd missed my last chance at sailing and biking and Halloween and Labor Day and every fun thing about fall, and I was spitting mad that it was winter. (I hate winter. I try to be more loving toward winter, but it's a really tenuous relationship necessitated by my insistence on staying in the Midwest.)

I woke up angry and blinked and looked outside and realized it was already 88 degrees before 8 am, and I was happy about that. It is mind-meltingly hot, and it has been for weeks, and it will be 100 degrees today and 102 tomorrow and I'm GLAD. It means I didn't miss everything, and I still get to go to BlogHer '11 and then take a week off (blessed, sweet week off, I'll miss you Internet, but I won't be here the week of August 8 because clearly I need to live in the moment away from distractions) and have my end of summer. I still get to experience the evenings when the light turns gold and the air finally starts to cool off and the last few barbeques are enjoyed with friends and their end-of-summer, we-don't-really-tan-anymore glow.

This morning was all Marley's ghost for me. THANK GOD. I almost missed it.

She stood on her tiptoes to put the Father's Day cards in the mailbox, her pigtails so long they hung halfway down her back, blowing occasionally in the hot summer wind already sweltering at eight in the morning. From the back, she could've been my seven-year-old sister back in 1984.

 

Most of my childhood memories are of summer -- on my grandparents' porch or under the weeping willow, visiting Gran in the hairdryer heat of Arizona or running around my own yard barefoot. Hot wind blowing through my pigtails.

Sometimes, when the wind is just right, the memories come back with such clarity, I can taste the rhubarb pie or feel the upholstery of my gran's ancient car. I can see the firefly jar.

What will she see when the hot winds blow on her at 37? I wonder.

The pool opened last weekend. I thought I was ready to go with my new halter swimdress (shut up) and my sunscreen and my baseball hat. Sure, it had been a long, cold winter accompanied by many, many seasoned wedge fries, but last summer I even bared midriff a few times and felt fine about it.

Also, I haven't had a full-length mirror in my bedroom since last summer. And I never go use my daughter's. So I actually don't know what I look like unless I catch my reflection in a store window, which only happens when I am fully clothed.

Imagine my surprise when I went to use the bathroom at the pool and caught sight of my full-frontal while pulling up my swimming suit. The florescent lights bouncing off cinder block highlighted every lump and bump that was not there last year.

My stomach seized up, and I started to feel hot and tingly.

I manage the anxiety that once caused my eating disorder through a combination of medication, previous talk therapy, exercise, sleep and maintaining a certain weight window in which I feel comfortable with myself. I seem to have tipped over the edge of that window this winter, because as I stumbled back toward my seat, I felt shaky.

And that was when I saw her, my new mom friend -- adorable and tiny and right in the path. I stopped to talk to her and knew I was coming off normal, but the entire time I was talking to her I just wanted to wrap my body in a beach blanket and starve until I felt better. I felt like she could see all the flaws and was taking stock, even though she's a delightful person and why would she do that? Of course she wasn't doing that. But I felt it: the shame.

And I haven't felt like that in years. YEARS.

I walked back to my chair and sunk in. The tears started rolling out from under my sunglasses a few minutes later. Beloved said nice things, tried to make me feel better -- but I know he didn't realize how seriously I was melting down at that moment.

I sat there telling myself I'm 37. I don't need to look like a 24-year-old. I'm a perfectly acceptable 37-year-old. And isn't that sort of shallow, anyway? And haven't I been writing a novel about a protagonist overcoming ED and haven't I been crusading about ED and taking issue with NYT ballet critics ALL YEAR? WHAT THE FUCK, BRAIN?

I took deep breaths. I told myself fat isn't a feeling. And I realized it isn't. My feeling was anxiety -- a severe hit of it -- and I was focusing it on my thighs. I was telling myself that I was a lost cause because I didn't stop working out this winter -- in fact I worked out harder than I have in years -- so it was difficult to stop catastrophizing that exercise no longer worked for weight maintenance, and I would just end up growing and growing from here with no hope. (Because that is the fear that my ED brain wants me to believe.)

My rational brain -- the one in charge 99% of the time -- knows that there is no "always" ever in anything in life, and weight management is just another one of those things. You don't always look great, you don't always look bad. Nothing is absolute, and everything about humans is in a constant state of flux, from our glucose levels to our shoe sizes to our hair length to our weight.

But revisiting that feeling, that download of self-hatred, was really upsetting. It made me hot and then cold and shaky and angry and sad. Thankfully the little angel was in the pool and didn't see her mother crying while staring at her hips.

It's since passed. I am aware that one thing that keeps the wolves at bay for me is staying in that five-pound range of normal BMI that has my clothes fitting without panty lines and me passing full-length mirrors without doing a double-take. I've been more careful this week about what I put in my mouth. But I also know that some parts of it -- the gravity parts, the cellulite parts -- may not be fixable by a sensible diet and exercise program. They may be part of 37. They may be part of my genetic code. I may actually not be able to do anything about the redistribution of what used to be higher on my frame. And I'm going to have to accept that, pronto. I am not going to spend the second half of my life being controlled by that feeling the way I spent the first half.

I AM NOT.