Every May gives me a double whammy of bittersweet. It's Mother's Day, shortly followed by my birthday. You'd think both those days would be happy and exciting, right? It's so fun waking up to sweet homemade gifts from my kids on Mother's Day each year, and who doesn't like a good birthday celebration?
It should be all sweetness, but there is a bitter taste for both these days. Each Mother's Day, I am reminded of what I have, but also of what I don't have. It's been so long since I could say "Happy Mother's Day" to my own person, and that makes me miss my mom fiercely. I honestly can't even remember her last Mother's Day with us, which would've been in 1995. I was a week away from turning 14 that year, and I'm sure I didn't make a big enough deal of it. So each Mother's Day, I wake up with the sweetness, feeling grateful that I have two healthy and decent young woment to call my daughters, but then that bitter taste sits at the back of my mouth and I have to swallow hard in order to curb the seeping sadness. I like and don't like Mother's Day.
This same bitter taste taints my birthday. I like and don't like that day as well. My birthday is also my mom's birthday. The last birthday she saw was when she turned 38, and then 9 months later, she was gone. It used to be the most special day. I loved waking up on my birthday because I knew my mom and I shared something really special. She would leave special things in my room for me to find when I woke up, and we would share a birthday cake with both our names. It felt like our special connection that no one else had. Now, my birthday has that same bittersweet feeling, because it's just mine, but I don't want it to be. I miss that specialness that the first 14 of my birthdays had. I miss feeling like I was in on a secret nobody else knew.
This birthday is a big mouthful of bitter for me. I am turning 38 in 6 days. I refer to it as my "scary birthday". I don't know what life can look like for me after 38. I kind of want to close my eyes this year, and just wait for 39 because then I won't be the same age as my mom was when she died. I want to skip this one. This birthday carries with it more bitter than sweet, and I just have a gutful of gross sitting inside me right now. I feel desperately sad. I know I won't feel this way for long, and I know I can still be happy in my sadness, but at the moment, sadness is the heaviest thing I feel. It's the kind of sadness that makes a person want to stay in their pjs all day, close the curtains, and pull up the blankets tight around your neck. It's the kind of sadness that makes a person want to sleep through it.
I'm not writing this because I am looking for sympathy or well wishes. I write this because it's really important for me to embrace my times of not okay, because when I feel those emotions fully, I can work through them and let them go. It really is okay to not be okay. I can put my smile on any day of the week and act like all is well, but why? Why should I need to act all the time? I need to be authentic, and reality is far more interesting than any make-believe I can weave. Sometimes I need to draw into myself and do some inner medicine, just allowing some gentleness and softness in. I'm really good at being critical of myself, of my choices, of my actions, but today, this week, this month, I choose to be kind and gentle and treat my sadness with softness. Don't be afraid to feel sad. Being not okay is okay. At least it's real.
