Happy birthday to me, Mom.
It’s my birthday today, and it’s sure to be wonderful.
A morning spent with Elysha and the kids before I head off to school to spend the day with two dozen children who I almost always adore.
Then home for ice cream cake and presents.
I’m even picking up my new car today. It took a while for the car to be transported from Cleveland to Connecticut, then title snafus made the process even longer. Today I finally drive it home.
It will be a good, happy day.
But I start this morning off – while the house is still quiet and the sun has not yet risen – thinking about my mother.
Perhaps it’s just me, but there is a real difference between celebrating your birth while your mother is still alive and celebrating it after she has passed away.
Mom died back in January of 2007. Seemingly a lifetime ago. I can’t believe it’s been so long.
More than 50 years ago, my mother and I began a journey together. Far too early, she has stepped off the path, leaving me to finish our journey alone.
Not that I plan on finishing the journey, of course. I plan on living forever. Blood pressure and cholesterol are excellent. My recent cardiac calcium score was a zero, which is remarkable. I survived COVID last month. Surgery two months before. My heart has stopped beating and I have stopped breathing twice in my life, yet I am still here thanks to trained paramedics and stubbornness.
I’ve never even bruised.
Unless a bus flattens me or aliens vaporize me, I’ll be here until the sun explodes. But still, you know what I mean.
Mom and I started this thing together, but now she is gone.
There was something about having my mother alive and well on my birthday that always made it feel like a celebration of our day. The day she and I met for the first time. Something only the two of us could share.
One of the most important days in both of our lives, started together, shared together, and celebrated together.
Now it’s only my day. I can celebrate today with family and friends, of course, but no one is left to remember and celebrate that specific day in February of 1971 when I first laid eyes on this world.
I can look online and see that the weather in Rhode Island that day was clear and cold. Temperatures hovered around freezing.
It was Presidents’ Day.
Across the Atlantic, it was known as Decimalization Day. After more than 1,200 years, the United Kingdom and Ireland both abandoned the pence and shilling system and switched to decimal currency
The front page of the New York Times featured a story about a US Air Force plane accidentally bombing “a friendly unit” near the United States-supported base at Long Tieng in Laos.
The Celtics and Bruins won.
“One Bad Apple” by The Osmonds was topping the billboard charts.
Renee O’Connor, who would someday become television’s Xena Warrior Princess, was born in Katy, Texas.
None of this matters a bit to me. Facts are plentiful, but it’s nuance I crave. Stories about that day. Intimate details that only a mother could know.
Now she is gone, making birthdays feel a little more empty and a little less worthy of celebration, especially in these predawn hours as I sit here alone.
Happily, I’ve got Elysha, Clara, and Charlie to push away those dark clouds and fill my day with happiness and celebration, which they will undoubtedly do with beautiful smiles, lots of laughter, and gobs of love.
They’ll be awake soon. I can’t wait to see them. Every morning, I sit in the quiet, waiting for the sun to rise, anxious to hear the pattering of feet above me.
Today more than ever.
I’m so very lucky to be me today. I like to think that Mom would agree.
