Briefcase on the Kitchen Table

In a couple of weeks I will turn 26 years old. I like birthdays. At least I do now. I haven’t always. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy my birthday, but they also seemed to be flashpoints of anxiety for me.

Birthdays always made me feel like time was moving too fast. Especially during years in which I may have lost someone close to me or made a major change, it would feel as though I had just celebrated my previous birthday only weeks before and my birthday was just a reminder of how little control we have.

Birthdays also used to scare me because, since age 1, birthdays have come with pressure. When you are very young birthdays come with the pressure of developmental mile-stones. I see it now it my friends who have children; are they talking? walking? crawling? teething? At times the conversations take on an almost competition-like tone, as though one mother’s teething-toddler is a trophy compared to her friend’s still drooling, gumming babe (as though the first mom has some sort of mind-gene-control trick that made her baby develop “ahead of the curve”). When you are in school birthdays are time to take stock; are you reading novels yet? doing multiplication? have a 4.0? decided what you are doing with your life? And then, as my friends and I entered the adult world, birthdays became even more of a measuring stick. “He made partner by the time he was 30”, “He already lived abroad for two years by the time he was 26”, “She was a business owner by the age of 24.” Birthdays made this pressure seem hyper-focused.

So now I find myself coming up to a birthday that should have a great deal of pressure coming with it and the questions, quite appropriately, have already begun to be asked. I graduate law school less than two months after my birthday. Then it will be time to take the bar, find a “good” job, and decide what the next step is for Avery and I in our little two-person family (keep the baby questions coming folks- it’s not gonna happen). So time to get ready for the pressure and anxiety, right?

You know what? Not this year. I won’t allow it. I credit my mother greatly for this. She had her birthday only a few weeks ago. My mother, more than most 55 year-olds I know, would have even more justification than myself to be nervous about the passage of time. Her mother, my grandmother, has been gone for over 20 years. Her father, my grandfather, has been gone for ten. Her sister, my aunt, passed five years ago this summer. My mom has had to say goodbye to too many people. Even so, on her birthday this year she once again celebrated the special day, never showing an ounce of trepidation for the passage of time. And she shared a quote that she had found by one of her favorite actresses, Meryl Streep: “You have to embrace getting older. Life is precious. And when you’ve lost a lot of people you realize that each day is a gift.” This quote, and seeing my mother love life, has knocked me out of my selfishly-melancholy outlook on birthdays. My life is pretty good. Sure, I have lost people, but it really could be so much worse. I want my birthday to be a time to celebrate the accomplishments of the past year, reflect on the growth, and use as a springboard for the year to come.

This year, when I wake up on the 31st and call my sister (it is the first thing you must do when you share a birthday with someone), and I feel the general nagging anxieties that always creep up, I am not indulging them. I will celebrate. I will go out to eat with my husband, facetime with my family, go to work (I have court all morning), breath in the spring air and just be thankful.