Happy Fortieth Birthday to My Son

My son, my first child, turns forty in a few days. It certainly does not feel like forty years ago that I gave birth to him in a bad snowstorm. I wrote about his birth in an earlier post, so I won’t repeat that here.

I’ve written many posts about my son over the years, including many birthday posts. Here are a few of my favorites:

Baby Boy Hupp: What’s in a Name?

My Son’s First Birthday Party

The Boy Wonder

Little Bunny Foo Foo and My Son

Yo, Mom: An Introduction to the Teenage Years

Shoe Shines and Parenting

Rather than repeat anything from prior posts about my son’s cuteness as a kid and increasing maturity as an adult, I’ll reflect on what his turning forty means to me.

I remember when my parents turned forty, in 1973. That’s when my father started joking about turning my mother in for two twenty-year-olds. We all knew it was a joke, but my mother didn’t like it. That was also the year I went off to college and my youngest sibling started kindergarten. My mother’s joke was that she had kids in college and kindergarten and turned forty to boot. Not as funny as my dad’s joke, but more philosophical about the vagaries of life.

I remember when my husband turned forty, in 1989. He had no trouble with this milestone, but I (only thirty-three) and his mother were depressed. To me, being married to someone in his forties meant that I must be practically middle-aged. And I think my mother-in-law believed that having a child who was forty must mean that she was getting old. Now I find myself in the same position as my mother-in-law.

I remember when I turned forty, in 1996. I was still practicing law, but was both bored by my job and dissatisfied with working in the legal system. I wanted something else to do in my career. Yet, my joke about turning forty was that I was finally covered by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which begins to protect workers at age forty. A typical employment lawyer joke. Four months after my birthday, I moved to a Human Resources position, a step upstream from praticing employment law—more preventative and less argumentative, I hoped. And in that role, I learned there is no ideal job.

This week my son, the start of the next generation in my family, turns forty. I wouldn’t say I’m depressed by my son’s milestone birthday, as my mother-in-law was when her son turned forty, but I am pensive.

Like her, I do feel old. His birthday means I have been an adult for almost half a century. I can no longer say with any credibility, even to myself, that I have more years left than I have lived.

Yet I still feel young. I have more to do with my life, and I am eager to get on with it. There are limitations on what I can do, due to time and health and other resources, but I know I have more to contribute to the world.

I see how much has changed in forty years. In 1982, we had no Internet, no cell phones, no email, and personal computers were rudimentary. (A 20-megabyte hard drive was huge.) Women like me with children were entering the professional ranks, but the workplace was not designed for us. Reagan was President, September 11 had not happened, and only one president ever had been impeached. There hadn’t been a pandemic in the U.S. since 1918.

My husband and I were healthy and hard-working, both in jobs and in volunteer activities. Now we are retired from active employment. My parents were busy and vibrant, and now they are dead. Our children are now in the workforce, as hard-working as we were at their ages.

Yes, the world—and our family—has changed.

And yet, not much has changed. I still feel like the young attorney slogging her way through the legal and corporate morass. I use the organizational skills I learned then daily. On a national level, political bickering is more vitriolic, but the partisan seeds were there forty years ago. The Cold War is over, but new international conflicts have replaced it. Life is still full of unexpected disasters as well as gorgeous sunsets.

So, as my son turns forty, I reflect on my life and on his, on what has been and on what is still to come. For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1 (ASV) My season will pass, probably before I want it to. And his season will pass, too. But I hope he has at least another forty years of seasons and purposes—he can still say he has over half his life ahead of him.

Happy 40th Birthday to my son.