On my birthday, this is my gift to you:

Tomorrow I am turning twenty nine years old. I have always celebrated my birthday for the entire month of July, as much to my mother’s chagrin as it was to my pleasure. As soon as July 1^st would introduce itself as the beginning of the seventh month, I would start hinting to anyone who would listen that it was my birthday month and did they want to help me celebrate. I didn’t care about gifts. I didn’t care about cake and candles. I just wanted the 9^th day of July to be recognized as my special day.

As I’ve grown up, and especially when I entered my twenties, my birthdays started to lose significance. I began marking them with the age of my older daughter, and then subsequently with the age of my younger daughter as well. When I turned 21, it was remembered because I also happened to be in the 7 month of my first pregnancy. When I turned 25, Lyv was just over a month old. I tallied up birthdays much like someone keeping score, so sure that she is always going to earn more points than her opponents. It became boring. Uneventful. Dismissed.

I was so eager, prepared, and ready to recklessly abandon my twenties and move on to my thirties with such enthusiasm, that I wasn’t even considering turning 29 as the last year linking me to so many of my milestones. Failed attempts at marriages, successful births of two healthy daughters, the long and winding road otherwise known as my Bachelor’s Degree that took me 10 years to finish. I had chalked up my twenties to living, learning, and love lost, gained, and drained again. I counted on turning 29 for the sole purpose of allowing it to be my last year before I could start a new decade of chapters, relying only on my promise and rushed determination to never make any one of my singular and disastrous mistakes again. I assumed that if it took the last two years to reconcile all of the decisions I had made for the first six, wrapping up the consequences of those decisions could be fastidiously done in the next 365 days.

That was my focus. Just. Get. Through it.

I should’ve known better.

I should’ve known that you can no better plan for what has happened any more than you can plan not to trip over an uprooted uneven sidewalk because the old oak trees that line the streets while you are on a long run, are tired of keeping mum. You came into my life when I never asked you to, and I didn’t know I was looking for you. You would lie in bed at night wondering what I was doing, where I was, what I looked like, never knowing that you had already memorized my face. And I, yours. I took your breath away one morning when the sun decided to act as my own personal backdrop. I was so caught up in my own world causing me to be that much later to the gym, which is why the sun was just that much more perfectly positioned right behind me. I let you in on my secret: my life had been severely altered, leaving me unaffected by your choice- whether it be to stay or to go- due to my inability to see that my own travesties might just be someone else’s treasures.

My next secret was that  I was lying to myself. 

You once told me that you would love to dive for pearls, and you made it sound so enchanting.  Then again, everything you saydotouchlookfeel becomes infected with your grace. You have a knack for uncovering things that have been tarnished and tainted. You make them new again, polishing them with your words, wit, and wisdom.

Having you in my life is a blessing, but allowing you to bring me back before I was ready to do it on my own is more than I think I deserve. You came a year too early, but one day later would have been past due. Adamant in your conviction that I saved you from swimming in a sea of familiar faces that individually offered you nothing, I need you to know I was as far down as you were, that place that- ironically- lacks so much depth.

You protected yourself for so long in your self-imposed bubble, until one day you were ready to burst. 

You finally floated to the top, and you discovered:

Me.