Dread

Sooo... this weekend is finally here... it's one I have been dreading for a long time...I always knew it would happen eventually... but not this soon... I mean it was bound to happen, but I didn't think I would have to face it for another twenty or thirty years....when my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and we learned it was inoperable... I knew this would be sooner than I ever expected...

34 years ago from this Friday, my mom celebrated her 23rd birthday...and she celebrated in the hospital... because she had delivered a baby... me... as the story goes...mom was not a pleasant woman during her pregnancy with me. I was one of those "oops" babies... the doctor told her that she was having twins, maybe triplets... but it was just me...mom always swore she had carried me for a year... that I was due in February, but stayed put until May...but when I decided to arrive, it happened fast, so fast that the cigar smoking doctor came into the hospital, put his cigar in an ashtray, delivered me, walked out and picked up the same smoldering cigar and left... and when I was born, my face was so squished up that the doctor wondered if I was blind...and I was colossal... I held the record at the hospital for a while as the biggest baby born there...

Every birthday since then... we have been together...together... we had developed some birthday traditions... at the conclusion of time spent together that was close to our birthday... we would hug each other goodbye and acknowledge that it was the last hug we would give each other at whatever age we were... every year since my adulthood, we have gotten together on our birthday or soon thereafter... sometimes meeting halfway between her house and mine for lunch or dinner...and then there was our annual competition... we each tried to be the first one to wish the other one a happy birthday...which in recent years would play out by whichever one of us answered the phone call would say Happy Birthday instead of hello... winning the 'I said it first' competition... when I was really young, mom would make birthday cakes... kind of fancy ones... I remember one of those round cakes with a Barbie doll sticking out of the center...the cake doubled as Barbie's skirt... but as I got older mom decided that it was her birthday too and she was done making fancy cakes... done making birthday cakes period... so we began buying Pepperidge Farms cakes as our birthday cake... there were also the extra special years when out birthday also fell on mother's day... I've always loved that we shared a birthday and felt that it made us somehow more special...it feels even more special now...


It's been almost three weeks since mom died....and I knew for a while now... or at least highly suspected... that mom wouldn't be here this year... on our birthday... for mother's day... but knowing that it was going to come... hasn't made it easier...hasn't made seeing the gigantic mother's day cards that fill the aisles any easier...

"The firsts are hard..." so many people have told me that... the first mother's day... the first Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc... the first birthday of my life that I don't share with my mom....that I don't have a mom... it sucks...

Waking up Friday is going to be hard...facing that day... facing the weekend...

I've thought a lot about how I wanted to spend my birthday for a long time... and knew I would not be going to work... I contemplated getting up in the morning and heading to the ocean for the day...I thought about not getting out of bed that day and ignoring the outside world... and I still think that idea has merit... but instead... my dad and I are heading to see my sister and her family for the weekend... I invited us down... because in some way I hope that it will distract me from how sad I feel about missing a shared birthday...

I hope it works... and I am scared it won't.