Birthday to Me

Here it is again.

The anniversary of my birth.

How do I begin?

Lately I’ve been focused on my inadequacies and failures more than my successes and abilities, and I see that change of focus made manifest in my blog.  Where I once found joy in sharing my adventures and fulfillment in divulging my thoughts, now I see photos and experiences regurgitated in lackluster prose.  I used to be funny and creative and occasionally deep. I used to take pride in my posts, knowing when I hit “publish” that I had created something valuable to me. I used to pick up my camera multiple times a day--that familiar, repetitive action accompanied by thoughts of, “This should be a post.”

Now, I find myself holding back what I’m really thinking and feeling and experiencing, rarely touching my camera, wondering if I really should share what is bubbling around in my head.  I’ve been “surface blogging,” documenting our daily existence, but finding no joy in it.  I’ve always taken great pride in my honesty and my self-confidence and my strength. 

I find little honesty in my recent posts.

As my birthday approached, I caught myself doing some self-examination, carefully and sometimes painfully appraising who I have become and how I use my time and what I’ve accomplished in forty-three years of living. I’ve become entangled in pinterest and blogs and (dare I confess) Facebook.  I’ve impeded my real living with cyber-stalking others and comparing their talents and passion with my shortcomings and self-loathing.

Honesty in my blogging has always come easy for me. There hasn’t been much I’ve held back from this space—when I struggled with sugar or parenting or just plain hitting the wall of life, I revealed it, never hiding the truth behind flowery embellishments. In spite of a few interspersed posts of struggle, my posts have been generally positive and good.  Maybe that’s why my blogging has suffered lately--I haven’t been honest about life, which hasn’t been either positive or good. 

In all honesty, here’s the real recap of the year I was 42:

Excluding 2002 when I lost my fifth child, I will always remember my 43^rd year as the hardest year of my life.  I felt the pieces of my life breaking all around me as I unsuccessfully tried to hold them together intact.

This was the year I lost much of my self-confidence. 

This was the year I was required to face character flaws I had previously determined I would never address because they didn’t seem to matter in the grand scheme of who I wanted to be.

This was the year I was dragged through life changes against my will.

This was the year I found more than three gray hairs, and I began realizing that I could never go back.

This was the year I was betrayed—by my body, by my mind, by others around me.

This was the year I lost my strength.

This was the year I became fragile.

This was the year I began to question how sturdy my construction of me actually was. Was the foundation of my character really sound—really who I should be for the rest of my life?

This was the year I lost grasp on the daily rituals of my life that have always grounded me—I lost my hold on prayer and study and exercise, and I let go so gradually that I barely noticed them slipping from my sight.

This was the year my spirit felt out of place in my body--where the two have never quite seemed to be coexisting as the single “me” they’ve always been.

This was the year I looked in the mirror every morning and never saw my reflection. I would see if my hair was sticking out or if my mascara was smudged or if the new scar under my right eye was ever going to fade, but I never looked past the surface to tidy up my soul.

This was the year I withdrew from others to protect my newly fragile self. As much as I wanted to possibly tell someone how I felt or what was transpiring in the chambers of my soul, I didn’t really want anyone to see my fragility and pity me.  I hate pity.

This was the year I wanted to hide from everyone and everything—shrouded in a house of cards that I could feel collapsing all around me, I still felt safer within its trembling walls.

This was the year my withdrawal hurt my sister’s feelings and we didn’t speak for six months.

This was the year I demanded time alone, time to try and face the changes within myself, yet those moments alone brought neither solution nor peace.

This was the year I changed—changed from the strong person I’d always known into a frightened, delicate creature I don’t know and, frankly, don’t even like.

This was the year I became acquainted with fear—fear of past mistakes, fear of present challenges, and fear of future changes.

For the first time in my life, I was, have been, and continue to be . . .  afraid.  It frightens me to admit all of this aloud, to publish it for the world to see.

 Me.  The strong one.  The unfaltering one.  The rock. 

I thought I was facing these fears.  

 I tried denying these changes by projecting a “surface” life, a life that had always stayed the same before, one that was on track to stay the same and should have stayed the same forevermore. All that surface image brought me was an unsettled feeling—Legos in a box that came with specific instructions, but even after I followed the directions meticulously, I had  to acknowledge something significant was still missing.

 I tried burying these changes in food. All that eating brought me was extra pounds and unhappiness every time I passed a mirror or pulled on my clothes. I would eat until I was past full, often to the point of pain and nausea, only to be driven back to the fridge searching for nonexistent comfort again and again.  

I tried smothering these changes by frequenting auctions and creating order out of others’ castoffs.  As much as I enjoy finding a treasure and making it my own, all it brought me was a full garage and a realization that material things will never fill the disquiet I feel down to my core.

Not all of the change this past year has been destructive, to be sure.

This was also the year I can bookmark as the year I became more empathetic.

• The year I removed myself from everything for weeks on end, lived a simple dairy-farm life, realigned my priorities, and treasured every single second. I saw that my hurried pace in Arizona was rushing me through many of the most important moments of  life.
• The year I slowed down and simplified. I haven’t taken the time to fully record my adventures of the summer, and one reason is that I’m still waiting to see how the lessons from Pennsylvania permanently take up residence inside me—how they permanently alter my character and approach to life. For now, I will say that when I first walked through my back door upon my return home, I knew I was fundamentally different from the person who had left just 25 days before.  I was different, and I purposely distanced my new self from my old life for as long as I could, trying to prevent some of my former self from coming back to the surface of my character. 
• The year I remembered that happiness isn’t measured by the size of the house but by the memories created within its walls.
• The year I adjusted my mothering to put happiness and joy ahead of achievement and the  perceptions of others. I saw, for the first time, that it is better to raise children who are good and obedient and happy and kind and satisfied with who they are, and even though my mothering may have come up short in a few of these areas, I recognized that my older kids are turning out just this way, and I couldn’t be prouder of them than if they were nominated for Nobel.
• The year I fell in love with a dark, curly-headed little girl who is stubborn and smart and beautiful and one step removed from being my very own. I began to accept the absolute happiness that comes from adding a new generation to our family.

I have hated most months of this last year--dreadful months punched here and there with specks of light and joy.  I have lost passion for most things that brought me joy—auctions, photography, blogging.  I have been fighting and fighting and fighting to regain what I’ve lost—a vision of who I was that has disappeared in a puff of smoke, forcing me to see that maybe my projection wasn’t real from the beginning.

I see what I’ve been fighting against for some time now—I have unexpectedly and unwillingly reached the middle of my life.  I am no longer young and never will be again.  I was refusing to knock on the door of aging, but it opened anyway and a gust of wind blew me into a room I was unprepared to enter. 

42 was the year of dissatisfaction, unhappiness, hurt feelings, and broken dreams. 42 was the year of transformation, adjusting priorities and modifying expectations.  42 was the year of change.

43 will be the year of acceptance—accepting who I have become and learning to love her, weaknesses and strengths, warts and all.

So here goes--the bravest thing I've done in a long time.  Push publish.

Happy birthday to me.