Half a Lifetime

At some point in the past I performed a particular mathematical exercise. I don’t remember exactly when. Apparently I was so exhausted by the effort of stringing numbers together, after studiously avoiding them in all the years since the nightmare that was Miss Bibby’s trigonometry class in high school, that my brain blocked off all memory of the event—much as post-partum mothers shed the remembrance of how excruciating childbirth really is until right before they find themselves going through it all over again. I do know it must have been sometime after 2002, because that’s when I first started keeping my calendar electronically, and very likely before 2005.

A long time ago, in other words.

The exercise I performed was simple. Using a date duration calculator, I reckoned the number of days between the day of my birth and the day decades later when I started seeing my husband, Craig. Once I had the tally, I took that same number, added it to the day I met Craig, and wound up with a date, long distant in the future, equal in time away from the start of our relationship as my birth.

In other words, there’s only one day in my life on which I have lived as many days with Craig, as previously I had lived without him. That day is today. I officially have lived half my life to date with Craig.

It was a little bit of a shock to see Half a lifetime with Craig on my calendar when I flipped to 2016, a couple of weeks ago. What the hell is this?, I wondered to myself. Then I vaguely recollected going through all the calculations over a decade before—prompted by what, I scarcely remember—and my brain winced from the memory. I took a deep breath and went through all the calculations again, just to be certain. Sure enough, January 22, 2016 was the day.

Until yesterday I’d spent less than half my lifetime, heretofore, with my husband. Starting tomorrow, it will be more than half my life. Today—the balancing point.

Now, I like my milestone anniversaries. We celebrated our twenty-fifth, last year. Each anniversary is a blessing, in fact: pleasant reminders of many years well spent. But this achievement is rarer. Trickier. I’ll never be able to pin down, without the Nostradamus-like power of prognostication to pinpoint the date of my demise, the exact proportions of Craig-repletion to Craig-deprived. I just don’t have that kind of psychic insight.

What I do know is which of the two halves of my life so far—the half spent before my husband, and the half spent after—is the better. That is an easy certainty.