Birthday Gifts

Next week for spring break we are heading to Kauai, visiting Doug and Ashlee Wylie (and baby bump!) for a much-anticipated family vacation. Doug is the Park Ranger at Napali on the North Shore — he took this amazing photo. It will be our first week long vacation since we moved to Santa Barbara nearly three years back. The trip happens to coincide with my thirty-ninth birthday.

Doug and Ash - can you handle the cuteness? 

Here’s the thing — for a bunch of little reasons, my last few birthdays haven’t been great. It was either a work commitment, a last minute cancel of a babysitter, a string of my birthday/Clara’s birthday/Easter all falling on the same week…just the stuff of life. I realized that I can’t remember when I had my last fun birthday — a day that felt like a celebration from beginning to end (is that too much to ask in a grown-up world?). However, this year is my thirty-ninth and this send off to my thirties deserves to be a good one.

I started this decade with a trip to Paris and I’ll usher in the grand finale on the beaches of Kauai. Instagram/Facebook/blog perfect, right? But those are just the fancy bookends to the real story of my thirties.

That story is slightly more messy — trying and trying to get pregnant, moving cross-country to a place that felt like a foreign land, back to back babies, the complete joy and utter demand of motherhood, cancer and radioactive fun, horrible family grief, the gift of more joy and cuteness than should be allowed one human, baking lots of chocolate-chocolate birthday cakes, chartering the deeper territory of marriage, being completely terrified of that journey, finding peaceful joy in that journey, job loss and a move back to Santa Barbara, a cozy cottage by the sea, growing, balancing, shifting, loving, ordering Rusty’s pizza more nights than I care to share and so many goodnight kisses on foreheads with a silent plea to soak in the sweetness.

How can I bemoan the end of my thirties? I’ve accomplished, learned, lost and gained more than I could have imagined in all the daydream fantasies of my twenties. It’s been harder than I ever knew possible, but the payoff is a true sense of what I want the rest of my life to look like, not the social media version, the real-deal-messy-beautiful one.

I’ve decided it’s going to be a good birthday. The past few months slammed us with some big reminders of what a gift it is to have another year together — to be able to take a family picture with my whole family, to walk, run, swim and see the beauty around me— all these incredible gifts. In the spirit of welcoming 39 with open arms, here are a few gifts I’m giving myself this year.

I am going to wear a bikini at the beach. I am going to play in the ocean with my kids and walk along the shore holding hands with my husband. I’m going to feel the sun (and rain) on my skin. I will not apologize for my body. I will not make excuses. I will not feel the need to explain my scars or jiggly thighs. I will not hide when the camera comes out. I will love and cherish this home with each application of sunscreen over stretch marks, freckles and bony elbows. I will delight in the feeling of holding my daughter close to me in the waves or the sun warming my pale belly. I will be thankful, grateful and proud of all this body has accomplished these past nine years.

We’re going to disconnect in order to connect. Ben’s vacation wish was for all of us to leave our phones and laptops at home. While we can’t quite pull off that maneuver, we are going to make a big effort to turn it off all day and only do a quick needed check-in at night or in the morning (and okay, post a few pictures). Our goal is to be present to the place and people right in front of us, hands-free. I want to spend a week looking up rather than down. I love photography, so I will snap pictures with my real camera, not my phone — and even in that endeavor I want to be conscious of putting aside the filters and capturing moments in my heart.

I’m going to sneak away with Mark (thank you, Doug and Ash!). Our last trip to Kauai was our honeymoon. We’re going to spend a night away just us and enjoy it, guilt-free — a challenge for me. We will celebrate the fun of being grown-ups pretending to be kids; utterly thankful we aren’t kids pretending to be grown-ups anymore. Almost fifteen years later, we may not be the sweet and shiny newlyweds of that first trip, but we are known and loved partners who have made a family, a life, a journey, together. Over dinner, I will look at Mark and feel more beautiful than I did all those years back, because now it’s a beauty that comes from being well-loved, known and accepted.

Above all else, I will say thank you. I will say thank you to God and to my people. I will honor all this decade has brought, taught, broken and built. There will also be fruity cocktails, bickering over directions, spontaneous hand holding, whining about how long the hike is taking, mosquito bites, shave ice overload and lots of laughing with dearest friends that really should be called family. It will be real. It will be good. As Clara would say, it will be a fantastic 39^th birthday. Aloha.

Ben drew this last year in kindergarten. He says he wants to go to "Hwiy" with his mom.