by Christine Nelson Karki
My son, Deven, and I share a birthday, which, although a fun coincidence, isn’t really that odd. The fact that our birthday is April 1- April Fool’s Day- does make it a bit more fun. Obviously, this year our birthday was celebrated much differently than we’d planned. But, if I’m being honest, it was a pretty great day. Yet when people asked me how the day had been, I found myself kind of apologizing for enjoying it: “Well, it’s actually been pretty nice.” Or, since I received 100% more FaceTime birthday wishes than ever before (i.e. I’ve never had a FaceTime birthday call before), I’d see myself making a sort of “eeek” face when talking about the day. The face you make when you’re about to say something that might ruffle feathers or go against the grain and you want to ease the delivery.
It didn’t feel right or ok to fully enjoy the downtime we were forced to take on our birthday and the forced family time we had all day. But I really did enjoy it. Had life been as we had planned it to be, on our birthday I would have had to work, Deven would have been in school all day and likely would have had baseball practice that evening – basically, the day would have been a perfectly lovely but normal, typical day. Nothing necessarily special with no real quality time together. But due to current circumstances, we were forced to rethink the day entirely. I got up early and did my weekly grocery shopping, I went to Costco to pick up some items for my parents (which, sidebar, I was beyond thrilled to do, as this was the first time they took me up on my offer to help them stay the eff home! Said with love, of course). There was a socially-distant visit from my best friend and her husband who serenaded Dev & me from our driveway – a full rendition of Happy Birthday for each of us, complete with different percussive instruments for each ditty, another socially-distant visit from my parents where I was able to give them their Costco stuff (all rubbed down with Clorox wipes) and they gave Dev his birthday present (something he’s wanted for a long time and was super excited to get) and they brought me some b-day treats too- a dozen purple roses, some People magazines and… the kicker… LATEX GLOVES!!! Gang, right now, those gloves are the holy grail of b-day presents, considering we’re currently stocked up on toilet paper. The day continued with lots of time hanging with my hubs and Deven watching fun TV, the aforementioned numerous FaceTime b-day calls and several birthday texts and Facebook messages throughout the day. And the day ended with a wonderful Zoom b-day party with dear friends and cocktails. A really lovely day. Under typical conditions would this have been my ideal birthday… not exactly. But given the atypical situation we’re in, I can’t imagine it being better. Aside from not being able to hug those that visited, the day was great! But I still didn’t feel like I could tell people that I really enjoyed it because it just didn’t seem like I should.
(At this point I feel like I need to be very clear: NO ONE made me feel like I shouldn’t enjoy my birthday. Quite the contrary! I felt that way due to, ya know, everything going on in the world. How can I feel comfortable expressing my happiness and gratitude with all the fear and sadness literally everyone on the planet is feeling?)
Then the other day when I was scrolling through Twitter and I saw something from @DrMarisaGFranco, who I don’t follow so I can’t give you much context to this, but apparently she just got a new apartment and was struggling with her excitement about it. Her tweet read, “…it felt tone deaf to celebrate anything. Until I realized, joy doesn’t undermine suffering; it softens the blow of it.” Man, I loved how she phrased that! And- poof!- it felt like permission was granted to feel a little happiness.
These times are gobsmackingly bonkers and we all need to cope in any and every way that we can. But I hope that if you are able and fortunate enough to experience joy and/or excitement during all this, that you allow yourself to feel it. Some random person on Twitter has deemed it appropriate. And we all know if it was on Twitter, it must be true. 😉
Wishing you health and sunshine, gang!