THOUGHTS ON BIRTHDAYS, FINDING YOURSELF IN GRAND FORKS & DEFEATED TABOULI

Defeated is the only way that I can describe it. I descended our brown shag carpet stairs to find her tiny body slumped over an upside down bowl on the floor, in front of our fridge. Tears spilling out between the fingers that covered her face. Her entire heart poured into the mission of making this healthy meal for an unsupportive meat and potatoes crowd.

To a young me, it was the first time that the word defeat ever had a face.

Yesterday was my birthday, and birthdays are wrapped in strange and unpleasant thoughts. ‘You’re not who you thought you’d be by now’, ‘You could have been a better parent', ‘This is it! It’s all downhill from here!’, ‘I wish I hadn’t of cut my hair’, ‘Next week I start that diet….’ ‘Wait, was I supposed to make a list of all the ways I’d be different by my next birthday!?’

These last years have brought defeats ugly face to my door; a broken masked liar. It tells you that you’re finished. It tells you it’s time to give up. But yet, here you still stand. As long as there is breath, there is life. And life brings hope.

As you get older, your goals become more prominent. Last year, I hit a midlife crisis, although I don't think that I’d call it a mid-life crisis, it felt more like an awakening. An undeniable gravitational pull to become a stronger version of myself. To look back on the parts of my life that I’ve felt the most accepted and light and start hoarding those feelings within the uttermost center of myself so that I’d never lose them. As I enter the downward half of my life, it’s time to take these things more seriously. There’s no ‘In 10 years, I’ll deal with this, or ‘in a year maybe I’ll consider quitting such and such’. It’s now or never.

When my son Kai was 8, he and I went for one of our nightly walks with our dog Finn. I remember telling him that I hoped he would take the time to invest in himself when he graduated from high school. I told him that it would be great if he would travel and that it was important for him to find himself. To an 8 year old, he was able to understand the idea behind the concept, but his world was so small at that time, that his excited response to my advice was ‘Maybe I can find myself in Grand Forks!’

I would hope that my child would choose to find himself in the Palms of the Amazon, in a treehouse in Thailand, down the cobble stone streets of some small Italian town but for that day, in his 8 year old mind, Grand Forks would have to do.

I wish I could protect those I loved from defeat. I wish I could shelter them from the slumped, enervated picture that etched itself into my young brain the day that my mother dropped the tabouli. But for now, another year older I turn, full of goals that most likely won’t be met.

In a world so full of love without enough to go around, all you can really do is your best, or maybe we all just need a little time to find ourselves in Grand Forks.

*Enjoy ‘A World So Full Of Love’ (Roger Miller) performed by Shakey Graves - Best paired with a trip to Grand Forks, unachievable goals and a bowl of floor tabouli.*