birthdays

Song Lyric Thursday – Happy Birthday, Dad!


My father turns 81 today. Something of a miracle really as the doctors have had us outfitting him for a casket more than once* over the past three years.

He is a very lucky man. Not because he has survived long past medical predictions but because he used the time to make amends to his family and to be a better husband and father with the extra time he was granted.

Not many people would have fought like he did or work as hard as he has to remain around and rebuild burnt bridges and build new memories. He had much to atone for and, in my opinion, he has acquitted himself admirably.

I imagine that many people would wonder why long life has been granted to someone like my dad while so many other – younger – people were not as lucky. He certainly didn’t merit the time if one were to look closely at the choices he has made and the people he has hurt by them.

But life really isn’t interested in our opinion. It keeps its own counsel as to who reaches old, old age and who does not. There are reasons. And they aren’t our business.

I don’t know if Dad even has a favorite song. It wouldn’t be rock or pop because he loathed the stuff we kids listened to as we were growing up. The only music he ever listened to at all was country and big band. In fact he met my mom at a dance and they did their early courting on the dance floor.

My father is a man who not only knew how to really dance but he loved to dance.

Happy Birthday to my dad then. A lucky man. A good man.

*Dad got sick around the same time as my late husband began his final decline and has cheated death on a regular basis since. In fact, Will’s first bout with pneumonia occurred when I was propping up my mom during Dad’s first surgery following recurrent TIA episodes. My father was upset that he couldn’t come and help out while Will was in hospice. He is really the only one of my family who wanted to see Will when he was in hospice. No one really visited him but BabyD, me and his mom for the entire three months – but that is another story.

Sister-Wife


The wives of polygamists refer to themselves as “sister-wives”. I think this is meant to impose a familial relationship on something that could easily dissolve into something competitive and downright ugly were it not for the veneer of a pseudo-relationship that the term implies. Despite my own negative views on this subject, I began to wonder the other day if the term didn’t more aptly describe my relationship with Shelley.

Shelley was Rob’s wife. She died eight months after my husband, Will, back in 2006. Today is her birthday. She would have been 47 years old. Just a few months older than Rob and he never let her forget it. Now he must contend with being older then I am by a couple of years, and I am not sure why I think this, but I’ll bet Shelley is enjoying that particular turn of the table.

When I stop to ponder Shelley and Rob and myself and the circumstances that bind us, I know I could write a novel that would set me on Oprah’s sofa in a heartbeat. But life is not a book of the month, at least not this life that we share. Anyway I am not certain I am accomplished enough to find the words, craft the sentences and paragraphs that would explain us or if I could, that I would really want to.

I live in the house that Shelley called home. The colors on the wall and the decor are hers. The garden out back and the hanging planters grew things she planted. There is a room in the basement crammed to the ceiling almost with things that mostly belonged to her once and what isn’t there sits on shelves and in cabinets and hangs in closets upstairs and down.

Our kitchen is more and more mine now, but there are still elements of Shelley. The dining room too. However the bed where Rob and I sleep and make love was the place of similar activities when she was alive and still well. That last part doesn’t cross my mind much at all truthfully, but when it does it certainly gives a surreal twist to things.  

Her birthday fell on and around Mother’s Day every year and as is common when one’s birthday falls too close to a major gift-giving holiday, Shelley got more than her share of combination gifts in much the same way my friends and family tended to lump my birthday with Christmas whenever they could get away with it. As Rob was telling me this, it occurred to me that from this point on, I will share this holiday with Shelley. Our daughters have a common father in Rob now but though I might likely be grandmother to her children’s children someday, I will not be a mother to her daughters in the same way that Rob fathers my little girl much as I might love and care for their happiness and welfare. An awesome task though nevertheless, and I wonder all the time if I am doing a good enough job.

I wonder sometimes too if I had known Shelley would we have been friends. I don’t think so because I don’t make friends easily especially with outgoing people and judging by her oldest daughter, Farron, I think she was. She was deeply committed to her ideals and values. I am still figuring much of that out. A farm girl, she was handy in the outdoors. As an asthmatic with more allergies than should be humanly possible, I am more of a liability in any woodsy situation than not. Still, we both found love in Rob which suggests some mutual ground I have yet to discover though recently Rob related to me that Shelley and I have common ground in weight struggles. Though he finds my concerns now and hers of long ago a bit mystifying, like me Shelley was a fitness nut who made eating healthy a priority. Weight, gaining or losing, is somewhat of a stereotypical female bonding ground (of course it is also a source of much friction as well).

Sisters do not choose each other. They are born into families and learn to co-exist. Sometimes quite happily and lovingly. Sometimes not at all. More often than not such relationships fall somewhere in between understanding and merely shared heritage. Shelley and I did not choose each other. Rob choose us. First her and then me. In the earliest days here, I felt a presence that I can’t say for sure was hers but that seemed to be studying and watching. It was neither welcoming nor repelling. Just there. I haven’t felt that for a while. Perhaps I have been judged and found adequate. I choose to think that.

Happy Birthday, Shelley.

My Birthday


I was born at 7:36 A.M. forty-four years ago today. That – is a long time ago my friends, and yet if you asked me if I feel old or to define “old”, I don’t know if I could. Sure I recently berated a poster on my DM-Register blog about the delusional tendencies we “boomers” have about age and how that relates to us (not at all if you were wondering), but 44 is a considerable number of years. I don’t feel wiser though I am a bit creakier of joint and stiff of muscle at times. I have gray hairs (I may have mentioned this before) and I have wrinkles (of which I am not fond but I deal).

The celebration of me and my birth has gone through changes since that first birthday, a bittersweet day for the 17 year old who bore me and gave me up, I am sure. Over the course of my childhood it was duly noted by my immediate family and some extended with just three parties ever been held in my honor – my 1st birthday, my fifth and my thirteenth. I would not have another birthday party until my 37th. Will, my late husband, gathered our friends for a dinner celebration out at a new restaurant in Cumming, which is no longer there and where he is now buried. Throughout my teens and twenties my birthday was a hit and miss affair. During my college years it always fell during finals and no one could be coaxed away from books and notes for even the tiniest party. Once I was teaching, I might sometimes be feted by a class or a group of coworkers but the day was by and large just another day. I haven’t celebrated my birthday with my mom since high school, but I do remember one year in college when she actually got my gift and card to me on the very day of my birthday. The book was a fictionalized biography of Henry the VIII by Margaret George. Mom inscribed it even and I still have it. It’s sitting on the bookshelves in our living-room. Will always made a big deal of my birthday because he loved me and because he knew how much I still resented the birthday slights of the past when I had gotten combo birthday/xmas gifts and usually neither one was very nice. It made me wonder if anyone I knew had any idea at all of who I really was.

Today, Rob surprised me at lunch with a carrot cake (it’s the only kind I can eat without getting sick) and presents from Katy that he had picked out for her to give me. Books. Ken Follett’s World Without End which I had requested from the library about a month ago already and was still 43rd in the queue. I also got Helen Humphrey’s The Frozen Thames which is a collection of short stories whose setting is the River Thames during those times it has frozen over – something it doesn’t do anymore. Rob is getting me a rebounder which he thought was an odd thing for me to want for my birthday but that’s me. I received three phone calls. One from my friends Meg in Iowa and then a call each from my parents. There were birthday greetings and wishes on my Facebook wall as well today from friends and my two wonderful step-daughters. And I have to say, that 44 is suiting me but that’s not a surprise. Age in general has always seemed a better fit than youth did.