birthdays

Forty before Forty

~ savouringmydays ~ Leave a comment

When I was in school, I had a lot of resentment about being an August baby. I was the tiny one on the desk hidden in the corner. I never turned the next grand age during the school year. My friends were inevitably on holiday for my birthday party, and to top it off I had my 18th birthday and went straight to collect A-level results the next morning.

However this year I’m finally reaping the benefits of being the baby of the year! I’m in a WhatsApp group with several school friends, and couldn’t help feeling a little smug as we started wishing friends a happy 40th way back when I’d just turned 39. But after Christmas was finished it suddenly dawned on me that when we’ve welcomed the New Year in, lockdown party style on Thursday night and celebrating a grateful goodbye to 2020, my fortieth will be in this. very. year.

Well that was it. Suddenly I was wide eyed and sleepless and wondering what I should do with this momentous occasion. I’m ok with the fact in terms of age itself. I’ve had some busy years in adulthood, with more ups and downs than Chessington’s finest rollercoaster. So I feel I’ve earned a fortieth and the grey hairs that declare my wisdom. Or my age, anyway. If anything, I’m aware that ageing isn’t a right or a privilege, it’s a gift that not everyone gets, and for that, I’m okay to welcome my next decade in.

Having said that, whilst the storms blew outside I was lying staring into the dark slightly panicked, pondering what I can still achieve whilst I’m still in my 30’s. I’ve spent the best part of 15 years changing nappies and gaining a chronic neck injury from my poor baby-feeding posture combined with the bedtime hand holding of unsettled babies/unruly toddlers/anxious children. At the beginning of the March 2020 lockdown I was still taking a napping Micah in the pushchair on a walk, and somehow over the last 9 months he’s morphed into a several mile hiking, name-writing school-child. And that’s the part that unsettles me. It’s a new season of life and although I’m keenly aware I am still very much still needed, the question is who am I when I’m not hiding my insecurities behind a cute baby or propping my anxious legs up with a pushchair? (This was the first year I had to go Christmas shopping without a pushchair to carry my bags, and I missed it greatly. Next year I’m hoping to be allowed to shop with a pushchair wielding friend.) So given my vague end of thirties/end of toddler-life crisis, I decided I needed some goals. So I sat up and let the pounding rain on the window inspire a list.

Obviously despite a brand new year, the 2020 hangover is going to stay with us for a while, so my goals have to be achievable within a pandemic and the almost forgotten Brexit. No point aiming for the European city break I had planned – turns out my friend who suggested Blackpool would be exotic enough for the four of us might have been right after all.

So here it is, my Forty before Forty. The organiser in me kind of wishes I’d thought about this somewhere in November so I had forty weeks to achieve it, but there we are, I’ll just have to get a wriggle on. Some I’ll have to do more than one a week, some are one a month, some will be one off specials. Some are personal goals, some to do with others, some to do for others. And some are definitely going to be easier than others! (The backlog of photo books particularly fills me with dread!!!) But if I put it in writing it’s more likely to happen, so here it is:

1. Go for forty runs (a combination of illness and the dark evenings have halted my running for the last couple of months, so now seems a good time to get going again).

2. Start a new course (possibly cheating as I’m already enrolled, but I’m excited to get going)

3. Finish reading or read ten new books

4. Get a tattoo (I’ve got the design and the gift voucher…just need them to be allowed to open again)

5. Start writing a book

6. Use my DSLR to take forty special photos

7. Bake forty things for fun (could do with being allowed to feed them to other people too.)

8. Complete four years of photo books

9. Clean out four rooms

10. Learn a new piece on the piano

11. Start learning Welsh

12. Hike somewhere new

13. Put our little house on the market (and hopefully sell it!)

14. Write down forty prayers

15. Write forty thank you letters

16. Do a four week healthy eating plan

17. Have 8 date nights (going out would be a bonus!)

18. Have 8 family nights in

19. Try a new craft

20. Climb a hill to watch the sunrise

21. Climb a hill to watch the sunset

22. Visit a new beach

23. Start walking the Welsh coastal path

24. Go on a bike ride

25. Write a will (we said we’d do it when we went to matching panel for Micah 3.5 years ago…)

26. Save £X per month

27. Get a passport (Liam looked nervous at this one)

28. Book a holiday (should probably get him a passport too)

29. Write letters to my children

30. Donate forty things to a charity shop

31. Crochet and donate 20 premature baby hats for hospitals

32. Twin a toilet

33. Buy from four new Independent businesses (always happy for recommendations)

34. Pay for fourteen suspended coffees

35. Donate forty items to food bank

36. Plant four bee attracting plants

37. Send 8 surprise parcels

38. Research and support a local charity/cause (again, recommendations welcome)

39. Sponsor an international Cleft Palate surgery through Operation Smile

40. Raise £400 for charities (split between BHF and Barnados)

Writing this list was enjoyable and focussing, and really helped my mood going into the new year. I’m not normally one for New Years resolutions, but the thought having some goals and purposes in the middle of lockdown life certainly cheered me up! I highly recommend doing it, whatever age you’ll be turning in 2021. No doubt there’ll be curve balls and unexpected moments, but if I don’t manage to bake all the cakes I’ll be ok with that. It’s more a motivation to keep looking for ways to make every day count. I’ll keep you updated on my progress, and I’ll be setting up a justgiving account for the fundraiser. I’ve got until August 18th 2021, so please, join me for the ride!

