birthday eve

I ordered myself a new dress today. ohhhh yes I did. To add to the ever growing pile of clothes I keep ordering that don’t fit me that I stuff into the back of my closet, still in their mailing envelopes, that I promptly forget about while I go hard at a bag of crunchy cheetos?

No.

Not this time, suckers. I ordered this dress to WEAR. Definitely not when it arrives. Maybe not in a few weeks…but definitely next summer and I am definitely going to feel awesome in it, and I definitely can’t wait. I’m amped. I’m ready. I cannot wait for Wednesday!

So why wait, right? It’s a ‘clean slate’ thing. I’m prepping. I’m going to do it right this time. I’m all in. And god, I am SO excited…..

Tomorrow is it. The 39^th anniversary of my first full trip around the sun…my 40^th birthday. It sounds so awful when you put it that way, doesn’t it? Well, don’t panic. I’m going for another round of Botox next week. It’s all good. (not kidding.) But The ‘tox can only do so much. It’s my insides that need a revamp….It’s my heart and soul and attitude and brain that need rewiring and mojo. And I know that. I can’t put a bandaid on a gaping wound and expect it to heal properly.

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2003. 

I turned 30 in “my room” in my mom’s apartment just south of South Pasadena, California. I have “my room” in quotes because I guess it had ceased belonging to me when I moved to New York a year and a half earlier. That strange trip lasted all of 12 months and I returned home in February of my 30^th year to find the room that had been mine completely amassed with boxes and piles and stacks of things that weren’t mine.

I’ve since learned that hoarding is an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder & emerges when one starts to feel a loss of control of their own life. My mom had filled her room to the brim with things and moved into “my” room with more things. All the things. So I settled in, as best as I could, thankful to have a place to come home to and my mom back in my arms again. She was the other half of my soul and always will be. She was diagnosed with Stage 3c Ovarian Cancer 3 months after I moved back home.

So that’s how my 30s started. With my best friend, the love of my life, and the most important person in my whole world in the fight of her life, and not winning. I got to sit in the waiting room at the hospital while she underwent an 8 hour surgery to remove a tumor the size of a grapefruit. I got to hold her hand while she sat in the chemo chair getting IV bags of poison pumped into her fragile, sick body. I accompanied her to countless appointments, kissed her bald head, tried my hardest to put on a brave face and keep the violent heartbreak and rage I was suffering at bay.

I got married when I was 33. She walked me down the aisle and she died while I held her hand almost exactly one month later. That was and will forever be the worst day of my life. I promptly lost all grounding. I was floating around with no anchor. The world expected me to be a glowing, elated newlywed so I wore a mask to please them and pretended to be ok but inside I was dying. I’m still dying. And I will never feel that anyone has understood the immense pain of that heartbreak. And for that I am eternally bitter because the day my mom died, she took the old me with her. I feel like everyone (myself included) keeps expecting the old me to come back one day, happy and carefree, but she ain’t coming back. I’m angry that my husband never got to be married to the old me, because, while I’m not claiming she was perfect, she was certainly more emotionally balanced. The whole of her emotional reserves not depleted to the point that no patience was left for anything else and in the void, apathy towards every single thing. I’m outraged that my son didn’t get to have her for a mother, because she was fun, and she was happy, and she was patient. And that is what he deserves. Instead, he’s been left with a shell of a mother who has been putting on a show. He is too amazing for that. And I am trying. I’m trying so hard. I just don’t know who this person is. It’s a strange thing to try and explain.

So then my awesome 30s have also contained a move across the country where I have no friends or family, an extremely ill fitting and unfulfilling job, a bout with Post Partum Depression and Anxiety which brought me to my knees and from which I have still not been able to fully recover, a crash in the housing market which wiped out the entirety of any equity we had hoped to build in our first investment and basically put us underwater for good, 2 years of near poverty level living due to the price of daycare costing more than a fucking mortgage (this is a literal statement.)…..

Those blessings I promised I would count?

My 30s gave me Ben. 

If there were adequate words to explain my love for him, how grateful and thankful and humbled I am by him, the only way I could explain it is kind of to say if it were possible, which it’s not, but if it were possible, the joy and fulfillment and awe he has brought into my life could effortlessly eclipse every hardship and heartbreak this decade has brought me. Effortlessly and entirely. He is just that good.

Unfortunately, we don’t get the chance to go tit for tat in life like that and the things that scarred me and hurt me and broke me are still there and the absolute elation of having such a perfect little being gifted to me is unfathomably awesome, but it is also not relative.

That brings us to today. Birthday Eve. Is it any wonder why I am more than ready to turn the page and close the door on this chapter of my life?

My 40s are going to bring me serenity & peace & happiness & calm & adventure & health & vitality & inspiration.  For no reason more than the simple fact that I. AM. READY.