40 for 40

Trial, Error, and Wisdom

1.

When I was a girl, I read in Seventeen that a woman was her most beautiful at thirty-three. The idea was attributed to Elizabeth Taylor, and it was illustrated with photos of female celebrities at this ideal age. I think they meant this to be encouraging—you can be old and still be beautiful! You have so much to look forward to!

Throughout my thirty-third year I inspected myself to see if I had turned my most beautiful. Most of that year I was between New York and Los Angeles: in a writer’s room with people I still treasure, on set making my first television show in the city I love. I turned thirty-four on a toe-numbing December day of exterior shoots. Friends stopped by, watched a few takes, hugged me. The cast and crew sang “Happy Birthday” while I stood on Sixth Ave., facing north, the Empire State Building beaming.

But we were talking about my face.

In 2008, after a late night of drinking in Gramercy Park with a beloved friend, I gasped. My friend—who was, like me, twenty-four—had just had sex with a thirty-three-year-old woman. I was titillated and horrified. What was it like? Tell me everything. He smiled politely and then admitted, It was weird. I pressed him—Why? How so?—and then he said it: Her skin.

Thirty-three is so fucking young.

I have lots of friends turning forty. Or approaching it with ambivalence at best. The existential fear of aging out is not nothing. I catch myself mythologizing how it was to be young (I didn’t tell you that in the year we made Sweetbitter, I was caught multiple times sobbing in the bathroom at Steiner Studios). When are my friends and I going to stop texting each other photos of ourselves in our late twenties and saying, Man, we were hot. Forget about how epically fucked we are, trapped in a culture that grossly fetishizes our youth. I just can’t imagine spending the rest of my days looking backward at some imaginary pinnacle of physical beauty. I refuse. 

What if, as teen girls, we were told that we would be our most beautiful at sixty-three? I have friends in their sixties. Things look promising. Yes, there can be health issues. Yes, there can be money trouble, or the heavy task of caring for an elder. But my friends also have affectionate and wry relationships with their adult children. They’re learning French or Russian, growing calendula and lemon balm for their own tinctures, or obsessing over the Dutch Golden Age of painting. They entertain without strain. They still have sex if they want to. I recently read Annie Ernaux’s Getting Lost, about an affair she had when she was fifty-eight years old, with a married man twenty years her junior, and she is doing stuff that was so fucking hot it caused me to clutch my pearls.

Will sixty-three perhaps be my most beautiful year?

2.

In both of my pregnancies, I heard a lot of talk about “getting my body back.” And yes, I sometimes long for that body and how it only cared for itself. But that body is gone, all the cute little parts, bye-bye forever. Why beat myself up trying to reverse the lasting marks of pregnancy when, in fact, it would make no sense to have that body after carrying a human for nine months, and then another ten months later?

This remodeled body is partially mine, and very much theirs. It’s there to regulate fevers or tantrums, serve as an indoor play structure, absorb mucus, pasta sauce, vomit and wailing. It was made to carry their sleeping deadweight out of the car, up the stairs, into bed. This body is a pillow, reported to be quite “squishy,” and has the bonus of being a heating unit for ice cold feet. Falling asleep with my kids at 7:30 p.m. is like floating-in-warm-water bliss. A bliss only this body gets to know.  

Julian’s 5th/My 40th/Rave Party in the Meadow

3. 

As I approached forty, I thought I might finally be able to accept the advice I often see on lists like these: “Forgive yourself.” Maybe that will be on my 50 for 50 list.

4.

I rarely buy new clothes. But if I do, it’s probably a cashmere sweater.

5.

One thing I had figured out by thirty-three: When you don’t want to get drunk, drink Campari and Soda.

6.

And one I wish I had figured out: When you want to get drunk, drink champagne indiscriminately.

7.

People tell me that they can’t understand poetry. I get that. I have been stumped and daunted by abstraction (I’m recalling the first time I read John Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, or the semester at Kenyon I spent trying to parse The Canterbury Tales). I often still feel that way. But I don’t only read poetry for understanding, as if every poem is a one-to-one translation of an experience or feeling. Instead, I look for something like flight or uncertainty, some threshold in a phrase or a poem’s music. I bathe in the poem and try not to ask too much of it. How often have I been baffled by a poem and then after a month come back to it? How often then did I begin to see what wasn’t written?

