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A Happy Birthday to Me!

I’m drafting this blog sitting on the bench in one of the shower stalls in my RV Park. My toddler is enjoying a very hot shower in the adjacent stall. Like her mom, she enjoys long, luxurious showers, so I have a little time to share a beautiful story of how I am finally enjoying my birthdays! 😊

It may seem like a little thing to you. “Many people enjoy their birthdays,” you may say. Well, many people are very blessed and they don’t even know it.

A Day Cursed to A Day Blessed

You see, by the time I turned 17, I concluded that my birthday was a cursed day. After all, I spent my 17th birthday in the hospital after a car crash that totaled my parents’ car. The accident was bad, but it was the circumstances before and after the accident that made it much worse. From that day on, and for the next 20+ years, my birthday caused me much more sorrow than joy.

Up through single digits, it was the fact that I had a hard time making friends and very few people came to my birthday parties. By my early teens, every passing year reinforced the painful realization that I was born into a family in which I would never truly feel loved. In my twenties, the ticking time bomb of my age reinforced the fear that I would never get healthy enough to get married. By my early thirties, every birthday reminded me that God had not fulfilled his promise to me of a wonderful husband and marriage. By the time I was approaching my 38th birthday, I told God, “I can’t have one more birthday without my husband! I think I’ll die of a broken heart.” At the time, I had no boyfriend, let alone a fiancé, but against all odds, I was a married woman a few months later. It was 19 days before my 38th birthday.

What A Difference

When I married my husband, I didn’t know how to enjoy celebrations. My family of origin celebrated less and less over the years. Eventually, we went through some motions, but we never really celebrated the person or special event before us. We just used celebrations as a reason to dress up and eat good food.

Fortunately, my husband is an amazing man and he has showered me with gifts and experiences galore over the past four years of our marriage:

  • Dinner and Dancing Cruise with my husband and his best man? Check.
  • Family dinner with close friends during COVID? Check.
  • Train Museum with our new family after COVID? Check.
  • Paint and Sip with all my favorite girlfriends? Check.

And this year? My husband set up a wonderful couples massage, followed by a sushi lunch, a gelato and espresso cafe excursion, and a group phone call he scheduled with my girlfriends in Maryland. During each event, he celebrated me and all I’ve accomplished this year. He asked me to reflect on what was important to me. He saw me, and he see myself.

As I was closing out my conversation with one of my friends, I mentioned to her how much I had enjoyed my birthday. “My husband even ironed one of my shirts for me because I had told him I can’t feel pretty with wrinkled clothes,” I said. (I didn’t recall that we had brought an iron with us and it was in our storage unit, but he did, and he surprised me with it!) “I have been look’ing forward to my birthday all month,” I continued, “and it didn’t disappoint.” “Yes, I remember how hard it was for you to celebrate anything,” she mused, “but now, you have a keeper, and look at what a difference he has made!”

Yes, just look. ❤️

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