44 Rotations Around the Sun

Happy Birthday to me, I’m 44! Ten years ago I wrote my first blog birthday post, but since Addie’s birthday is the day after mine, it was largely focused on her. Ten years ago, she turned ten; tomorrow she turns 20!

In 2012 I shared that she got Lego sets and Barbie hair extensions. Tomorrow she will spend the day at class, and then fencing practice, before going out for dinner with her boyfriend. It’s the second year I won’t get to see her on her birthday.

In 2012 I learned, on my birthday, that I would be losing nursing care for Fulton. I was an overwhelmed mom whose oldest was ten, whose youngest was almost two, with a four, six, and eight year old in the middle. We didn’t have a lot of money and my hobbies were blogging, scrolling Facebook, and attending homeschooling socials and playdates. Tony worked in Philadelphia, and we hardly ever went on dates. But there was a lot of playfulness, joy, silliness, and exuberant joy amongst all the chaos, even if their weren’t elaborate birthday gifts.

In 2022, I woke up before the sun to get my two youngest ready and on the school bus at 7 a.m., with a nurse in tow. I get texts from my two oldest wishing me a happy birthday, and Edie kisses me on the cheek as I head out for a run, and she dashes off to work. Her gift to me was a game of mini golf and ice cream yesterday. I get my hair cut, take a walk with Tony and get a protein shake downtown. I had a massage scheduled for lunch.

I know longer get the hand-drawn birthday cards, or paper crafts. It’s memes, GIFs, gummy candy, and sushi I will pick up myself at the local grocery store. We’re headed to Five Below tonight to pick up a couple fun gifts to mail to Addie from Fulton and Teddy, and I think Fulton said he’s getting me some perfume while we’re there. Can’t wait!

It’s hard when you’re so focused on raising little kids, your birthday is pushed to the back burner. It would almost be more work, to take time to do something for yourself. And while things are so much easier for me now in many ways, it’s a different kind of hard when there’s fewer kids in the house, and you have all the time in the world to treat yourself, but there’s no way you can have all your kids with you for your big day.

So you can focus on the hard of each stage, or you can enjoy what each stage brings, acknowledging that no age is perfect and not the gold standard of which to compare all life events.

Do I want to go back to the days of everyone hanging on me on my birthday in a huge pile on the couch? No. But I’m also not going to say I want every birthday to be like today, even if it includes a massage.

Sorry if too many of my posts are reflective nowadays. I guess as a young mom, all I could do was compare my life to what things were like before children. Now, my pre-children days are so far behind me, that all I can do is reflect on my life through the ages and stages of my children. But now my future is starting to come full circle as my home empties and my life is less focused on their daily needs. I won’t ever be “childless” again, but the window of time in which I marked my days through my children is winding down. And with more space in my days, I guess I have more time to write about it. But I guess a birthday is a good day for nostalgia

Honestly, I don’t feel like there’s been anything exciting to write about since my last post -but I’m not complaining! If you want something else to read, check out my past birthday posts. I read through them all and some are funny, some have some more deep thoughts and one (#35) details my final wishes. Definitely a benefit to having a blog is being able to look back and compare where I was each year on this date.

• No 43rd birthday post (too busy preparing for my book launch)
• 42nd birthday post
• 41st birthday post
• 40th birthday post
• 39th birthday post
• 38th birthday post
• 37th birthday post
• No post for my 36th (Focused on writing about Addie’s Hobbit themed party.)
• 35th birthday post
• 34th birthday post