Birthday Girl

Moving On

It’s been a while since I met my birthday with pure joy. The last birthday I remember being excited for was my eleventh. It was on a Saturday, and I’d been eagerly anticipating it all week, but Saturday morning, I woke up with a fever. The party was cancelled, and I spent the day in bed, intermittently dozing and reading. I truly had been looking forward to it, but lying there under the covers, my disappointment mixed with something else. I loved that people were feeling sorry for me. I went from kid about to preside over a birthday party to tragic heroine, and the day turned out not half-bad.

Now, birthdays are every bit as nuanced. Celebrations, of course, but also chronological reminders of time’s inevitability. As if the ravages of face and body weren’t sufficient! Yet. There’s an imperative to distinguish this day from other days in a festive fashion. Some birthdays come along, though, and you find yourself unable to rise to your own occasion.

My birthday was a couple of days ago, and the day was as scattershot as my mood. Happy, grateful, cranky, resentful, sad, sad, sad, guilty. There were sweet messages from loved ones, moments where I gut-level missed having my children by my side, handing me homemade cards. Birthdays are the day when the past and the future Velcro imperfectly to the present, and no feeling is left untinged.

Was it a happy birthday? Not really. When you have lived as many years as I have, happy seems pat. A good birthday, yes, because I was able to enjoy its passage. I know I am lucky, to feel all the feelings I felt, even the hard ones, in that twenty-four hour space, and to be able to slide back into the regular days that follow, the days that don’t remind you where you’ve been and tell you where you’re headed. A long life of such days- and I am smiling as I write this- is absolutely, unequivocally worth celebrating.