it is my birthday (period).

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It’s my birthday.

I’m pretty stoked. I should start by telling you that I started out with a bang in the birthday department. My parties when I was a little babeh got increasingly more awesome until they started being pretty anti-climactic around 14.

Once my mom had 15 eight-year-olds crowding her living room in neatly laid out sleeping bags where we all watched a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat. How cute are rabbits? We all thought. Until the little hopper was leaving little nerdlets around our sleeping bags and one of us realized too late, “What’s this?” Screams. Many, many screams.

I might have been nine-or-ten when my mom packed six of my closest friends together and carted us to the city where the new American Girl Place was. It’s not just about dolls, if you didn’t partake in the phenomenon. The store was filled with antique ice-cream parlors, adorable stores, a delish restaurant and a photo studio for you and your dolls (sounds so much less cool now that I’m sharing it). That may have been my last awesome birthday party. Everyone was getting meaner…including me…we froze a girl’s training bra that night and I could tell my mom was concerned about the effect of group think on me.

My birthdays have since involved being surrounded by close friends and family – the way it should be. Usually I get to pick the movie (not always, boooo!) and my mom cooks my favorite dinner or we pick a restaurant together.

There’s something you should know about me: I get really excited about birthdays. Not just my own…no birthday gift has ever kept its “surprise!” status within a month of the date…But I started getting excited about my birthday in December. I’m 23. It’s embarrassing. I even try to force down any feelings of excitement – it’s just the day I was born, there’s not gonna be a big party this year, RELAX YOU NERD YOU’RE MAKING ME LOOK BAD! Well, I don’t yell at myself, but you know what I mean.

I came across this entry from a blog-ghost from my past – the forgotten MySpace blog – about my 20th birthday (three years ago) where I was apparently reading far too much Sylvia Plath and questioning the reason of my existence. It’s okay, 20-year-old Lizzie…it’s just a birthday.

There is something strange about a birthday. You’re celebrating the day you came tearing through your mother’s hips and took your first placenta-filled breath in this somewhat empty world. Newborns don’t know what this earth is like. If they did, I’m sure most of them would have yelled “Put me back,” crawled back to the womb and stuck their recently-formed thumbs in their mouths and just chilled for the rest of eternity. But mothers and doctors know that life has plenty of wonderful things to offer, so they yank the baby out by the head, slap it’s bottom and cut it’s belly button in their first “birth day” celebration of pain and confusion.

There’s nothing so beautiful as a newborn to everyone around them, however. Everyone else is celebrating life and beauty. Life is like this, I’ve decided. When you are feeling filled with pain and desperation, the world knows it’s something beautiful, it’s a celebration of a step forward, progress.

So it’s my birthday.

Twenty years ago today, I was a confused, blood-covered sea-monkey. Happy Birthday.

Pfft. Drama queen.

Well, this year I’m pumped. I’m embarrassingly, nerdily stoked to celebrate another year, however anti-climactic the number 23 might be. I’ll probably jump around all day singing “Hey-Hey-Hey-It’s-My-Birthday!” and I don’t want anyone to try to stop me.

Image found via Pinterest from Flickr.

Tagged as: happy birthday