Today Is My Birthday

Thoughts on babies, birth, and choosing our lives

Hello Sweet Community,

Today is my birthday! I’m writing this before heading up into the mountains with Meg, where we will hike to beautiful new heights, ride an alpine rollercoaster, and celebrate every candle on my proverbial cake. Back in my thirties, this day stopped meaning much to me, but since my cancer diagnosis, my birthday arrives to me now as the most generous of gifts. 

Recently I was talking with a friend about the day her child was born. After labor, her midwife said, “You both worked so hard.” I had never conceived of babies having to work hard to be born, but loved learning that they do. That we fight our way into this weird and wonderful world. Now I picture myself muscling down the canal, yelling, “Get me into the light so I can make some poems, raise some hell, (and a little bit of heaven too)!

I was an only child until I was ten years old, and will never forget the day I found out I was going to have a sister. My parents called me into our den. The television was off so I knew something serious was about to go down. Not to mention my father’s chair wasn’t reclined. He was sitting upright, rolling ice cubes like dice around an almost empty glass of Pepsi (a beverage he had far too much respect for to use only its first name. I’ll have a Pepsi Cola! he’d exclaim each time we went out to dinner, and if they only had Coke, he’d politely accept, but would never want to return.)

My mom gave me a big smile and said,  I’m gonna have a baby! 

I don’t know that I reacted as they had expected, partly because of this: Just a week earlier I’d been drawing a map of Italy in my 4th grade History class while singing John Melancamp’s, It hurts so good, sometimes love doesn’t  feel like it should, when a boy named Arthur  leaned in from the desk behind me and said, You know what that song’s about don’t ya?  It’s about ssssssex!

A fire alarm went off in my face, my cheeks ablaze with the humiliation of having not known the repulsiveness of my own musical taste. And that’s to say nothing of how mortified I was to add to my small scraps of sex education the knowledge that grownups enjoyed hurting during the act. What the heck?! I hadn’t been able to look an adult in the pupils since, and there was my very own mom lifting up her shirt to reveal a speed bump five months grown. 

I locked my eyes on her belly and began plotting how to convince my classmates to race over the speed bump without slowing down long enough to notice my parents had done the hurts so good thing. 

There was a five month sale on her favorite ice cream at the Shop n’ Save. 

She raised my allowance and didn’t have enough money to go to aerobics class. 

What happened to the Virgin Mary happened to my mom and you can’t prove it didn’t, Arthur.

My god, I had a lot of worries as a kid, but the day my sister came home was one of the most tender days of my life. I can still see my mom and dad stepping out of our old blue Buick, walking up the driveway, holding a little bundle in their arms. When I looked at my sister’s face I felt like she’d come from somewhere else. That she had been somewhere before choosing to be in our family.

Last night before falling asleep, I was listening to a podcast in which someone was telling a story about their Near Death Experience. They said something I’ve heard many other people with N.D.E.s express over the years––that when they were in the next realm it was revealed to them that they had chosen their parents. And not only that, but they had chosen the hardships they would have in this life, specifically choosing ones that would aid in the evolution of their spirit. Whatever’s true, that’s been one of the most helpful tools for me in engaging my diagnosis and every other challenge in my life these past two years—engaging it as if I chose it before I was born, as if I muscled down the birth canal, willing to face whatever I had come to face, while raising some hell, and a little bit of heaven too.

Love, Andrea🖤
(One Year Older) 

P.S. As Meg was editing this newsletter she suggested I find a less weird term than “muscling down the birth canal” but I ultimately decided to ignore her wise advice.

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