I don't think I'll ever be OK with birthdays again.
My own comes, and goes. Another day, following its usual beat. I am thirty one years old, suddenly, quietly, with little fanfare or celebration.
That's OK. I like it that way. Birthdays scare me. There's little I can do about anyone else's birthday– and so help me, the last thing I will do is allow my own fear to mess with and make light of the normal childhood my children deserve– but I can spend my own birthday, sadly if I wish.
And I do. I retreat, seek comfort and solace in myself and my TinyTrainHouse and miss my husband with a fierceness I did not know was possible. We have takeaway for dinner and blow out candles on a supermarket mud cake and I smile. My mum takes photos on her phone and I almost can't stand it, I almost tell her to stop, because it just aches far too much- it feels like a dangerous copy, a silly naive thing to do. It feels as though those photos will come out just as blurred and desperate and resentful as the ones I took on Tony's birthday were, the ones I took just before the After- the last photos anyone took of him.
I will never be OK with birthdays again. I do will do them, not only for my own sake but for that of my children. We will have cake and we will sing and blow out candles; but its far more for them than it is for me.
It's not birthdays, of course.
It's the day after birthdays that I'm afraid of.
***
In honour of me now being classified as 'early thirties' instead of just 'thirty', have this photo, taken at the #PBEvent recently.
It kind of just sums up the last year or so, yes...? I think so. And I love it.
