Happy Birthday To Me

I turned 33 today. Birthdays are strange, aren't they? They can be one of your worst days when you view them as a day when you shouldn't have to do anything you don't want to do and when everyone around you should wait on you. It's kind of a small-scale experiment of what a completely self-centered, self-serving life would be like. Not pretty.

I think the best birthday presents are rarely given on the actual birthday. The best birthday present my husband Andy gave me this year wasn't something he gave me today. It came in one sentence he said a couple of months ago, while we were lying in bed about to fall asleep: "It's so easy to be faithful to you."

Ahh...I could live on that for months, maybe years.

My mom told me that she remembers someone telling her that on her birthday, every year, she sends flowers to her mother. Isn't that cool? Instead of going through the day feeling entitled to be waited on as the birthday-queen-for-a-day, she gives a gift to the woman who gave her the gift of life. Of course, I would just be a copycat if I started doing the same thing, especially since my mom is the one who told me about the idea.

But I would like to thank my mom for choosing to give me life, because for her, it would have been much more convenient to have done the opposite. It's impossible to wrap my mind around the possibility that I never could have existed outside of the womb. Yeah...I just don't know how to even try to imagine it.

It's not flowers, but perhaps another sentence will do: Thanks Mom and Dad for choosing life, for choosing me. I love you.