Birthdays | Day 6 of my 2023 Journal

In the first week of each year, half of our children celebrate their arrival date. Our oldest son is 17 this year, and our youngest is 11.

We have tried many strategies, but there is no way around the fact that birthday parties just after Christmas and new year are not the most hyped ones. Everyone is tired, just slowly adjusting to the new year, breathing.

Our daughters celebrate their birthdays in April and September, and they have big classic parties: Balloons, sparkling wine, presents, restaurants, guests, and cake. 

Our sons just hope to have a peaceful day with the people they love. 

Either way, we celebrate that they have traveled around the Sun on the spaceship Planet Earth in one full orbit (close enough) and that life is just better because they are here. After all, they are unique and contribute something extraordinary. 

We celebrate the fact that we are all unique and needed. Each and every one of us holds a world, has a unique path, and when we pass the starting line on our birthdays, we celebrate this journey, this life, the fact that we are all stardust full of life, souls on a mission, sparkling lights in the vastness of cosmos. 

It is not important how we celebrate. Whether it is balloons and pink cakes and gold dresses or starry nights, board games and tea. The core is we remember to celebrate our lives and our gratefulness for each other. 

Birthdays should remind us that everyone is as important as our children and that we all have a role to play. So our gratefulness expands from the person being celebrated to celebrations as such, to be as such. 

This is what the quiet, humble birthdays of January make me think about, under the fantastic full moon hovering over the days we spend celebrating our sons in the silence of the Sicilian countryside, grateful for what is. And how it is. And why. 

Cecilie Conrad

#6 of my 365 writing challenge - Read them all here