I hate birthdays.

Specifically mine. I love other people's birthdays - I really do - I find it a time to reach out to those you don't keep in good enough contact and celebrate those who you do keep in good contact with. I love throwing birthday parties - we throw Cody one every year and it's a blast - I love planning it - I love being there - I love celebrating his birthday. But not mine. There are lots of reasons.
First, the older I get the faster the years seem to go by. No kidding - the gap between 9 and 10 was HUGE - it seemed like I waited an eternity to finally reach those double digits. But this last year has just flown by. I feel like I barely even got used to last year's age before this one snuck up on me.
Because of the years going faster, I feel more and more anxiety about how much I still have to do. I can't be getting old - there is so much I still want to do while I'm young!! But I can never do things "young" anymore - never marry "young" - never have kids "young" - never make a million dollars "young" - I'm too old to be "young" anymore. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I'm ancient here - Cody's great-grandma is in her upper 90's - that's really old - I'm not there - yet. :) But I feel like I have so much I want to do, so much to see, so much to accomplish and I just feel like I'm running out of time already.
Then there's this feeling as I look over the last year of feeling like there's so much I should have done - should have gone to this, or should have enjoyed that more, or should have visited here or should have made better use of this. Every year I think of how much I need to do more - which is impossible for me given all we do already.
I don't mean to be so pessimistic on life - I'm really not - I love life and I love my life in particular- I do a lot and I enjoy most of what I do - I just feel like I have all these goals and dreams and that at some point I'm going to have to give up on a lot of them. And my birthday reminds me of those. Sooner or later, especially as I get older, I'm going to have to learn to let go of some of those aspirations and just enjoy what I have. And while that's great and life goes on, there is still a sadness in giving up on something because you just ran out of time - if only I had more time.
This sort of ties into another post I was planning to write about kids - I'll write more on it later - but I feel like we should have kids before we get too "old" so we're not the "old parents" and we're not too "old" to have the energy to enjoy their energy and we're not dead by the time we have the opportunity to have grandkids, but damn is there so much to do before we are ready to have kids. It's almost as if we had had them years ago we wouldn't even have experienced all that we have so we almost wouldn't have known the extent of what you give up - sort of a youthful ignorance that makes for happy parents. But at this point, we've seen more and more of the realities of what being a parent really takes and the true sacrifies that only age can impart upon you. We know so much more now then we even did three years ago about what there is out there and we think where we would be if we had kids three years ago - we'd be happy, loving parents who never got to see and do what we've been able to do the past few years. We'd have been happily and blissfully unaware of the sacrifices that we see now. So now that we're married folks ask the next logical question - when are the babies coming? Who knows? I question almost every day if we'll EVER be ready - when will we EVER be ready to just give it all up for kids? I don't mean to sound selfish - but that's sort of what it is - it's just too confusing. A friend's mom (my STL bonus mom) put it well when she told me that at some point once you decide that you are going to have children, you have to start putting their future well-being in front of yours - and that means having them young enough to be around for them for a long long time. I know I'm not to old to have kids now - will I be in a few years? Not sure. What if we decide to have three? Then we'll be having #3 in the late 30's - can we do that? Not sure. All these questions swirling in my head - right now we're at a point of being paralyzed by choices- more on that in another post.
Happy Birthday.