Cloudy Day

Today is my birthday. I am 32 years old. My 30′s suddenly seem so . . . inevitable.

Normally, I’m the one to celebrate my birthday the loudest. A birthday is your own special holiday, a day the world became a little bit different because of your existence. Every birth has a story, a history, the artifacts of which you carry with you every day of your life.

***

It’s been an unseasonably wet and cold winter in Florida. Where we normally take sunny days for granted, we now remark on the days when the gray skies part to give us a glimpse of what is being obscured.

A cold front, and the rain it bears, kept us stuck in the house again today. The girls were losing it. I was losing it. Not bothering to change the girls out of their pajamas, I took them out to the front yard.

We sat, the three of us, on an old porch swing by the front door, a swing I’ve used maybe three times in the past five years. The simple motion — back, forth, back, forth — invoked instant calm, the memory of rocking in the womb.

The wind picked up. The girls got down. Without hesitation, Althea buried her feet into a pile of wet leaves, sitting down to squish the earth and twigs between her fingers.

Elise picked up handfuls of leaves and trotted around the front yard, shrieking with delight.

Both girls stuffed piles of dirt into their mouths, an unapologetic exploration of their ever-expanding world.

Builds immunity, as our 93-year-old, World War II-vet neighbor would say.

***

In some tiny corner of my mind, I mourn. I long. My daughters’ lives evoke these feelings. I don’t embrace these feelings. I don’t hide them either. It’s just a dormant seed that I do not plant. But in fleeting, gray moments, I mourn. I long.

I mourn because my daughters will know so much about their lives — of their father, their future siblings, of each other, of the day they were born.

Things I don’t know about myself.

Much about my birth day is a mystery to me. I know that I was born in a small town nestled in a valley in the Pyrenees mountains of northern Spain. I know that my mother did a natural child birth. According to my Spanish birth certificate, I was born at the vague hour of “noon.” I don’t know how much I weighed, how long I was, how active and alert I was.

I don’t know what I looked like. I will never know what I looked like.

And so (teensy tiny nebulous little thought that I do not nurture) I mourn the irrevocable loss of my infancy. I long for knowing.

***

This year, my parties and presents and over-indulgences are overshadowed. My desire to celebrate my day has dissipated. Today is now something more. I share the day of my birth with my my children, my whole family.

These are my gifts this year: my daughters, my husband, our family. Love. Cloudy days. Playing in the dirt.

As it should be.