Clara decided to have a great birthday

My daughter, Clara, celebrated her birthday yesterday. She turned 12 years-old.

My wife, Elysha, isolated in our bedroom, recovering from COVID-19, described Clara best when she wrote:

“Clara Susan. Fierce feminist, voracious reader, Minecraft builder, cat enthusiast, deeply kind and empathetic friend and sister. She is a top notch human being who makes me so proud every day.”

Never was the pride that I feel for my daughter any truer than yesterday.

Celebrating your birthday in the midst of a pandemic is no fun. If you’re following the guidelines set by doctors, scientists, and public health experts, unnecessary social gatherings of any kind are a terrible and dangerous idea. Risking the lives of children and parents in order to mark another trip around the sun makes it potentially the last trip around the sun for one or more members of the gathering.

It’s a dumb thing to do.

Delaying gratification turns out to be a hard thing to do for many Americans, which is part of the reason we are the worldwide epicenter of this virus. Americans account for 4% of the world’s population but 25% of COVID-19 deaths. It’s a disaster. It’s not entirely to blame on gatherings like birthday parties, of course, but it’s part of the problem.

Just imagine how you might feel if someone attending your party or sleepover contracts COVID-19 and later dies because they attended your celebration. This has happened many, many times in the past year, yet people continue to gather unnecessarily.

We do not. We are willing to delay gratification in order to stay safe and preserve human life. Clara understands and supports this.

Still, it doesn’t make for an ideal birthday.

Add to this Elysha’s isolation from the family. Celebrating a birthday without being able to leave the house is bad enough. Celebrating with your mother locked away in a room upstairs, recovering from COVID-19, is miserable.

So I was prepared for a slightly sad daughter to come down the stairs yesterday morning. I was ready to try to bolster her spirits. Offer some perspective. Remind her of how lucky we are. Turn that frown upside down.

Instead, Clara came down the stairs with a bounce in her step. When I told her how sorry I was that she couldn’t celebrate her birthday like last year, she told me that it was okay. She planned on having a great day despite the pandemic. The coronavirus wasn’t going to spoil her day.

And it didn’t. She smiled all day long. She chose to be embrace everything good about the day while ignoring all the bad.

Clara had a great birthday because she decided that it would be a great birthday. It was astounding.

Others helped, too. From her confinement upstairs, Elysha arranged for balloons to be delivered to the house. She wrapped gifts and watched them opened from two rooms away while wearing a mask for all of five minutes. She arranged for friends to drive-by later that evening to wish Clara a happy birthday.

Our friends, the Golders, dropped off a birthday cake.

Her Aunt Emily sent an edible arrangement.

My students made birthday cards for Clara, and my principal dropped them off at our home.

Elysha’s friends left small gifts for her at the door.

The phone rang all day with people wanting to wish Clara a happy birthday.

We ended our day with a chapter of Harry Potter while Elysha sat beside us on Zoom.

All of those things helped make her birthday special, but mostly it was Clara. Even as we drove to be tested for COVID-19 for a fourth time, she was making the best of it. As I drove through Hartford, I heard Charlie say, “Hey Clara. I love you.”

She replied, “I love you, too, bro.”

That was the second best moment of the day for me.

But the best was my daughter’s decision to be happy. Her choice to make the best of it. Her willingness to embrace the good and disregard the bad.

It was remarkable. I was so proud of her.

It’s a hard thing for many people to do.

Making the choice that today is going to be a great day is a powerful, positive, and oftentimes self-fulfilling prophesy. While it’s easy to focus on the negative aspects of our lives, why would you bother doing something so silly and unproductive? Why not decide that today will be great? Why not at least start off with that mindset?

Give yourself a chance to have a fantastic day. If you get hit by a bus, perhaps adjust that mindset a bit. But until then, why not try to have a great day?

Many people don’t. It makes me crazy.

Elysha has referred to me as oppressively optimistic. A colleague recently told me that my positive attitude exhausts her. I’ve actually had people snap at me for answering their question about how I’m doing with, “Fantastic!”

“Great.”

“Wonderful.”

“You can’t be great everyday!” someone shouted at me earlier this year.

Why not? Why not at least try?

There is a desire amongst many people in this world to focus on the negative aspects of their life. Center their attention on the struggle of the day. Assume the worst. Find all of the problems in their life and assemble them in one, large, ugly pile that they can stare at, talk about, and think about constantly.

Not only is it a terrible way to think and be, but if you do it enough, people will no longer enjoy your company.

The constant complainer is the pariah of the workplace. The Debby Downer is the last person you want attending your party. The defeatist is not the person you choose for your team.

Not only is it bad for you, but it’s also bad for the people around you.

Please don’t get me wrong. Sometimes it’s not possible to be positive. In fact, if Elysha, trapped in her room, missing almost all of her daughter’s birthday yesterday as she dealt with the symptoms of COVID-19, was less than positive yesterday, she has every right to be.

If you or your loved one is sick, you may not be feeling quite so happy today. If you’ve lost a loved one to this terrible virus or lost your job as a result of the pandemic, today might not be so good a day for you.

I’ve had those days, too. When I was sitting in jail, awaiting trial for a crime I did not commit, I was not the most positive person in the world. When I was homeless, I was not turning my frown upside down on a regular basis.  I had no skip in my step when my dog passed away last year. I can be quite miserable following a Patriots loss.

I am not insisting on a positive mental attitude every day of your life. I am not saying that it’s wrong to feel sad or miserable or depressed.

For some, this is not even a choice. Depression is a real thing that cannot be overcome by a simple shift in attitude.

But for many people, it can be a choice. For many people, the day routinely begins with a focus on the problems rather than their good fortune. For many people, the goodness of their lives is often obscured by the less-than-ideal aspects of life.

It would’ve been easy for Clara to come down those stairs feeling glum yesterday. Quarantined at home, unable to see her mother, unable to celebrate with friends, she had every right to feel sad.

She opted for happiness instead.

What a remarkable daughter I have.

What a remarkable birthday she enjoyed, thanks to Elysha, her friends, her family, and my students, who all made it special.

But mostly thanks to Clara for making it possible.