Undoing Dates and Blood
Facebook is awesome on your birthday. All day long great messages have come in from friends, colleagues, intimates, and associates, far and wide. It has been lovely for a day that has generally been sucktastic. While today is my actual birthday, this year, in my mind, my birthday was on Saturday. On Saturday, I woke up with my most beloved one. She bought pastries from the patisserie down the street from the house. We puttered around the house, laundry, cleaning, newspaper reading, then had sex. We went to lunch at Panera. I read all afternoon. We had a lovely dinner at Jakes on Saginaw’s old west side. It was a wonderful day.
Today, I woke alone, I walked both of the dogs, I ran errands, including buying groceries for the week for my grandmother. We met with the attorneys about Tibe’s hearing on Wednesday. I signed and express mailed my statement for the hearing. I delivered groceries to my grandmother and wrote up the weekly meal plan. I came home and did some work. I had a delightful visit with a friend on Skype, did more work, walked the dogs more, and now am listening to the wind and thinking about how the dogs will go out one more time before bed. Maybe all of this does not qualify as sucktastic, but it has been a day of fulfilling obligations and a day of courting concern about the hearing on Wednesday. Not a day of celebration, a day of obligation.
Except for the Facebook emails, I have not regarded this as my birthday. My birthday passed on Saturday. While this may sound like a sleight of mind or some sort of delusion, this practice of understanding a lovely day with a beloved one as being the actual special day is a practice I learned from a dear mentor. After a spectacularly bad birthday of fighting with a girlfriend, I cried to this mentor, angry about having my birthday ruined, upset about the fight. She consoled me, then told me this most important piece of advice. She said, one day soon, you will have a lovely day with your girlfriend, you will laugh and have fun and feel happy. When that day comes, tell yourself, this is my birthday. Then remember that day as your birthday forever, letting go of this bad day. In time, you will only remember the good days, the bad days disappear from your mind.
This seemed like good advice and also like some kind of key to creating a life for myself. This mentor had a life I admired. She had a marriage I admired, a career, a family. She navigated the good and the bad with aplomb. I feel like she told me one of her secrets. I listened. I held on to it. I used this advice. I have come to think of this as “undoing dates,” and it is an idea and a skill that I love.
I have used it dozens of times to create a memory for something special. And I tell people in their own anger and pain about a day gone bad to do the same. Undoing dates removes the pressure of a single day and expands the possibilities for celebratory happiness throughout our days. This advice of undoing dates is the best advice I have ever received.
I connect this undoing of dates with undoing blood today. Just as we imagine certain days as being particularly special, birthdays, anniversaries, and in our imagining of their special need they become filled with pressure and expectations, we also imagine blood relations as having particular meaning and power. All of this is fine, of course, except when it is not. Except when we have a birthday that is not fine, a birthday that is sad, lonely, hurtful. Except when people who are our blood disappoint us, hurt us, abandon us. Why should one day have such particular meaning, hold such power? Why should blood relations be more important that our kin of choice?
I think just as we can undo dates and in the undoing create new positive memories, we can undo blood and choose family who will be with us through thick and thin regardless of biology. We are not bound by time and blood. We can undo time; we can undo blood. We can imagine something better.
The birthday gift that arrived today from the sister I choose.
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