Year By Year

An exercise in remembering past birthdays

I remember…

Sitting in the backseat of the car, my small hand out the window waving excitedly to cousins and siblings running after us in our very own tiny parade to celebrate me turning three. I can’t decipher if it’s a real memory, or the kind you create when you’ve been told a story by your parents enough that your imagination has logged it as a memory. Either way, I am beaming. I am wearing a birthday crown. I feel giddy as others cheer my name.

Wearing a dripping wet, green tie-dyed one piece swimsuit, I scoot in beside my friends at the wooden picnic table of Montgomery Swim and Tennis club to share in a cookout lunch, a black choker necklace donning my neck. I’m probably 7. I am free, I am happy. Summer birthdays are truly the best there is, right?

Eleven felt big – My golden year. Soon to enter the fifth grade – this would be my year. I spent a week away at Camp Ernst for the first time that summer. I felt then, and still do now, most myself in a t-shirt and shorts. With a ball cap on my head and bug spray on my legs, I remember the taste of sweat on my upper lip, seeing the portable fan spinning beside my top bunk bed, and feeling my heart pounding against my chest as I sprinted across the lawn with the flag in hand to win camp wide Capture The Flag for our team.

It’s 2010 and I run three miles south, hard packed sand under foot, then realize I have to go back the same distance to get back to Palmetto Dunes. Dreaming of my soon to be first day of my freshman year of high school while listening to my ipod nano play, “You take a deep breath and you walk through the doors, It's the morning of your very first day.” At fifteen I ran to a soundtrack that put words to my hopes – that someone would tell me they loved me sometime in the next four years of high school – to see me and choose me. A few weeks later a group of girls from school went to the sold out Rascal Flatts concert at Riverbend and the next day I woke to find photos on Facebook and a text message reading “we didn’t think you’d want to come”. I wish I could hold the crying girl in my corner bedroom and tell her about the women who rang in 30 with me last night - the same ones who feed my family when we bring home a new baby and answer the phone when I’m in tears overwhelmed and listen to my deepest fears without flinching. To tell that girl fifteen years ago, you’ll find your people.

“Twenty Two Truths About My God” I write at the top of the paper while sitting outside a coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado on my twenty-second birthday. I list out praises I know to be true as a breeze rustles the pages of my journal. I’m living out west for a summer design internship and spend my birthday evening alone, but content. I hike the flatirons and enjoy the companionship of the holy spirit, for the first time experiencing the reality of “what a friend I have in Jesus.” I pick up a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Dairy Free Ice Cream on the way home and plop myself on the couch, ending the day with two episodes of Parenthood before retiring to bed for the night.

I pour maple syrup over pancakes my nephew made for me - in the shape of 26 - and sip black coffee surrounded by family on the back deck of Ray’s Place at Norris Lake. I dance and sing while wake surfing behind the boat, briefly closing my eyes, feeling the wind on my outstretched arms as the air winds its way through my fingers, the warm sun beating against my face, and I welcome what God has for me this year – the year I would grow and change as a small human is formed within me, making me a mom to the sweetest, freest, most darling human I know.

And today, on the morning of my thirtieth birthday, I sit at the nearby Blue Ash Starbucks nursing my free iced blonde vanilla latte as I type on my laptop beside strangers. A few runaway tears escape as I recall memories of past birthdays, memories of past versions of myself, memories of past demonstrations of God’s faithfulness to me. I am comfortable in my skin, more so than I’ve ever been at least. As fears and doubts and insecurities inevitably arise these days, they do not swallow me whole like they used to. Rather, I acknowledge them, hold them out at arms length and turn them around to examine them asking, “where did you come from? What is your source?” And they lead me back to a previous memory of pain or joy or impact and the spirit of God kindly helps me process that experience in light of his love for me. What a remarkable capacity we have as humans – to remember our lives, to retrieve past experiences, to reminisce on the good, to reflect on the hard – to grow.