It’s not sugar crafting and gift wrapping that woke me up with that anxiety that creeps in if you wake between 3 and 5. It’s something else.
It’s the overwhelming burden of being a Mum. Pinterest is good for hacks on cake decorating and gift making: existential birthday angst? Not so much.
Parenting is so strange, isn’t it? It is hardly a condition unique to you. It’s something most people experience. Yet it is an experience that is so intensely personal that you sometimes feel nobody else can ever understand the length and breadth of your feelings, your delights, your fears.
How many women gave birth in the room in the hospital where all 3 of our children were born? How many of them can ever truly understand my feelings of holding my babies in my arms?
I feel lonely with my memories and also melancholy about the unstoppable nature of time. It would be wonderful to go back to that moment where he was handed to me, healthy and well, in those few minutes between the last terrifying push and when the stitches started to smart.
For me though, it’s not about wanting to go back, it’s about wanting to go forward. I want to know all the little decisions I make are the right little decisions. I want to know that he becomes confident and is allowed to flourish. I want to know he finds love and friendship. I want to know that he will see the world and that the world will, by and large, be a good place. I want to know that he will outlive me, that he will die old, content and at peace.
If I knew these things then I might be sleeping a little easier right now, but if there is one thing giving birth teaches us, it is the unstoppable, unpredictable, painful, joyous force that is life – both giving it and living it.
Life, like your child’s birthday, is both a sense of togetherness when you share the celebration and of intense isolation when you peer into the darkness of unknown futures.
How to handle to darkness? Light the candles on that birthday cake. Sing, laugh, enjoy seeing his face lit up. Catch the eye of another Mum and know that while she can never understand precisely how you feel, that she gets it too.
Cogito Ergo Mum 
I don’t think parent angst ever truly recedes; sometimes we’re better at hiding it, that’s all. Birthdays do bring it into sharper focus though. My Kid is coming up for 14, and well into his Hermit Phase. I still get those little stabs of acute joy from time to time, when I look in on him sleeping, or like this morning – as he got into the car, with his usual slightly dazed shock that he has to go to school again, and I caught sight of the curve of his lips. Of course, there are also the obstreperous pedantic remarks, and selective deafness! And I wonder/worry all the time if I’m doing right by him. And I wonder/worry how his life will turn out and what bad stuff will happen – because a life cannot be lived without bad stuff happening. And more than anything I hope, like you, that ‘he will die old, content and at peace’.
I hope your son has a fabulous birthday!
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