7 days after my birthday and I start
thinking about what I may have done to celebrate it.
I’ve never really had a wild
birthday full of friends screaming and surprises delivered to my door.
And as I get older it seems even
more pointless because I feel like am already drained enough by the stresses of
life and the best birthday would really be a sleep in at home, with completely
no interruptions, or a lazy warm afternoon with my feet in the water by a pool,
lying down on soft grass and staring at the clouds or a star filled night
figuring out constellations.
This time around on my birthday,
I was on the road heading back home from what had been a crazy three day run
around in and out of hospitals doing consultations on my daughter.
By the time it was my birthday, I
didn’t even have enough money to buy myself something nice.
I lay on my bed the day before my
travel back to my small flat on the copperbelt and thought about how life just
seemed to have zoomed by and how much time I had wasted on the wrong people and
not pursuing my passions and I suddenly missed the old creative me, the one
that read a lot of books and painted on Sundays. The one that liked to invite
people over for board games, the one that still believed in love and forever.
Life was not like that now; now
it felt like I was always too tired to read and not creative enough to paint, now
it felt like the spare time I had was time for my daughter and little for
myself.
Now it felt like I was working
half the time or catching up on trying to make it in the “normal” world.
I suddenly felt defeated, I was
doing all these things about life, being a single parent, trying my best at my job,
trying out fleeting romances to make me feel alive and yet never experiencing the
real thing.
A part of me felt quite unfulfilled.
I had disabled my birthday on my socials,
because I did not want to be bombarded by a flood of happy birthday messages
that were just from people who well, just saw it was my birthday on my wall and
just said it just because..
I needed something more meaningful.
Four days before my birthday
three years ago, I lost my father. So every time four days before my birthday
after that year, I get some form of sadness when I think about it.
I still remember vividly seeing
him be a shadow of himself, from the once ever argumentative Dad I knew full of
energy, the academic who loved books and travel and never got to fulfil most of
the fantasies he had dreamt of.
I still remember the last day I had
seen him alive, he had called all of us his children, as if he knew he was
about to leave this earth and we all had to find some time from our private
lives to go and see him at our family farm.
I still remember very vividly as I
approached him with my siblings when we entered the yard of the farm, he was
lying down, outside by the side of the house. Initially I didn’t even realize
that there was anyone lying down, it looked like some beddings spread outside.
It was only when the beddings shifted with movement that I saw a peak of his
head.
His voice had become hoarse and
almost inaudible and his hands were shaky. My father had always been a dark skinned
man, but this time, he seemed to have gotten unhealthily dark with sunken eyes.
To this day I think about that
scene and how he reached out to us one by one as we approached to greet him.
No one had anything to say that
day. We all had lumps in our throat and to each his own feel of grief because
we knew the inevitable.
Two weeks following Dad’s funeral
I found out I was pregnant. It felt like on one hand life had left and on the
other hand new life was coming.
So my birthday month that year
was full of mixed emotions, losing my father, discovering I was pregnant and
would be a single parent because of a failed relationship was a lot to deal
with. I felt very much lost and alone.
Over the years I have pulled
myself through some of the loneliest of nights and the worst of days. Sometimes
I didn’t feel like going to work, other times I just wanted to work all day, to
get myself distracted.
Now that I have my hands full
with a little one and trying to just live each day the best I can by myself, it
seemed kind of pointless to celebrate my birthday this year. Am focused on
other things.
However, I do appreciate that everyday
should be a celebration because am here and I’ve been strong enough to fight
through the pains of yester years, I suppose a birthday just adds an extra
touch to a celebration of life.
The day God decided to actually
bring you to this world, to be a change maker and to touch lives. We are all
basically looking for our purpose, sometimes it takes a lifetime to figure
ourselves out, but each day has purpose, in everything that we do. Some of it
we may not understand there and then until later on in life but we keep living
regardless.
Life is short enough as it is and
to the privilege of it is to be exactly who we intend to be and no one else. To
be our authentic selves.
