By You celebrate your children’s birthdays, your husband’s, and your own birthday, but do you also celebrate you on the day you gave birth?
I do. Which means I have 6 extra birth-days a year, and I deserve a bit of celebration myself on every one of them.
15 years ago today I gave birth to child #6 (not in my plans, but then neither was #1, or #5, all girls by the way; the ones we planned turned out to be boys…)
I was 47. We went dancing that weekend, because, why not celebrate? And get this party started! Our oldest daughter was pregnant with our first grandchild, who was born five months later. She went dancing with us that night.
Today, on the day I gave birth to my third daughter, I celebrated with a spa-bath (triangular tub, lavendar bath salts, time to relax and breathe deep), in the morning. In the afternoon, I gave myself extra reading time. This evening I drank a glass of wine with the hub. Simple things, but I feel grateful.
We looked at pictures from 15 years ago with Lily, who came over for birthday brunch with her little sister. They put on make-up and did nails, then we worked on a sewing project. Being together, gathering, even in small ways, certainly feels like celebration these days.
And I wrote. Writing is somewhere between a challenge and an art, but it always feels celebratory when I do it, when I’m done–not exactly like giving birth, but a bit like it, bringing ideas formed of words to life on a page, then sending them out into the world.
Today also happens to be my half-birthday. Arielle was born on May 1, May Day, exactly six months after my 47th birthday, so our birthdays are each other’s half birthdays, which is kind of fun.
I’ll be writing more memoir in May- May is Motherhood Memoir Month. I’ve gotten away from memoir as my main focus this past year-and-a-half as I’ve focused on my novel. But the novel is actually a created journal, or make-believe memoir. It’s also a sketchbook. More to come on that… but meanwhile I’ll be posting prompts and writing. I hope you’ll join me over at https://mamomemo.com/2022/05/may-mamomemo-is-here/#