Level Up, Girl.

Today is my birthday and I made you a gift this year because I don’t really need anything. But before I share it with you, let me explain.

We’re supposed to be on a plane to Ireland right now. Visiting the Emerald Isle was a surprise gift for me and my best friend: our husbands planned for months, our siblings and our dear friends would join us, we were thrilled and it would have been epic and I’ve been counting down the days. Instead we’re on Day ___ of a stay-at-home order. Nero is fiddling, Rome is burning and I’m still in my Brooklyn apartment.

The overwhelming generosity of my people to pull together a celebration that involves airfare and passports takes my breath away. Oh, I know there’s a friends-and-family Zoom in my near future and I suspect SilverFox has conjured up a cake (yellow with chocolate frosting, please) and for that I am so very grateful, but this pandemic sucks. Like all of us, I’m worried and stressed and angry, but today I’m so angry on my family’s behalf.

I’m so angry and worried for all of you, too. We are living through great uncertainty even as we try so hard to hold on to “normal.”   The pandemic edges out what we know and we’re left hurtling through our strange days. Truly, a trip like that is a luxury, and our world is a mess. It can wait. We are all missing something; we all have loss; we are all grieving. If it’s not an event, it’s lost work, lost school, expected opportunities that are no longer on offer. People are hungry, scared, worried for loved ones, so uncertain. We miss each other so very much, in the smallest and largest ways. But we do what we can in the uncertainty - we wear masks, we stay in, we send funny texts to relieve stressed friends. We’re grateful when the birthday still comes.

And come it has. Birthdays are never really normal, are they? They signal an evolution, change, the excitement that a better kind of uncertainty brings. My young nephew thinks of birthdays as “leveling up” and he has eagerly awaited this particular leveling up of mine for years. 

So in the interest of getting brave, leveling up and gift-giving, I chose to do something that scares me as I await tonight’s big Zoom - I made a video of me singing and playing a song for you that I have wanted to sing for years.  Could it be better? Oh heavens yes: I need a better mic, I need to not think, I need to practice the piano (I know, Mom…). But I had to do it, even though it puts me on edge. It sums up how I feel today and how I hope to move through this.

You have to care enough not to wait for perfect.

This big birthday is about choosing to put one foot in front of the other while accepting the uncertainty of being in the world. It’s about leveling up, being imperfect and being grateful to get to do so.

We’re all missing our own Ireland - whatever or whoever that is for us. In the meantime, please accept this gift instead. I hope it brings you solace, comfort, joy, maybe even a giggle at my bobbles and imperfections. What a gift, and what a blessing. Level up, girl.