A Very Merry Unbirthday To YOU!

After reading some of the comments to my self-indulgent post last week celebrating MY birthday I started to feel a little sad. I realized there are many people out there that don’t share my wide-eyed, Pollyanna approach to birthdays. But why not? We should all have people in our lives that celebrate our very existence. And especially around the anniversary of the day we stepped onto this wonderful planet. If we don’t have people in our lives that do this – then we should do it ourselves!

Call me self-indulgent. Call me self-centered. Call me crazy. Call me Jane. (Ah, I just made myself giggle. I crack myself up!) The day we took our first breath on this beautiful place we call Earth was a miraculous day, indeed. For each and every one of us. You owe it to yourself and your friends and family to live it up! Stretch out the celebration as long as you can. For yourself and for those you love. If you have 52 immediate  family members then you get to celebrate all year long! How cool is that?

Turning 30, for me, was a piece of cake. Turning 40, not so bad either. But when I turned 41, I was a little blue. But then I remembered, I’ve earned every single wrinkle, every gray hair, every single jiggle. Badges of honor I like to call them. And the wisdom I’ve gained – immeasurable. Oh sure, I have things I wish I’d done differently. But no regrets. If I had done things differently I wouldn’t be who I am today. I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Celebrating our lives, every day, is a good thing. Pulling out all the stops around our birthday is a great thing. Frankly, I’ve always felt sorry for those of certain faiths (not naming any names and please save your comments preaching to me – I’ll just plug my ears and sing La, la, la, la, la, la) that don’t celebrate birthdays. Marking the day that you made it in one piece (hopefully) all the way around the sun – again! – is such a fabulous miracle. A gift. It doesn’t happen for everyone – really, just open the obituary page in your newspaper. Young. Old. People die every year. I didn’t, this time around. I’m here again for my children, my husband, my family, my friends. And that’s a fantabulous, spectacuwonderfully, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious thing.

So, today I’m giving you permission to celebrate YOU. And you, and you and even YOU! Let’s all have a very, merry un-birthday celebration today. And if it really is your birthday today, well – Happy Birthday! You couldn’t have chosen a more wonderful day to be born!