Musings on Birthdays

Some honest birthday reflections… May they reach the right audience, touch the right hearts, may they be accepted here in this space… 

I don’t much like my birthday. Each year it comes around (which is a gift in itself) I find myself anticipating it with a hopeful heart, but the nearer it is I remember the complexities of celebrations: that we often hold conflicting feelings in tandem. Joy and sadness. Gratitude and disappointment. People tell me the fireworks are all for me, or that the whole country is celebrating as a cheery thought. But being born on the Fourth of July often meant people choosing hot dogs and fireworks over a birthday party, attending a pool party over brunch. I didn’t realize how much I let that define how I felt about my birthday, and at many times, about myself in general: I’m the second choice. I’m overlooked. I’m not worth celebrating. 

This is not a “woe is me”. This is just an offering of honesty. I know I am not unique to experience these feelings. 

I’m choosing to redeem how I think about my birthday by learning to let myself enjoy this marking of time passing, doing things I love, taking more photos to remember, writing about it, thinking about the joys and pains of this past year and dreaming about the year ahead, and being just darn thankful for it all. 

It is a gift to age, to celebrate another birthday, to let our life mark us with wrinkles, to create memories that will sustain us through the years. 

“We work and goof off, we love and dream, we have wonderful times and awful times, are cruelly hurt and hurt others cruelly, get mad and bored and scared stiff and ache with desire, do all such human things as these… [God] meets us at those moments in which for better or worse we are being most human, most ourselves…” (Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner) 

May He meet me here, at 27, in all my humanness, in my ordinary, in it all.

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Scripture for post: Ecclesiastes 8 v 15-17, Psalm 139 v 17