Birthdays was the worst days

Is this the birthday when I stop celebrating birthdays? Where I stop counting and ask people not to remind me of my age? In one ear I hear my children telling me that the 1900s are a long way off; in the other, I hear my grandmother saying that I am still a baby. Thirty-six… but a baby nonetheless. 

At times I feel like a baby. I feel helpless and desperate and like I have no idea what I was put on this earth to do or what the rule book is on being an adult. It seems that the older we get, the further we drift apart in an effort to keep the not-so-well-guarded secret that none of us really have any f*%.”!$ clue what we are doing here. We all just keep moving forward. 

So here I am. I have kept moving forward for thirty-six years, long or short, depending on your perspective. 

Most of my 20s I spent pouring through knowledge on politics, philosophy, health, and psychology. I was a stay-at-home mom, had a chaotic home life, was very physically sick with no apparent answers, and my knowledge became more than something I gathered for myself. I began sharing what I was learning, helping people find words for their own experiences and asking questions that led to conversations I didn’t know how much I needed. Those conversations grew into connections. Those connections became my community. Other people were curious like me, hurting like me, and trying to make sense of things, too. I was still a stay-at-home mom with a chaotic life and unanswered questions, but I also had something to contribute. I could help someone understand something, and they could help me see it differently. I didn’t know what I was put on this earth to do, but I was beginning to recognize how much it meant to me to learn, to share, and to make people feel a little less alone.

Around my thirtieth birthday, my life was uprooted. Everything changed, and I grew quieter, more thoughtful. I began to understand that this season was asking me to listen, to sit still, to admit how much I still needed to learn. I needed guidance. I needed to be held through some of the things I had spent years trying to understand. I began to heal. The ugly kind of healing. Screaming. Crying. Yelling. Breaking. Cutting ties and grieving them afterward. Therapy. EMDR. CBT. Equine. Medical intervention. A psychology degree I worked for and earned myself. Years of turning inward & toward things I had barely been able to name. And through it all, a new marriage I poured my whole heart into. One I immersed myself in, believed in, and fought for, both in this world and in the spiritual one. A love I brought into my prayers, even when I couldn’t find the words for anything else. This became what guided and molded the spirit of my thirties. 

For years, I kept coming back to the same chicken-or-the-egg question. What came first? I had twins. I had a C-section. I got sick. I couldn’t eat the way I used to or get through a day the way I used to. At the same time, I was in a relationship that was unstable and, at times, abusive. I kept trying to figure out where one thing ended, and the other began. How much of what I was feeling came from being sick? How much came from what was happening at home? I could turn those questions over a hundred different ways, but one thing was certain: after twenty-two, I was never quite the same.

By my thirties, I needed the silence. I’d spent so much of my twenties reading, asking questions, and sharing what I learned with anyone who might need it. I wanted to understand how racism takes root in a society and how it shows up in things like police brutality. I read about the oil industry and Big Pharma, trying to understand how decisions made by people I’d never meet could shape the lives of people like me. Numerology, philosophy, physiology, psychology. Somewhere along the way, all of that became my everyday reading. 

And then there was abuse. I read about all the forms it could take and slowly became fluent in its many languages. I learned to recognize control in the way money was handled, in the things I was made to doubt about myself, and in the way I learned to think through what I was about to say before I said it. Some of the things I’d spent years trying to understand on the page were things I’d been living at home. Now I needed to sit with some of those same questions long enough to hear my own answers. And some of them had been eating at the back of my mind for years. I still couldn’t tell you exactly why I got sick, what started it, or which incidents came first, but I could finally admit how hard it had been to feel that bad and still get up every morning and take care of everybody. I could call what happened at home what it was: abuse, even on the days I remembered the good parts. And I could ask for help while I was still figuring out exactly what kind of help I needed.

Some of those realizations felt like epiphanies. Others took me years to say out loud. They changed what I thought was possible for me, down to the smallest things. What I could say in my own home. Who I could let close to me. Whether I could go back to school and take my own interests seriously enough to build a life around them.

I still think about who I was at twenty-two. She wanted so badly to know what came first. I understand why. She was sick, she was desperate, and she had two babies to take care of. She thought if she could figure out where it all started, she’d know where to begin.

I’m thirty-six now, and there are still days when I feel just as lost as she did. The difference is that I’m finally willing to ask myself what I need and let the answer come from more than one place. I needed doctors to help me understand what was happening in my body. I needed therapy to say things I’d barely admitted to myself. And I needed my faith on the days I still had more questions than answers. There were days I needed all three. I spent years trying to untangle what was happening in my body from what was happening in my life. I think healing meant finally giving myself permission to care for both, even if I never figured out which came first.

So, is this the birthday where I stop counting? I don’t think so. My kids can keep reminding me I was born in the 1900s, and my grandmother can keep calling me a baby. Honestly, there are days I need to hear it from her. I still wish somebody would hand me the rule book, but if I could sit beside that twenty-two-year-old for a minute, I think I’d just tell her, “You can ask for help right now. You don’t have to figure out what came first, whose fault it was, or how far back it goes. You’re hurting, and that’s reason enough.”

And at thirty-six, I’m still learning to take my own advice.