Break the Birthday Cycle

Over the years, I’ve seen what birthdays can do to a wo/man. All the dark matter she carries within her may erupt into moments of self-pity, regret and feeling not good enough. The only remedy to this conundrum is to realize the truth of who you are.

You are an aspect of the divine Creatrix. Everything else is an idea.

Time is an idea. Clocks and calendars are ideas. And we are each trained into relationship with time, clocks and calendars.

One of the ideas I’ve noticed in the female psyche — for myself and for the women I work with — is the sense of entitlement that piggy backs on the belief that birthdays are the time when we get to exercise what it is we think we deserve or what we are entitled to. And it almost always leads to disappointment. Because the thing we are most longing to connect to has little to do with other people being able to give us what we think we should have.

We live in a society obsessed with age which is the thing that results in the marking of time with clocks and calendars. Who would you be if you didn’t know your age?

I’ve listened to many a woman rage and cry on her birthday. I’ve witnessed many a woman beat herself up with self-loathing because she’s not who she thought she could be, should be, would be on a birthday. I’ve seen a woman set out to celebrate her birthday only to regret the drama that actually ensued in her couple or her family on the occasion.

It’s all a colossal waste of life energy.

And I have a simple solution … the truth.

Why not honour the mother who birthed you on your birthday? Regardless of who or what she turned out to be to you, she is the one who laboured to bring you here. So let it be her birth-day. Give it back to her. In a society that still doesn’t fully value the work of mothering, it is a way we can claim value for mothers.

This automatically reroutes any of the dark matter of self-entitlement. And acknowledges that who each of us really is, lives outside of time.

The day my mother birthed me is HER birthday and it is my arrival-in-Earth-School-day.

As mother, I love claiming the days my sons were born as my birth-days because it is an opportunity to honour what I went through to bring them here. And make no mistake, where there is a human being, there is a mother who made their arrival possible.

This may all seem silly to some of you but I have experienced first hand what this idea is capable of shifting.

On your birthday, forget yourself and remember the woman who made your life possible. Whether you know her or not, and regardless of the circumstances of your arrival, you are here and life never makes any mistakes. So, whisper it to yourself or say it out loud, “Thank you for my life.” And then feel how great it is to be alive. Everything else will find it’s place in your day when you can begin here at the beginning.

In Love,

Magi