The past month has been a blur—it started with a surgery (planned, my mother’s, she’s recovering well) and ended with a surgery (planned, my husband’s, he’s recovering well). Last week, somewhere in the middle but the middle towards the end, was my birthday.
A spring birthday is a lot of pressure. Your personal New Year falls in the exact season when the earth itself begins anew. You look at the roses and think, “What’s stopping me from looking and smelling that good?!”
Burnout, that’s what! Despite the perfumed Los Angeles air I woke up in a black mood. It didn’t help that I woke up in the middle of the night to panic and then, panic complete, slipped back into a fitful sleep before the baby awoke and we brought her to our bed so she could pinch our faces until she went back to sleep and then woke up at dawn to demand breakfast. But you know what? Life is hard and we solider on, if I learned anything from the part of Prince Harry’s memoir about going to his brother’s wedding with a frostbitten penis.
So I spent most of the morning chiding myself to “CHEER UP AND ENJOY YOUR BIRTHDAY, YOU IDIOT!” Weirdly, that didn’t make me feel any better, so I continued my petty pouting. The thing about days is they will go on, whatever your mood, so my husband, after bringing me a box of beautiful baked goods from my favorite bakery, gently suggested we walk to lunch.
We met my sister and I ate something green for the first time in days. When we wrapped up, my husband put the baby in a stroller. My sister put her dog in another stroller. My husband said he’d walk the baby to the park, and I asked my sister if she wanted to browse a nearby Expensive Clothing Store.
The Expensive Clothing Store is very “L.A.” That is to say, it consists of a bunch of t-shirts and sack dresses and clogs arranged on industrial shelving, with hummingbird-sized purses placed throughout, for effect.
I remembered that I had visited that Expensive Clothing Store on another birthday, in a prior year, in a similar black mood. I bought myself a dress (besides SSRIs, a top treatment for dopamine depletion). The dress was The Cheapest Thing in the Expensive Clothing Store (in fact I don’t think the Expensive Clothing Store even carries that brand anymore because it was Too Cheap to count as Expensive), but it was a reminder that doing nice things for yourself is not a punishable offense.
This year I left the Expensive Clothing Store empty handed (I’m sure they weren’t expecting that from two women who walked in with a dog stroller). My mood was already improving. By bedtime, I felt loved and lucky, asleep in my bed, the dress asleep in my closet. Who knows what this year will bring, but whatever happens, time passes, and if one thing’s for sure, that means you’ll eventually feel different from how you feel right now.
I finally got around to reading this article. An excerpt:
I hope that when the war ends I can go back to Gaza, to help rebuild my family home and fill it with books. That one day all Israelis can see us as their equals—as people who need to live on our own land, in safety and prosperity, and build a future. That my dream of seeing Gaza from a plane can become a reality, and that my home can grow many more dreams. It’s true that there are many things to criticize Palestinians for. We are divided. We suffer from corruption. Many of our leaders do not represent us. Some people are violent. But, in the end, we Palestinians share at least one thing with Israelis. We must have our own country—or live together in one country, in which Palestinians have full and equal rights.
Oowww…I think birthday blues are genetic. Mine (aside from the genes) came from the predictable gifts for a late August birthday-new (💥) socks and underwear for the impending (parochial) school year.
Rereading this one — it had me chuckling out loud and tearing up at the same time.