My Birthday
It’s my birthday. I’m 34 today.
It’s the first birthday I had without my mother, and it was so different: no card from my parents, no messages wishing me a Happy Birthday, no messages insisting when we can do a video call, no baby pictures posted on Facebook to wish me a Happy Birthday, and no more chats reminiscing about the events surrounding my birth.
Sure, my dad and I can talk about it, but it’s my mother who went through the labour and birth first hand. It was my mother who fed me and held me. It was the start of my life and even though I was the second child, it was a pivotal moment in my mother’s life.
And I think for this reason organising parties, cooking special dishes, and baking special cakes her children’s birthdays were a way of celebrating for us and for her.
Not that any of my birthdays have been really special since I moved to the UK. The first several years was spent in relative isolation, just myself and my ex-husband. We were too broke to go out for dinner, and he was too stingy and embarrassed of our living circumstances to invite anyone over. He tried his best for the first two years, baking me a gluten free cake and buying me a huge bouquet of flowers.
FaceBook memories brought up a picture of me on my birthday from 3 years ago, shortly before my life completely changed. That birthday started out well, and should have been one of my better birthdays. But the memory I’m left with is trying to get my intoxicated ex home who can’t stand straight on his feet and shouting political slurs at 2am.
Today, I’m afraid that my birthday has completely a very normal, non-special day. It’s like it became just another day of the year without the person who gave birth to me, the person who always insisted that February 25 was a special day of the year. And maybe because I knew today wasn’t going to be marked in a special way anymore, I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle the circumstances I found myself in: mother dead, away from my Partner, and in Cornwall where the precipitation alternates between rain and hail.
So I picked up a shift at work.
There’s a part of me that regretted going to work though, because there’s also a part of me that still wanted my birthday to be special. I still wanted to celebrate, meet with people, have cake, and drink Prosecco.
I think if my mother would be alive she would be disappointed at how ordinary I’m trying to be right now. When she told the story of my birth, she always recounted how alert and aware I was in the first few minutes of my life. Both my parents always mention how I didn’t cry very much and I looked around and my instincts were sharp. My mom took this as a sign that I was meant for great things.
In January, I set my intentions for 2020 and the rest of the decade to be better than the last. While the start hasn’t been bad per se, the intentions have been very much centred on making money and growing my business. I haven’t been prioritising anything on a personal level or an interpersonal level. That begs the question, if a person is so focused on business and money, is it normal to miss out on the personal things? Is this what making sacrifices looks like?
So maybe it’s not that I’m making today ordinary. Maybe I’m just sacrificing one special day so that future special days can always be special. So maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself about working today instead of going out, spending money, and drinking beverages that end in dehydration.
My parents sacrified so much more and worked so much harder so that I could have a comfortable life. So if I have to sacrifice my 2020 so that the rest of the decade can be successful seems like such a small sacrifice in comparison.
