You Say It’s Your Birthday…

I am not feeling particularly chipper on this, the anniversary of my birth. We had a good day. Rob took the kids grocery shopping this morning, giving me a bit of time, and then we met a few friends at a BBQ festival, where we got to eat a lot of charred, sauce covered pork, which is one of my very favorite things. It would have made a fine Saturday, but for some reason, it was a bit of a let down birthday. No stuff upper lip here, it wasn’t awful, no one forgot, gifts were given, phone calls from friends were taken, Sam shook sprinkles over a store-bought cake and insisted on candles.
It’s just that I feel not so happy, and since I usually feel reasonable happy, I suspect my birthday (oh, plus two nights of bad sleep, one thanks to Lily, one thanks to an excess of espresso) is to blame.
I think primarily that the things that are always true grated even more today. That I managed maybe an hour or two to myself, and felt weighed down, as always, by the pressure of the weedy garden, the undone laundry, the missing puzzle pieces, the dishwasher full of clean dishes longing for their homes, the sheer enormous piles of stuff that surround us and threaten to collapse on our heads daily. I was so frustrated that, for a birthday treat, I cleaned out the fridge simply by throwing away anything old right inside its tupperware, or, in one case, right in the bowl. So there.
I’m pretty sure that showed someone.
We met friends, but couldn’t actually talk to them, since we were all embroiled in tending the needs of the small ones who dominate us and, by sheer virtue of being louder, whinier ond less reasonable than one would think anyone could get away with, always come first. And the moment they sense that it’s gone too far, that you’ve decided the next thing you do will not involve an ice cream, or a balloon animal, but actually feeding yourself or perhaps exchanging a non-kid-related sentence with another adult, they trump you: “I have to go PEE!”. Or they start bleeding.
The fates will punish me, I know they will, they have done so before, so I ask them please just to overlook the following, because I am not suggesting that they be taken away:
I don’t actually even LIKE small children.
I’m not even going to follow that up with the usual caveats. Just that preliminary note to those all-dominating fates and the goddess of irony, who knows full well that Alanis Morisette doesn’t know jack.
So, I don’t know, today I’m fighting the chains, I’m lighting a candle, I’m cursing the darkness. Today I am not resigned.


850 Responses to “You Say It’s Your Birthday…”

  1. JK says:

    They do grow up. Wishing we were together so we could go get a pedicure, or whatever you would like to do.