I read poems to become a better writer. I know of few other ways to feel both the presence and absence of God. 

8.

My number one no question kitchen essential is my nine-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven. I have the round one, in white. I prefer it over every other pot and pan. It goes with me on road trips, on every writing retreat. I can roast a chicken, sear a steak, make a soup or risotto. If I had to bake in it, I could. Never in my decade plus with this pot have I thought, I really wish I had a slightly smaller size.

9.

In my twenties I did every cleanse marketed at me. (Sometime I’ll tell the story of doing Blessed Herbs, which gave me a hallucinating fever and completely emptied my intestines). At forty, I will never, ever, give up bread and pasta. I have a piece of Bub and Grandma’s seeded sourdough every morning - with almond butter and sliced strawberries, or peanut butter, bananas, and sesame seeds, or Vegannaise topped with avocado. And I go through boxes of De Cecco rigatoni every week: in the winter I favor Marcella’s bolognese, in the summer, Canal House’s hot spaghetti tossed with raw tomato sauce.

10.

I’m in a heterosexual marriage with two children. I honestly never saw it coming. I feel I need to scream out to myself at twenty-six, when my boyfriend asked me to marry him: Say you’re not ready. Instead, I thought at the time: Who could say no? Isn’t this what everyone wants?

The second time around I got married for what I consider the right reasons (love, children, health insurance). But I wish I could say to myself and my peers in our early and mid-thirties: You do not need to get married and have children. Did I do those things because I felt a guttural instinct? Because this was how I wanted to grow and spend my days? Or because I’m impulsive and wanted to see what could happen?

Dear God, the pressure, both ambient and explicit. Why do we still have such limited imaginations for what a woman’s life can look like? When I think about what I want for my daughter, it’s this pressure I want to remove first.

11.

Every single body, at every age, looks better in a tiny, tiny swimsuit.

12.

Every year I ask for patience, poetry, and posture. What I’m really asking for is discipline.

13.

It is nearly impossible for me to recover from losing or misplacing an object. A lip balm, an earring, a puzzle piece or one part of a 127-part plastic marble track. Or most harrowing of all, a book I own but cannot find. I keep lists of what I’m missing. I may appear present, but in truth I'm wondering where I put that baby doll’s fake diaper, or the lighthouse Christmas ornament that broke last year. This is a ridiculous waste of energy, but then again, better the anxiety landing there than on my loved ones.

14.

In my forties, will I be less annoying about how bossy I get about my friends’ life choices/creative endeavors/marriages/dating lives/vacations?

15.

I’ve found that what’s most stabilizing for my two children is not a specific routine, a house, a school, or a marriage. It’s unconditional love. I know that sounds obvious, but I’m still recovering from the explosion of well-meaning advice that detonated when I was postpartum and so fragile. This is what a day should look like. This is what sleep should look like. This is what structured play time should look like. In short, your infant/toddler/child will thrive only if you create these routines.

I ask my kids to do a lot of things that are technically destabilizing—we travel a lot, sometimes at the last minute, with irregular bedtimes or foreign sleeping arrangements. Even mealtimes are all over the place. When we’re in these new places, we ask them to figure it out for themselves: play with a stick, talk to the adults, or flip through a book. They are both insane so maybe there’s a correlation—but Matt and I are their constants, their routine. Our love for them, even if we were apart, is home. I torture myself about my parenting, but I feel good about this.

16.

I will never have a neutral, minimalist, spotless house.

17.

I take no credit for my daughter’s sophisticated palate, and no blame for my son’s refusal to ingest a vegetable.

18.

I love my acupuncturist. She was involved in both my childbirths, and I see her regularly for hormone and mood regulation as well as back and neck pain. I am always begging her to sell me herbs, which she does sometimes. Mostly she tsks me and says, Drink more water. She pats my hand, You’ll feel better.

Eight hours of sleep, on your back. Morning light. Rest after lunch, cut out caffeine. All of these things my acupuncturist says to me. I laugh about this with my friends—everything she recommends is free. And too accessible!

19.

As someone who loves to wax lyrical about the glories of the Loire Valley varietals (cabernet franc and chenin blanc, I’m looking at you), who once ranked the best Negronis in New York City, who built a career around her passion for wine and its history, I wish I could say to my twenty-year old self, to myself at thirty-three: Drinking alcohol isn’t good for you.

