I've been planning a post all week, but I've had kind of a bad attitude about everything so I decided to hold off and feel sorry for myself in my good old-fashioned and ever reliable paper journal instead. Self-pity on your birthday isn't a pretty thing.
So anyway, I'm 34.
I have no real angst about that. In fact, my thirties have been rather lovely. I enjoyed my twenties, but whenever I go back and read some of the things I actually wrote in my twenties (decades of constant and occasionally obsessive journal writing mean I have pretty much every thought I've ever had documented somewhere), I come to the conclusion that twenty-somethings can be pretty insufferable. Whatever angst I have now isn't related to my age. However, this week it's been no less self-indulgent.
I love birthdays -- mine and anyone else's. My expectations for my own birthdays are pretty simple, really; I usually just want to eat something delicious and carve out a little space to spend time with the people I love or doing something that feeds my soul. A few years ago, I took the day off school and used the time to deep-clean my kitchen and take myself out for lunch and coffee and a few uninterrupted hours of reading and writing time. It was glorious. Last year my birthday was on a Sunday, and I had a nap, a trip to the Elliott Bay Book Company, and palak paneer for dinner at Annapurna in Seattle.
This year, I had to cancel all the little birthday plans I kept trying to make, starting the weekend before (my birthday was on Tuesday). Everyone in my house had been healthy for three whole weeks, and whoever assigns illnesses to young children decided we'd gotten off too easily, because last Saturday Isaac woke up with a high fever and a cough and spent the entire weekend either sleeping or listlessly watching videos on the couch. And despite the fact that his big sister wouldn't go near him as soon as we uttered the word germs, she started coughing a few days later.
I spent my birthday week mostly wearing sweats, disinfecting things, running loads of laundry, wiping noses, coaxing my children to drink lots of fluids and take their medicine, cleaning up dinner that was vomited onto a child's lap after a hard bout of coughing, trying to squeeze in one nap for myself (it lasted for fourteen minutes before a sick child called for me), worrying, feeling really lonely, and then feeling guilty on top of that because my husband did try to make my birthday feel special -- even if I spent the day in sweats, taking care of a feverish child, and trying to catch up on a stack of grading. We obviously couldn't have our fun family dinner out in Seattle, but he did bring home pizza from my favorite place, plus cupcakes from Cupcake Royale and a box from Lush. My parents called, his parents called, my brother called, and all of those things made me feel loved.
But it was a lonely week. I felt stressed about missing more days of school, and I had almost no adult contact or conversation for days. When I went back to school on Thursday I jumped immediately into senior IB orals, which means I'm spending several days in a tiny office/closet with a bag of Hershey's kisses and a string of nervous teenagers. When I did emerge from my chamber for a break, someone I normally love acted like a complete ass to me and I admit I might be hanging on to just the tiniest bit of residual hurt feelings. It's been a long time since I was so desperate for a Friday, even though I'd spent very little time at school during the week.
But things shifted, as they do. Fevers broke. Children went back to school. Plans that had been abandoned a week or more earlier were rescheduled.
On Friday afternoon, one of my former students delivered the most spectacular chocolate cake to my classroom, and that incredibly sweet gesture somehow redeemed my birthday week. That evening, I had a girls' night out with my sister-in-law while the kiddos stayed home with their Uncle Aaron (he brought them pizza and new matchbox cars!). Yesterday, I had an early-afternoon run in a light spring rain, followed by a bubble bath and a trip to the Elliott Bay Book Company, and we finally enjoyed our cozy family dinner out. The kids went to bed easily, and Matt and I curled up on the couch together with drinks and Netflix, and I felt that some sort of happy balance had been restored.
And maybe it was never really lost, and I shouldn't have wasted so many moments feeling sad and lonely when I knew the better ones would return. But feelings are what they are, and guilt can be just as self-indulgent as self-pity. At 34, I don't know if I'm really any wiser than I was in my twenties, and I'm still just as messily human. But at the end of a better weekend, I'm feeling mostly okay about that.
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