Happy birthday to me?

I have a complicated relationship with my birthday. Not because I’m getting older, that part is fine with me. My struggle is that I have no idea how to celebrate my own birthday. I’ve NEVER known how to celebrate my birthday. I know how to be grateful I am alive, but birthdays are more than that to me. To me, a birthday is a day for you to celebrate the existence of someone you love. To consider them and take the time to articulate, “I’m glad you are here, the world is better because you are in it.”

My birthday for me feels less like a celebration and more like untangling myself from deep aches of the past. As a child, I remember waking up every year on my birthday and wondering if anyone would remember; they always did, but I always assumed I’d be forgotten and struggled to regulate the internal emotions of intensely hoping that someone would celebrate me paired with the fear that no one would.

As a young adult, I spent a lot of years alone. Because I didn’t know how to make connections to people, I never really had friends. When it was my birthday, I would make my way home because there I knew I would find people who were grateful I was alive. But even “home” became divided with one half counting me as nothing.

And so my birthday feels a lot like standing in front of a room full of people not knowing what to do with my hands. Awkward because I’m suppose to celebrate, but instead I find myself working to be internally convinced that it really is ok that I exist.

So today I am choosing to be grateful for the people who love me and for the 6 beautiful humans that make visible the fact that my life brought something good into the world.

But I’ll still be grateful when it’s over. I’m much more comfortable thanking the Lord for my daily life and leaving the obligation that I celebrate another year of my existence behind for the next 365 days.

Ordinary

Sometimes it helps to say it out loud
to confront it as it is;
to look it in the eyes and stare it down
thus proving that it is not more powerful
than the decision I get to make in light of it.

I realized recently that I say these words
frequently
“I’m not really good at anything.”
I usually follow it up with encouragement,
“but I’m just going to do my best.”
It doesn’t necessarily feel degrading,
but it doesn’t feel healthy either.
It reeks of a tool that trains me to accept
as it seeks
to cover my pain with contentment.

I can trace it back,
to the event where this phrase was birthed:
When asked directly,
the one person I ever wanted
to be proud of me searched
but could find nothing nice to say of me.
I didn’t even realize there was someone
I wanted to make proud,
until I didn’t.

I don’t blame them, really,
I’ve never been the kind of person
who catches the light…
I’m the kind you have to unbury.

As I looked my declaration in the eye today
I could see that though it started somewhere
it was reaffirmed again and again
in the safe place of the past.
Rejection had a way of following me…
unacceptable and unwanted were sentiments that plagued
me from childhood,
but there was one place that made it bearable—
one place of belonging
one place where I believed I stood
in desirable light;
where others chose to see me and
to believe I was worth loving,
and it put the averted eyes in their place.

It’s no one’s fault, really,
I was born into a field of extraordinary beauty
but didn’t add to it…
because some people were made to behold
not to be beheld,
and I'm the lucky one.

It’s not that I don’t find joy in
my ordinary,
it is just that I find myself sad
that my safe place has lost
its desire for it.

Memorial Day Reflections

It gets me every time; the 3-Volley Salute followed by Taps. The sound of the first shot fired transports me back to the front row at my brother’s graveside service; encompassed by grief as I fix my eyes on a coffin containing his uniform-clad body. The shots that follow reverberate through my heart bringing back to life the places of pain that over time have grown dormant; shudders running through me from head to toe. And when finally there is silence, the gentle sound of Taps fills the air, as if wishing to soothe the abruptness of the pain that was just thrust upon me; a haunting accompaniment to my falling tears. 

Today as this tradition came to a close, I felt as these memories flashed before me—of a coffin lowering into a grave, of the feeling of dirt filling my shoes as it fell from the shovel while I put dirt onto his open grave, of the sobs that came in crushing waves breaking out of my chest with overwhelming intensity—gratitude. Time passes. Details and images in my mind grow fuzzy. But traditions like these take these memories, frozen in time I leave further and further behind me, and brings them for a moment into my today. They remind me that even if things get harder to remember, this fact remains: I am a marked woman. Marked by the life of my brother Noah, marked by the love I had for and received from him, and marked by the losses I know because he is no longer here.

It is Miscarriage and Infant Loss Awareness Month

My Mother Love
©10-5-18 Hannah McLean

it’s a lonely grief
to lose a child 

who has never breathed the air

around me

who has never occupied the space 

outside me

who has never entered into any heart

besides my own

because my Mother Love

is different than another love

it begins the moment

that I know my child exists

as though the heart had already

prepared a place

for them to occupy

one that will now remain 
unfilled

because that space is meant

to contain a lifetime

of moments shared

but will forever echo

with the emptiness 
of what never was

the first miscarriage
was accompanied by eager expectation
anticipated fulfillment of prayer and promise
6 days of knowing, praising, delighting
but all he had was 6 weeks inside me
before I felt the pain of my womb as it snuffed out his tiny life
and of my empty arms

the second miscarriage
was far more recent and far more messy
at 12 weeks they looked inside
my growing center
and found that the heart was no longer beating
for nearly 2 weeks I walked around
a fragile tomb
waiting for my baby to emerge
an excruciating wait
ending in a pool of blood
that nearly drained me of my own life
I gently washed that tiny child
and buried him under
my freshly planted linden tree
and looked down once more into my empty arms

it's a lonely grief
because no one got to love
those babies
like I did
and the expectation is
that the grief be as small
as the life that was lost
but that is not
the measure of my Mother Love