Mourning the Little Things on My Son’s Sixth Birthday
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2019
Our house should be overflowing with activity and noise and celebration today. It’s my middle child’s sixth birthday and, although we aren’t the most social animals, we do throw big birthday parties for our kids at our house every year. It’s one of our main traditions.
We invite friends and their children and classmates from school. We rent a bounce house for the backyard and serve up a mixture of vegetarian snacks (mostly for me) and chicken tenders on Hawaiian rolls and Buffalo chicken dip and a table full of sweet things for everyone else. We fill coolers on the porch with juice boxes and waters and adult beverages. We have a pinata that the kids whack to pieces and then they scramble for fallen candy in our backyard that is filled with leaves. We sing “Happy Birthday” and blow out candles and just sit back and watch the kids go crazy for several hours.
Those three days per year are the highlights of my social calendar. And as an added bonus, we are motivated to clean our house, so it looks somewhat presentable for about fifteen minutes. Now, with the motivation completely zapped, our house is cluttered with worksheets and pencils and crayons and little pieces of paper glued to larger pieces of paper. The relics of a homeschool hastily assembled.
And today, unlike most birthday party days, our house is quiet. Just kidding. It’s never quiet. But it’s just flowing with the normal noise and activity rather than bursting at the seams.
I feel particularly bad for my son, because he had been looking forward to the day so much. We will do our best to make the day special with cake and games and a couple presents, but it’s still not the same.
Of course, I also feel bad for feeling sad about something so small in the face of everyone else’s suffering. Heck, my wife is a nurse. She works in a hospital and I worry every day that she is going to be the next person to come down with covid-19. I worry for her co-workers and medical professionals and all the other people around the world who have to work through this. I worry for everyone who is vulnerable to this virus (that’s everyone, by the way, STAY HOME). I worry about when my kids will get to see their grandparents again.
I know what real worry is and I know even with my real worries, there are many people who have it much, much worse.
But I think it’s OK to still mourn our small losses. Almost every person on the planet is mourning the loss of something right now. And whether it’s a big loss or a small one it’s perfectly fine to be sad about it.
We’re all in this completely weird and terrible situation together. Very far apart, but together. And while I’m angry that failed and corrupt leadership made it necessary for all of us to sacrifice pieces of ourselves to protect others, I am glad many of us are willing to do that. But, I wish we weren’t completely on our own.
I hope we can give ourselves permission to mourn our personal losses even if they are relatively insignificant in the grander scheme.
And I really, really hope by this time next year, we’ll be celebrating a 7-year-old the way we want to be. With noise and laughter and lots and lots of chocolate chip cookie dip.
Stay safe, everyone! And Happy Birthday, Bennett!
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