38. It’s a weird birthday, isn’t it? It says something about this birthday and year in general that I’m writing my birthday reflection post more than a week after it happened. In the past, I would have been on top of it, annoyed with myself if I didn’t have it ready the day of my birthday. But like so much this past year, my writing has been catch-is catch-can and that’s just how it’s going to be.
“We can listen to music or I can yell at you to stop. Which would you rather?” I said to my kids, exasperated. They were making a shit-ton of noise and I felt like my head was going to explode. Everything was just so damn loud. The music went on – we settled on Rusted Root – and everything settled down. Or at least settled down as much as my incredibly high-energy children will let it.
But this incident was a culmination of a lot of self-exploration.
“Hold it! Hold it!” my prenatal yoga teacher encouraged the class as we all struggled to keep our backs to the wall and our knees bent. Those three minute wall sits felt like an hour. But they weren’t meant to be easy. They were meant to teach us how to okay with being uncomfortable.
“Huh, I would have thought there would be fewer shadows this time of day,” I thought to myself as I ran through our neighborhood. I was running at noon, comparing it to when I often run at 2 or 3 PM. I dodged the hot sun by ducking under a tree overhanging the sidewalk.
I’ve been running this same route almost every other day since COVID-19 started. Before that, I’d been running it on Sunday afternoons, but never so often and not at different times of the day. Having it as my only chance to venture off of our property for a solid three months attuned me to the tiny changes from day to day.
I’m not usually this way. I crave novelty. I do different things every weekend, hardly ever read the same book twice, and am constantly on the move. Being stuck in the house all day feels more like a cage than coziness. The line in Hamilton about never being satisfied struck me like truth with a capital T. So at first, COVID shutting everything down was terrifying.
But I found sanity by finding novelty within small changes. The shifting of the shadows on my run, the growth of dandelions in the yard, the movement of the clouds in the sky before a storm. Each a slight shift was a new variation on a theme, beautiful in their own way.
And of course, I witnessed the small changes in my children. My older son’s penchant for coming up with his own original jokes that are getting gradually funnier and funnier. My younger son’s shift from pretending to be various baby animals to various Dungeons and Dragons monsters. (You’ve never heard of a baby Death Knight? Shame.) Both of their vocabularies getting bigger and more complex. Both of them being more able to resolve arguments with words – and when they don’t, my younger son at least being bigger and less likely to get hurt. As stressful as working from home is (and we are exceptionally lucky in that my husband is a full-time stay-at-home dad), it’s been amazing to have all of this time with them. No longer is my weekday free time with them squished into 45 minutes at best. It’s allowed me to take in these little spots of growth that build up so much over time.
I hope when all of this is over, I can maintain this newfound satisfaction. This ability to not just slow down, but embrace the new pace. To find fulfillment in the shifting of shadows and the small pleasures with my children. While I had some appreciation for those things before, the fact that it’s all we have now have given them a new weight. One I hope to find comfortable on my shoulders now and in the future.
“It doesn’t really matter whose fault it actually is, we need to clean it up together,” I said to my kids, talking about some mess or another. I heard those words come out of my mouth as if I actually believed them. But I did really want to believe them.
I am a blame monster. If there’s blame to put on someone – even myself – I am on the case. I used to think that if you could blame someone for a problem, they would learn their lesson and not do it again.
Problem solved, right? Uh, no.
A silver-gray hair flowed from the top of my head down past my ear, ending right at my shoulder. “Huh,” I said, looking in the mirror and shrugging. It’d be cool if it was eventually a skunk stripe like Rogue in X-Men or glittery like Luna Girl in PJ Masks.
Perhaps my ambivalence about gray hair seems strange, considering that women are supposed to hide any sign of aging. But there’s a sense of strange gratitude – I expected a hell of a lot more of them by now. Like many things on my 37th birthday.
Writing a book is a lot like birthing a baby. Both require huge amounts of work to bring into the world. Both have unending unpredictabilities and surprises. Both are deep works of love.
And today, I’m celebrating both. It’s my book release day for Growing Sustainable Together: Practical Resources for Raising Kind, Engaged Resilient Children and the anniversary of my older son’s birth.
“Just do the next right thing,” Anna sobs as she pulls herself up rock by rock towards the entrance of the cave she’s stuck in. Watching Frozen II on the big screen, I was too enthralled by her crisis to think about how her song related to me. But later, when I was re-listening to the song with my kids, the power of that message hit me. I choked up a bit as I watched the bouncing ball bop atop the words on the sing-along YouTube video.
I too have sat on the floor and cried “I don’t know what to do.” I too have stared miserably in the distance, incapacitated by the seeming lack of a path forward.
“He said his favorite time of day is when he’s going to bed and gets to talk to mommy for a while,” said the text from my husband, referencing my three year old son.
Kid, why don’t you just stab me in the heart again?