Happy, Happy, Happy Birthday Bunny BOOOYYYYYYY!!

That is probably one of the funniest scenes from that movie, everything else is sad.

So today I am 28. I am sad and scared, happy and excited and young and old. There is something on the inside of me that is in high anticipation of something grand and wonderful for my day, but I recognize that it doesn’t happen that way anymore and it makes my anticipation of no use, which is confusing. I really want to be little again with a big pool party and all my friends invited, a cookie cake and a Coke-a-Cola theme to boot. I want the Barbie cake with the Barbie stuck in the top and the dress is the cake. I want to go back to Virginia to celebrate with all my friends and have a McDonald’s Playground party: the tons of toys, the smiles and pictures, themed party favors to give away with love and laughter of family and friends. No one is here. There are phone calls from people far away and an office gift of Bath & Body works. There was a cake with candles from my boss with flowers because she knows how much of little girl I still am and is so loving and kind and gracious to love me on my special day. I am so grateful for my boss. She is exactly what I need. I try to pretend that flowers and a ten dollar hurrah are just perfect, but it isn’t. I don’t really want to be 28. It feels too much like a birthday an adult would have. There is a dialogue from one of my all time favorite movies that goes something like this:

“Are we going to be exactly like our parents when we grow up?”
“Not me, not ever.”
“I don’t want to grow up”
“Who cares?”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“When you grow up your heart dies.”

No one tells you the secrets of adulthood, but what I have learned is that there is one cardinal rule: you can never be a child. No one tell you how much that is going to hurt. There is something about this birthday that makes me cry. I don’t know if it is the absence of loved ones or the lack of importance of the day or if it is just that I have been growing up so much in the past four years and now with such an insignificant number, I am the adult. I am doing things like “nesting” and paying bills and driving cars, making decisions for a future life and somehow, that callous that separates me from the child me, grows and I become a little more disheartened. There is no way to go back. There is no way to stay in that child’s eye and maintain that same blissful, wishful happiness. It doesn’t exist anymore. Grief is what the books and my Dad call it. “Don’t give me any grief,” he says. I can see why he has been telling me that. Heartache hurts. I am sure that there is some reason for celebration amidst all this depressed talk. A day of birth is one of celebration. My parents didn’t even tell me the story of my birth today, that tells me how adult I have become: you were born before they allowed dads back in the delivery room and there was a Philippine nurse who came out to get him in the waiting room; I didn’t hear her at first because of her accent being so heavy; “Mr. Glean, Mr. Glean,” she said; “Mr. Glean you have a dawtaw, you have a dawtaw Mr. Glean!”; you were born at 6:23 PM. (Or maybe it was am, can’t remember) Everyone keeps asking me what am I going to do for my birthday? I think, what I will do is just make it through the day and hopefully the upswing of this day will hit me.