My Birthday

For an entire year, I hated August 17th. In 2008, I had my birthday sitting in a hospital room, crying because my son was sick and nobody could tell me why. No cake, no love, just me in a hospital room feeling sorry for myself and pissed off at the world. In three days, my son would be dead and I would hate the world even more than I did that day. I swore I would never celebrate my birthday again.

Last year, I chose to work on my birthday. I got a few birthday wishes, but ended up eating cupcakes at midnight because I was so depressed over my birthday and the impending anniversary of my son's death. I waited all day for my hubby to tell me happy birthday and do something nice for me. He forgot. Really. Bad. Day.

This year turned out to be quite the opposite. My boss told me to take the day off, and then while I was at work Monday night, he called to say Happy Birthday because he wanted to be the first. He doesn't know about the rough time I had last year, so for my birthday to start in such a caring way brought me to tears. I went to the cooler (no cameras) and bawled like a baby. I was an emotional wreck for the rest of the evening, but when I woke up on the day of my birthday, I felt wonderful.

I went out with hubby, who not only remembered to tell me happy birthday, but also took me out to lunch! We came home and worked on rearranging furniture in two different spaces. One for him, one for me. He now has a "man cave" and I have a living room again! He can play his xbox on the big screen in the dark and I can open the shades and let the sun stream in while I listen to my iPod on the awesome house system he hooked up for me. The living room still needs work. I need to paint one wall and find a way to hide all of the power cords dangling from everywhere, but I have room to exercise now and I know where all of MY things are located!

After working hard on the living room, I made a steak dinner for hubby and me (the kids were content with corndogs and mashed potatoes). After the kids went to bed, I attempted to dye my hair with pink highlights. It's not as dramatic as I had hoped. I have pink roots and a little pink on the underside of my hair. I color treat it black, and the kit I used was for black hair, just not color treated black hair. I'm going to have to do a whole bleaching and coloring process. Not sure I'm up to doing it myself the next time around.

Finally, after I cleaned up the pink that was everywhere but in my hair, I treated myself to chocolate cake, and through it all, I kept getting Facebook updates of another and another and another birthday wish. I lost count, but I did take a nap early in the afternoon and woke up to 54 text alerts from Facebook.. and that was only at 2 pm. I got constant updates until well after midnight. I can safely say this was the the best birthday that I can remember.

In three more days, it will still be Tommy's Angelversary. I'm okay with that. I will get sad again as it approaches. How could I not? But I'm at least able to celebrate myself a little and know my son would approve of my happiness.