I think perhaps it’s time to dispense with my birthdays

ONCE a high-flying magazine editor in Dublin, living the classic, harried executive lifestyle, Kate Kerrigan swapped it all to be a fulltime novelist and live in her idyll — the fishing village of Killala, Co. Mayo. But rather than being a sleepy existence, it’s been anything but for the 50-something mother of The Teenager (15), and The Tominator, seven (oh, and there’s the artist husband Niall, too). It’s chaos, as she explains every week in her hilarious and touching column...

I’M 54 in a few weeks. It’s not a shock really. I have been adding a year onto my age nearly all of my life. It started after I hit 21. I loved being 21.

We threw a big party in my parents’ house where I wore a Dallas-style, puffed-sleeve, scarlet satin dress and had my hair bleached and piled up on top of my head. Looking back on the pictures now, I look about 45, but at the time I thought I was perfectly gorgeous. I was the centre of attention. More than 100 people packed themselves into my parents’ house and I had an absolute ball, loving every single moment of it.

The following year, when I was turning 22, I felt so thoroughly disappointed at being that very average age, that I prepared myself by saying I was 22 a couple of months before my birthday. I have done it every year since as a sort of salve on the sometimes painful experience of getting older. However, it has become so much of a habit that, this year, I’ve actually forgotten how old I am.

My husband can usually be relied upon to tell me although, because he is four years younger than me, he does love to tease and put an extra couple of years on. I know I was born in 1964, but somehow this year I came around to thinking I was 55, because I’ve been calling myself 54 since about two weeks after my 53rd birthday.

I really do think that perhaps it’s time to dispense with birthdays altogether and I’m starting to understand those women who simply pick a number and stick with it.

I always thought that was vanity, but maybe it’s just boredom with the whole business of birthdays and the tedious ploughing forward that getting older brings.

There is no good news in ageing, but I’m glad I’m the age I am, because I have a good deal more sense than I had when I was younger.

I’m better able to stand up for myself and I’ve lost that ambition to acquire things that I think will make me appear more important than I am or feel happier in myself — like a posh house, or a designer handbag, or a book award. There is great freedom in the passing of time teaching one that sometimes dreams don’t come true. Frankly, that’s a relief. I can relax and enjoy what I have actually got. At last.

‘You don’t look 54,’ people tell me. Telling women that they don’t look their age after they hit 50 is supposed to be a compliment, but it’s actually a depressing prediction.

If I don’t look it now, sooner or later I will, and does 54 really look so bad we have to lie about it?

I was so afraid of turning 50. I remember tangibly fearing things slipping away; my looks, my health, my children. I didn’t want things to change, to keep moving so fast.

I could not have imagined that I was going to be diagnosed with ADHD and find myself in the position of redefining myself utterly in my fifth decade.

I thought I knew myself so well — that I enjoyed a rare level of self-awareness so nothing could phase me. Yet now I find myself rewriting the history of my life to fit this new definition.

I am, and have been all my life, neurologically atypical. My diagnosis has flung me forward into changing in a way I could never have seen coming. It has shown me how the unpredictability I most fear can bring joy as well as hardship.

JUST four years ago I was fielding ageist rubbish, arguing ‘50 is not the new 30, 50 is 50. Why can’t I just be 50 and be OK with it?’

Now, the numbers matter less. Time is taking its toll on my body — arthritis, osteoporosis — I even wear a hearing aid. I can’t say I like that, because I don’t. I would much prefer to be in my 21-year-old body than this one.

But not, for all the money in the whole world, would I be taken back to a time when I was confused and felt different from everyone else.

I spent all of my life trying really hard to make a life. I did it, but it was hard. Harder than it was for most people.

It took until my 53rd year for me to receive an explanation.

Until this year, I knew I had the tools I needed for a great life — a family and work I love. I just felt I hadn’t read the instructions properly. Finally, this year, someone gave me a manual — in English. And it’s the best birthday present ever.