Our family doesn’t have too many traditions surrounding birthdays – we mostly just figure out what sounds fun to do that day, and then do that – but we do have one rule:
When it is your birthday, you get to sleep in, and you get your favorite breakfast in bed.
And kisses. You get lots of those.
Kendrick’s presents for his 33rd, in addition to that burrito-ish thing pictured above: a Giles & Brother bracelet with our kids’ initials stamped into it, and the promise of a date night in the city a couple of weeks from now (the itinerary for which I’m keeping to myself for the time being).
At night, my mom watched the kids and we took our first just-us-two excursion since Goldie arrived, to a friend’s party. We stayed out until ten, and at the end of the evening we came home, tucked the blankets up around our son’s neck, and crawled into bed with our daughter. The lights were out by 11.
Birthdays are different once you get older. People are busier, harder to get in the same place at the same time. Naptimes have to be accommodated or babysitters hired. These past three years, our birthdays have pretty much been spent doing whatever it is that we usually do (plus breakfast in bed), and Kendrick’s birthday on Saturday was lovely, but not especially out of the ordinary.
And when it was over and I was laying there under the covers in the dark, I started worrying that he hadn’t had a special enough day, that we hadn’t done anything exciting enough or fancy enough or wild enough or whatever it is that you’re “supposed” to do to celebrate one more year of existence. Had he wanted a big party, a big fuss, a big anything at all? Because the day was a happy one, a relaxing one, a fun one…but big it was not, and I worried that our sweet, simple celebration hadn’t been enough to show him what he means to me. Which is everything.
But then I remembered I never used to like birthdays (or at least not my own), for the same reason that I don’t particularly enjoy New Year’s: they just feel like so much pressure. And now I do like them (even my own). Because now that I’m older, the pressure has fallen away. There’s nothing I really need that I don’t already have; my favorite meals are usually found at diners; there’s no place where I’d rather spend a few hours than in the hammock in my own backyard.
My favorite part of the article about turning forty that I linked to in a post last week:
“Forty is knowing that the ferris wheel of life is ticking ever forward, and that this is probably the tippy-top. It is watching the decline of some in the generation ahead of us and the blooming of those in the generation behind us. It is taking a breath and looking around at this spectacular view and loving it, knowing that it is changing even as I admire it.
Forty is realizing that a birthday of chores and errands and a candlelit family dinner is exactly what I wanted. It is understanding in a new, visceral way, that all I want is more of this.”
Birthdays nowadays are just another day, but “another day” is a pretty wonderful thing to have.