‘So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.’ – Psalm 90:12

Birth days.

~ savouringmydays ~ Leave a comment

Liam says my mum gives presents if someone sneezes. Actually, that’s not true, because loud sneezes are one of the things that make her really cross. But still, gifts are her love language, and I’m the same. So it was already an interesting dynamic that the man I met and love and married shares his birthday with the day St Valentine met his untimely end. Who gets gifts? Do we just throw out the commercial holiday made to bring more money to greedy supermarkets, or do I get him two gifts and he still sneaks out for flowers/chocolates/wine on February 13th (or 14th…or 15th)? In previous years, we’ve gone with the second option.

Until two years ago, when on this day, we were gifted another Valentine. I’m not willing to take responsibility for poor planning on this one. Granted, our family planning historically has looked like more family and less planning, but on this one we can’t take any credit. I’ve already talked about his arrival to our family on here, so suffice it to say that we had very little idea we’d be sharing our meal for £15 with a tiny newborn that year. But that day changed our family dynamic once again, with a new little one to be grateful for. But what do birthdays look like when you weren’t the one who gave birth?

The very idea of a birthday is to celebrate someone’s birth, their arrival into the world. And, like my mum, I’m definitely up for that. I love giving gifts, I love making that person feel special. And I’m also very nostalgic. I love remembering dates and days and talking memories. But the truth is, that for a lot of people, birthdays often bring a measure of pain in the memories too.

As a student midwife, I quickly learned that the movie idealised birth story, where the perfectly made-up mother with gentle devoted partner pops out a beautiful completely round-headed forceps-mark free baby who is immediately bundled into a pure white crocheted blanket is just that – a story. Birth involves pain. For many people, the pain of labour is put behind them, and they embrace life with a newborn. But I think for possibly the majority of people, there is history that comes with them into the labour room, and that will go home with them too.

In those rooms, I saw mothers who had waited for this day for many many years. They brought fear and anxiety into the delivery suite, and a brave hope that their dreams might at last come true. I saw mothers whose tears of joy were mingled with tears of loss – they’d lost their own mother, or father, a previous baby, or the father of their child, and the birth of a newborn was an intense reminder of that person they desperately wished was still a part of their life. I saw mothers afraid of who their partner was, but they were birthing his baby and clinging to the ideal that he would be who said he could be. I saw mothers who were children themselves, with their own mothers nervously stroking their hair. I saw mothers who hadn’t anticipated this baby, and didn’t know how they felt, how they would bond, if they even wanted to take it home. I saw mothers whose baby was born, and it wasn’t the perfect baby they had dreamed of, it would have needs they didn’t know if they could manage, and their world came crashing down. I saw mothers who knew the baby they would birth would never breathe. Their baby had left earth before it arrived, and those heartbreaking deliveries were sombre with intense, raw grief. I saw mothers whose baby was born far too soon, and they were afraid for its life. And I saw mothers whose baby would be whisked away, because it was too unsafe to send them home to the chaos and abuse and trauma there.

What I learned in those rooms, through my own experiences, and through being privileged to witness so many others, is that often the words ‘happy birthday’ are an oxymoron. Often a birth day is not pure joy and elation. Even in the births of my first three children, I carry buried pain alongside beautiful memories, whole stories in themselves. For my youngest three children, their birthdays are mingled with huge loss. Their loss of safety, of childhood innocence, of the only world they’d known, and the loss of the mother who gave birth to them. I can’t even imagine what goes through her mind on those days. And for me there’s sadness too – all the first moments missed, and all the pain I wish I could have saved them from. But this is life in a broken world, a whirling mess of joy and heartache, a see-sawing of hurt and healing, and with every birth delivered in pain there is promise of hope. A new life, a new story to be written. A new person gifted to this world for a reason, capable of being loved and held and dreamed for, and of loving and holding and dreaming.

I think it’s important to acknowledge the whole story, even if only to myself. I know I’m not alone in these days of mixed emotions. When we celebrate birthdays, I’m not pretending that all birth days are happy days. And I’m not trying to patch over a hard story. But I am celebrating this person. This gift of life. This day that marks another year on earth for them, another year of their unique personality and character and skills changing the world and the people around them because of their individual design. Despite the minor challenges of the two cake-making, double gift-buying, ‘where do I hang all the cards?’ issues related to the double birthday, I feel so honoured that we get to celebrate this little boy. People sometimes tell us that the children are lucky to have us. I don’t think lucky is the right word for such a start to life, but I feel incredibly privileged to have him, to be the one to wrap his presents, light his candles, and listen to him walking around the house still singing ‘happy birthday’ to himself, four days later.

As for Valentine’s Day, I still sneaked it in, with heart confetti on the dinner table and a chocolate for each child. I’m okay with letting it go for myself these days- I’m just hoping for double presents on my birthday to make up for it…