7 days later....

 

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.