My younger self would slap me of course, but I wouldn’t say it if I wasn’t certain.

20.

I’m also certain that my phone is more physically and mentally degrading than alcohol.

21.

But: we are sexless, joyless, emotionally anemic automatons without our vices.

22.

So, I’m forty. I’m curious about authentic sexual desire in women. If I want subjugation, is that valid or is it false consciousness, just conditioning? What parts of my relationship to my sexuality is a defense mechanism? Is it possible to remove power dynamics from sexual relationships? Is it possible that power dynamics are ever healthy, or non-abusive? Am I still turned on without them?

Certainty freaks me out. It’s partly reactionary—I grew up Catholic, after all—but certainty doesn’t reflect my experience of the world.

And while I resist it, I also believe in a moral code. I believe in lines that should never be crossed.

I find thinking through these questions difficult but pleasurable. Maybe that’s why I am still heavily involved with my contradictions. 

23.

There is a way to gossip without maliciousness, without an intent to destroy, and it is one of my passions.

24.

I’ve been in consistent, almost weekly, therapy for fifteen years. I know it works for me. But what does that mean?

One reason I’m drawn to psychoanalysis is because it emphasizes the ongoingness of talking. Sure, I have epiphanies. I am occasionally shocked by my therapist’s insight. And I make decisions using the information I gather during my sessions. But that’s not the bulk of it. I repeat myself. I bore myself. I cry. Why the fuck do I still feel so unsafe, like I’m standing on the edge of an all-consuming terror, every single day? I berate myself for not making progress (why am I still berating myself?).

But if I really believed it was about progress, about an imagined cure, I would have quit. I don’t believe that I’ll ever work through my past or my grief. I know therapists who dispute that. I do believe it’s possible for people to change. But not all of us. I’ll just keep returning to the room, secreted off from all my public selves, where I have no idea what will happen. The taboos aired, the exchange, the ritual. The value of therapy for me is the seeking.

25.

I’m a single-issue voter. Guess which one.

26.

I think about this line from Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror nearly every day: “Our world—digitally mediated, utterly consumed by capitalism—makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard.” I have to stop and check myself to ensure that I’ve not confused the action of reposting a meme with authentic political engagement. How often am I practicing communitarian values, or making myself uncomfortable in real life for the sake of something I believe in? I don’t ask this because I have this kind of integrity, I regularly don’t. My husband is one of the few people I know who is more concerned with civic responsibilities than his online representation of it. I admire that.

27.

If I could change one thing about my own ethical misalignment, and that of my family, it would be the waste we produce, and the nearly automatic consumerism that’s both embedded within a society that intentionally conflates what we buy with who we are, and within my own psyche which hums: I need, I want, It’s not enough. I am haunted by this, I’m always trying to amend it, and I feel totally powerless to stop it.

28.

Case in point: noise-cancelling Bose headphones are the best fancy thing I’ve ever purchased.

29.

My peers seem to have a lot of regrets about the sun. I have zero about how tan I used to get. My inspiration has always been and will always be those ancient Italian women, bronzed and sagging, resplendent and leathery in their jewelry and their bikinis, eating four-course lunches without a thought for bloating, then unselfconsciously displaying themselves on the beach.

30.

I am not a litigator. But sometimes in my marriage, I find litigating easier than empathizing. It is so much harder for me to be curious about his perspective, to give it as much validity as I give my own. I can’t believe how bad I am at it. I feel like I’ve been trying to protect my perspective for my entire life—why would I ever give a fucking inch? But I am not stockpiling evidence for a trial. There is no judge I’m performing for. I want to learn how to take better care of the people I love. 

31.

I’ll never do drugs again. They have a really solid marriage.

These are some of the things I don’t say anymore. Been burned too many times.

32.

I never tire of the NYC versus LA conversation. Despite it being one that’s riddled with clichés and platitudes, despite the objective fact that both are barely different versions of the same expensive small town, I will always be willing to pit one’s pleasures against the other’s and see which comes out on top.

