Welcome to new contributor, brought via Kentucky, Chris Hemming!

I am officially middle-aged.

I didn’t want to believe it. I resisted thinking about it for a while (years, Chris, they’re called years). But there it was, staring me in the face on my last birthday. Friends came over for a pizza party, with board games afterwards. That was my first clue: pizza and Tabu. When your idea of a night’s entertainment is the same thing you did when you were 12, you know you’ve begun that long regression back to toddlerhood that ends with someone changing your diaper.

After the games, I was practically dragged out to a bar. I know my friends thought I really, deep down, wanted to go ogle strippers and sit like a wallflower. But on the way home, it hit me just how much I would have rather settled in at home with a movie. That’s when I knew it was official.

I can remember – not too long ago, really – going out to the bars and closing the place down. I was a late bloomer, coming out about 30, and looked forward to catching up on this “gay lifestyle” thing I kept hearing about. My friends and I would start many a Saturday evening with dinner, then a trip to the gayborhood: a coffeeshop or bookstore, where we would test the waters before jumping in to the bars and nightclubs at the deep end. So many memories, good and bad, were born in those places. I don’t regret any of it, but I’ve outgrown it.

I suppose in those days, I was doing what was expected, looking for what, I don’t think I even knew at the time. Even when I was in a relationship, I resisted living together for years. Was it me subconsciously waiting for something better to come along? Or thinking I didn’t deserve to be loved – either way a kind of self-sabotage? My partner and I broke up, and got back together, twice in the past few years. This time it feels different, in a way I don’t think I could have understood before, much less explain to anyone else – part knowing what it means to live without someone, and part reexamining what I really wanted. And so, eight years after we first met, we’re living together.

I always thought of middle age as that point in your life when you’ve compromised enough of your dreams for the sake of comfort – what the kids call “selling out.” But it doesn’t feel as bad as that once sounded to me. I’m not as god-awful self-conscious as I was, not so quick to follow the latest trend. I’ve found the simple pleasure of sitting in the dark with a dog in your lap while you look at the lights on a Christmas tree, remembering ghosts from Christmases past and wondering about those yet to be seen in the future. I have a looming AARP membership and my first colonoscopy to look forward to.

But it’s not all fun and games. I’ve seen a good childhood friend buried a few years ago. My parents are failing and I can hear the relentless ticking of their clocks. Friends and family have their own health issues, and I am more frequently reminded of their, and my own, mortality. Now, instead of wondering what shirt to wear out to the bars (well, maybe not instead of, I still want to look good!), or who’s the latest drag diva to grace the stage, I think about whether we can make it on one income if one of us was laid off, how much we would pay for health insurance since neither the federal government nor the Commonwealth of Kentucky subsidizes us the way it does straight married couples.

Anyone with loved ones in recovery is probably familiar with the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” That’s what middle age feels like to me, a little bit of hard-earned wisdom at the back of your mind. Yes, I still have dreams, and have learned it’s even more important to hold on to the ones you think you’ll never accomplish. But I value my comfort, and that of my friends and family. Hopefully I have enough wisdom to balance the two. I’m still working on the serenity part, with a little help from my partner.

Which brings me back home, to a Cape Cod in the inner suburbs that I share with him and our 2.5 children (two dogs and a cat). It’s not a place I would have picked for myself, but it’s where my family is, and that makes it home. It’s been so long since anyplace really felt like “home,” like I belonged there, that I never realized how much I needed it. I could really get used to this “wisdom” thing.