A Birthday and A Universe

June 24, 2010

The festivities are almost behind us. Not that I don't look forward to and love the busyness, but it appears that the busyness of mothers in September of many years has led to the very busy birthday month of June for both my and Nicholas's family. On my side, we celebrate Arilyn's birthday, my birthday, and a nephew's birthday at the end of the month; on Nick's side, we celebrate two cousin's birthdays and an aunt's plus the newly added celebration of Father's Day. In the future, I think we will declare June the official party month and simply celebrate from the first until the 30th.

I might have decided when I was considering becoming a parent that I would conceive in time to have a Gemini baby. Not that I am so ego-centric, but I remembered once hiding myself in an aisle of Barnes and Nobles in the Astrology section with a book of the Zodiac spread open upon my crossed legs reading about signs of compatibility wherein it stated that Geminis usually got along pretty well with and liked the company of other Geminis. Also, I thought it would be a great way to take the focus off of myself, and the often awkward attention that birthdays bring, by allowing me to celebrate the life of someone else - someone else that I helped create. As Arilyn's first birthday came and went two days before my own, I conclude that the plan was successful! In fact, my birthday was all the more richer because the celebration of her life was still in the air.

I am not sure, yet, if I would confidently confide that I based my decision to have children at a certain time of year on the whimsical declarations of a book that was probably titled Signs of the Zodiac: Your Life in the Stars...; however, when I consider my teenage years and the amount of time spent trying to understand love and life from within the scripts of movies, between the lines of dialogue, and out of the ink of canonical literature it is not surprising that this memory, this advice from the cosmic region of the stars that aligned just so on the day that I was born, would find its way out of my personal subconscious at the moment I felt the delicate and very certain pull to create life.

Perhaps, it can all be explained by the human need to be verified, or our insatiable search for answers. I looked for answers to my internal questions (When will I find love? Is this fate? Is he the one? Is this the best path?) always in things that were outside of myself: T.V. commercials, the Tao, red lights, and simple random coincidence. I once diagnosed the demise of a relationship I was in based on an accident. During a difficult time in our being together I pulled a pair of his jeans out of the washing machine. As I transferred the damp dungarees to the dryer I inadvertently hit the light switch, which resulted in me standing in the laundry room in the dark holding a pair of his wet pants. This, somehow, was a terrible metaphor for me. And whether or not I then created the unrest that did eventually end our relationship, the relationship did end. Were the wet pants in the dark the universe's way of telling me the guy was no good? Or, was I simply searching for answers outside of myself to verify and confirm what I was already feeling? I hope I am old enough now to confirm the latter.

Or am I? When our midwife told us that Arilyn's due date was on my birthday I couldn't help feeling that everything was going to be okay. Some of those fears that speed new parents into the future of our children's teenage years where they hate us because we don't understand them were unmistakeably quieted. For an instant, I saw the gleam from between the universe's eyelids as she winked at me and said, "You've got this." And though I am old enough now to understand that the true answers we seek come from only within ourselves, I must admit that when the instant was over, a quiet hope settled in.