What about those winter beach days, the concentrated, horizontal light bouncing off the Pacific? Yes, but what the spring lust that stirs through the city as the cherry blossoms tumble down? And what about driving across town on Beverly with the windows down while station 93.5 KDay plays “Backyard Boogie?” Yes, but what about being on the J train heading west over the Williamsburg bridge during the blue hour and watching each building light up?

It’s provincial to have spent my entire adult life in New York and Los Angeles. I’m the first to admit that I’m a calmer, gentler person when surrounded by trees, mountains, bodies of water. I could live a fulfilling life identifying wildflowers and constellations. But I’m addicted to cities. I always assumed this would change, that I would eventually settle down into a quieter life. But I’m starting to doubt it.

33.

If I wasn’t so scared of addiction, I would happily drink green NyQuil every night of my life.

34.

My friendships are as important as my romantic relationship. My husband asks when our date night is, and I have to tell him I’m booked two months out with my friends. And while I’m not perfect about always responding to a text, I make an enormous effort to check in or see friends regularly. It’s completely worth it. What are we doing on our dates? We are talking.

We’re telling stories of awful past relationships or despairing over the historical moment while walking around the Silverlake Reservoir before preschool pick up. We’re discussing every minute and perverted detail of our sex lives around a dining room table with take-out. We’re shouting gossip through the din at Musso and Frank’s or Via Carota, and on celebration getaways in the Southwest desert, Mexico, Kauai, or Palm Springs we’re talking about grief. Betrayal. Our dumb aspirations. What can I say? My friends are fascinating, complicated, and fucking funny.

How am I still meeting new people and falling so hard for them? How do I still love people who have known me through so many ages and selves? I have to prioritize them because they are the great loves of my life.

35.

When my children yell demands at me, or purposefully destroy something I’ve just cleaned, or pretend to be deaf, or refuse to walk or stand up or use words, I have to swallow my natural reaction, self-regulate, and try to not take anything personally. Of course, I want to treat my children better than my parents treated me. But I struggle to stay on the gentle-parenting script. And do I really want my kids to think I’m not a human being, that sometimes has overwhelming feelings? Everyone, even the most wonderful kid, is sometimes an asshole. And as often as I say, I see that you’re angry right now, and that’s ok, but I can’t let you throw the potty at my head, I occasionally find myself drawing a hard “asshole” line and standing by it. I hope when they’re older, they will be able to do the same.

Pretend this is our Holiday Card

36.

I’ve regularly wished I was more combative, more aggressive, less afraid of conflict. I long to be less pleasing.

I’ve seen so many men curse at each other or belittle the people who work under them. I’ve been on calls where grown men hang up on each other. I’ve watched them duck blame without blinking. And about ninety-five percent of the time, I’ve seen them rewarded for that behavior.

But at my core, I don’t know, man. I sleep easier knowing that when I’m working with someone, the experience of working together is as important to me as what we make. I don’t want people’s fear. I hope people think or say, That was nice working with her. I have to believe that counts for something.

37.

I’m afraid of: planes, snakes, random acts of violence. Of course, earthquakes and fires. I’m afraid of dogs and I run from the chickens at my children’s preschool. I’m afraid of being in the Holland Tunnel and the subway if it pauses for too long. I’m afraid of underground parking garages and other people’s driving on the freeway. Those fears have inhibited me many times over. But I’ve never been afraid of starting over.

38.

Reading books taught me how to write them. Talking to, arguing with, and listening to people taught me how to think like a writer. I guess I’m saying that living counts as much as reading.

39.

I can’t keep up with the fiction new releases and bestseller lists. I prefer the company of the dead. (There are brilliant books released into the world every Tuesday, and I believe the ones I need will find their way to me). But contemporary publishing is a marketplace, and I often want to read outside of its vernacular. At the end of my thirty-ninth year, I’m reading Alien Hearts by Guy de Mauppasant in Richard Howard’s translation. 1890’s Parisian aristocracy; a bored, empty dilettante’s decision to conquer and fall in love with a liberated and jaded young widow; who wouldn’t enjoy watching a decade end with such a wild and psychologically penetrating account of their love affair?

40.

At thirteen I couldn’t imagine living past thirty. When I thought about being an adult, I ran into a dead end. This inability to imagine the future made me a terrible planner. But I’ve gotten good at taking what comes. I am perpetually and continuously surprised. I can’t believe I’m forty.

I cannot wait to be sixty-three.

---