Birthday Schmirthday

I'm turning 34 today.  Seems like every other day since I woke up with a tiny person jumping on me at an ungodly hour, the kids are screaming, the house is a mess, the mister showed up late for breakfast and left early and I've barely sat down from cooking and cleaning the usual Sunday mess.  There are a mass of Facebook birthday wishes I'm quickly reading, liking then twisting to finish whatever mess I started trying to fix.  I'm taking a minute now to sit with a cup of tea and some music before I go break the ice off of the step.

My brain keeps trying to reflect on the last year, try to get a handle on things and pack 33 away before 34 starts rolling but I don't want to do that.  There has been so much good tempered with so much bad that it really was a year that left me shrugging my shoulders and wondering what the hell happened.  I would like to pack it all away without the reflection and the fight to understand this last year.  There are parts that I'll never understand and probably best that I don't.

If I could have one birthday wish, it would be that the bad things and the hurt don't carry over from one year to the next.  I wish that our birthdays were a cut-off date for shitty times from the previous year.  Whatever we were hurting from or stressing over the day before ends on our birthday and we can celebrate a new beginning, a fresh start.  Sure we got our lessons from the previous years, we remember how we learned and we grew but what if our birthdays carried us over to something better?  We take our friends, family, good times and happiness into the next year but the hurts and the pains and the worries stop as if they're hitting the wall.  It wouldn't be ignorning them, it would finishing them and moving on with only a somewhat bitter and fleeting memory remaining.  Basically I want to put Bad 33 in a box (MS, Mr. Khoury, finances, etc) and tuck it away but take the Good 33 box (kids, the mister, my friends) and leave it open to add Good 34 stuff to it.  Does that even make sense?

What I'm learning from today is to not put hope into something as trivial as the day the number on the life odometer flips over.  It really is just another day with all the same occurances, with all the same disappointments, heartaches, smiles and love from the previous day.  Change is simple and slow, sometimes unnoticeable until we take a few minutes to look back but sometimes it slaps us in the face with the recovery slow and almost unnoticeable.  This is especially true when looking at pictures of our 1980s hair.  I'm going to remind myself today that nothing lasts forever, it all has an expiration date so I shouldn't put too much stock in the hurt and enjoy the peaceful moments when they're here; feel it all, it all eventually goes away and that happens much too fast.

Except Madonna, she's forever so I'm going to throw on some of her tunes and dance in the kitchen to my guilty pleasure, read my Facebook wall posts again from all the beautiful people in my life because hey, it's my birthday and there's only a few hours left.