December 26, 2018 |
Turning 40 is supposed to be a traumatic moment for a woman. “Over the hill!” my sister and I sang, when we were 10 and 9, at our mother when she turned 40, parroting a card we had seen in the local newsagent, and she promptly burst into tears. (Kids really are the absolute worst.)
Sally Albright sobbed hysterically at the prospect of turning 40 in eight years’ time in when Harry Met Sally. In this is 40, Judd Apatow’ tedious mid-life crisis movie, a female character refused to let her family acknowledge that she was older than 38. And on and on it goes.
I am normally all about embracing the clichés, so by rights, I should be in the throes of a full-on midlife crisis, as I have just turned 40. And yet, I am absolutely not. In fact, I’ve been looking forward to this for years, for the shockingly basic reason that it means I can throw a massive, fuck-off party. Over the age of, I don’t know, 21, people aren’t really supposed to throw birthday parties for themselves. Birthday parties sound like something for toddlers, with kids dressed up as cowboys and mermaids tearing around, hyped up on pure sugar and impure juice drinks, and then the birthday girl ends up weeping from overexcitement and forgets to take any of her presents up to her bedroom.
At this point I suppose I should say that, actually, parties can be very grown-up and chic affairs, and that’s what I’m thinking of when I say I like to throw parties, but that would be a lie. The truth is, I loved the parties I had when I was a kid and, if I could somehow get away with it, I would throw them again every year. Here, in a quick recap, are the best parties I ever had.
1. When I turned seven, I had a costume party purely so I could wear my favourite costume, which was Cowboy Barbie. My mom hired a long table, which she set up in the kitchen, where 20 of my friends ate grilled-cheese sandwiches and chocolate cake. I couldn’t eat anything, however, as I refused to take off my Cowboy Barbie mask. Even then I knew that one must suffer for beauty.
2. When I turned nine, my mom took some friends and me ice skating. I was allowed to eat normally forbidden junk food and gorged on nachos with melted cheese, ice-cream sundaes and a supersize pack of Skittles. Then, as I was ice skating, I threw up all over the ice, which for a moment was mortifying, but then someone pointed out that my vomit was rainbow coloured because of the Skittles, so then it was totally awesome.
3. When I turned 10, my mother got tickets for me and a few friends to go to a Yankees baseball game, where I made all my friends wear Yankees T-shirts and hold up a banner saying “Yay Yankees!”, which I’d printed out on my dad’s Apple IIc computer, using the much-missed Print Shop programme. At the top of the seventh inning, “Happy birthday Hadley!” flashed up for about 10 seconds on the scoreboard. Nothing, not even the birth of my children, has equalled that moment.
4. For my bat mitzvah, my parents hired the ballroom at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Knightsbridge and I set out the place cards so that I was next to the son of one of my dad’s French friends. We didn’t say a word to one another all night because he couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak French, but he was stuck next to me and I still have the photos to prove it. Ha!
So, as you can see, my formative years set a high bar in entertainment, and as a result, I have never stopped throwing parties for myself. Long after everyone else my age started casually suggesting, at most, meeting down the pub for a few drinks to mark their birthdays, I was still sending out elaborate invites to nine months in advance, keeping an eye on the RSVPs with the overexcited eye of a nine-year-old who has eaten too many Skittles. Because I no longer live in America I can’t drag people to baseball games, and my mom is no longer willing to make grilled-cheese sandwiches for all my friends. So instead, I spend weeks searching out acceptable alternative venues, weeks planning the menus and incalculable sums of money purchasing party outfits. I throw parties every birthday (obviously), every Christmas (of course), any time I move back to America (fair enough), every time I then move back (fairer enough), whenever I move out of a place, then move into a new place, and so on and so on. I excuse this by saying it’s all just an expression of love for my friends and I’m a super-generous person who loves to provide for people. But the truth is, I just really like
being the centre of attention and getting lots of presents. And you know a really great way to remind people that they should give you a present? Throw a party.
But even I was starting to recognise that this schtick was beginning to wear a little thin. I mean, there’s really no justification for throwing a massive 32nd birthday or a 38th. But I still wanted parties. And just like that, right in the nick of time, 40 arrived.
No one can gripe about a big 40th. No one can say, “Seriously, Hadley? Another party?” And because no one can say that, I am having several parties this summer. What can I say? I just like to push the boundaries. And my friends’ tolerance for celebrating the existence of me.
So obviously I’m going out for a fancy dinner on the day with my boyfriend, followed by another one with my parents the following night, but those are standard so don’t count. I mean, if they didn’t do that I’d report them to Child Protection Services and Girlfriend Protection Services. A week later I’m having a big dinner “up West”, as they used to say on EastEnders, with friends from university, followed by going clubbing where we used to go in our twenties. Then I’m going to Ibiza for a long weekend with the same group of friends I went to Ibiza with for my 30th. And finally, I’m having a big party with all my favourite people from the various stages of my life. Me, me, me, me, me.
There are a couple things going on here, really. The first is that I doubt I’ll ever have a wedding, because I don’t want to be married, so I’m treating the summer of my 40th year as the wedding I will never have. By the time you get to 40 you are likely to have multiple groups of friends from multiple parts of your life: the friends from school and university; friends from your first job, your second job, your third job; friends you took drugs within your twenties; friends from your first marriage and your second marriage; friends of friends of friends. And at 40, you never really see any of them any more: they have kids, or you do, you now travel for work seven months of the year, they moved to the country, you moved to LA. And on and on it goes. And this is why it is stupid that birthday parties are associated with children instead of adults. As a kid, you see your friends every day at school; as an adult, you see your closest friends about once every eight months. We’re the ones who need parties, just to make sure we’re up to date on who among us has had plastic surgery. Otherwise, five years will go by and you’ll bump into one of your oldest friends in Bicester Village and you won’t even recognise them.
And there is another thing here, which is that I’m American. English people, it seems to me, have more embarrassment about this kind of thing. They think suggesting they are worth celebrating, or their friends should pay attention to them, is shameful, or weird, or I don’t know what. And then they cope with the disappointment of no one giving them presents on their 40th by making self-deprecating passive-aggressive comments in the corner. That, in my extensive experience of living in this country, is how English people roll. And fair enough, if it makes them happy (it doesn’t seem to massively, but maybe something is getting lost in translation). But as a general rule, Americans are a lot more comfortable with being perfectly open about wanting to be the centre of attention and, while sometimes some of them take this a little far, I think that is the healthier way to be, ultimately. Everyone wants people to notice them occasionally and thwarting that impulse just turns into inner bitterness and, let me tell you, bitterness plays absolute havoc with one’s complexion. That’s why I still look like I’m 26 – it’s because of all the parties I throw. I swear God’s honest truth. Happy birthday me!
Hadley Freeman is a columnist and features writer for The Guardian. Illustration by Stephen Doherty.
