Unquiet
Things

I don’t know why I would say such I thing, but I honestly never thought I would live to see the age of thirty-eight.  I suppose that is a funny thing to admit, isn’t it? I’ve never had a death wish or engaged in dangerous behavior…it’s not as if I wanted to shuffle off this mortal coil at an early age. And I’d be doing my imagination a great disservice if I claimed that I just couldn’t imagine myself at this age (because I’ve got a pretty crazy imagination).  I don’t know what it is.  But here we are, at this place I never quite expected to be.

I am now two years older than my mother was when she started fibbing about her age. We were pretty dumb kids, I think. We thought our mother was 36 well into her 50s.

A natal day mini read presents the eight of pentacles.  Creativity, intent, immersion and focus. Practice, practice, practice.  Patience and hard work and continually acquiring knowledge, leading to expertise. Perfection may never come, but achieving a greater understanding of a process and learning new skills along the way is immensely valuable in it’s own right.  I love the spider in The Wild Unknown’s deck.  Spinning away busily, the same web over and over. Winds blow it away, hands swat and tear it.  
A focused, detail-oriented little thing,  the spider spins it’s web again and again creating a beautiful and immensely functional, and ultimately nourishing piece of work.  I am making most of this up, of course. But there’s got to be something truthful and useful and good in all of that, and perhaps this year I shall figure it out.

My fella’s lovely mama stopped in today and brought me some birthday posies.  On a day when I was missing my own mother’s voice (and hot on the heels of a rather melancholy mother’s day), there were not enough words for how much I appreciated the gesture.

I don’t know that we were particularly demonstrative toward each other, my mother and I, but she would, without fail, call me up every year on this day.  Even if it was just a voice mail, she always said to me “happy birthday, baby”.  I didn’t expect to miss hearing that so much.

 

It was a rather quiet day, as most birthdays are now.  Anti-climatic.  Once you have passed your tenth year aren’t all birthdays like that? I had done all of my birthday shopping & shows last week and had a stack of reading and nice smelling things which are already summarily being ignored. So what does a thirty eight year old woman do with herself, on the anniversary of her entrance into this world? Nothing that she doesn’t want to do, of course.  This includes knitting, binging on favourite teevee programs, and the hunting down and devouring of childhood treats.  Not a bad way to spend the first day of 38 – whether or not I anticipated being around for it.