For those of you who follow us on twitter, you will be well aware of a lot of my core trauma. One aspect of this is trauma I suffered is around the celebration of my birthday. The trauma was so deep that I had banned birthday celebrations for myself. Not celebrating my birthday has been a source of pain for me, but it was a safety measure and kept me from having to deal with my core trauma connected to my birthday. Briefly stated, my mother viewed my birthday as a day of service because of how difficult it was to carry and deliver me. Over the years, various other things happened that added to that trauma. Birthdays became very painful for me and any time someone would try to celebrate me, if they got it wrong it would trigger me and I would hear my mother’s voice telling me how unlovable and underserving of celebration I was. Celebrating my birthday has always been high stakes for me. I thought my son and husband understood this but they didn’t and tried to celebrate my 50th birthday, which went horribly wrong.
My husband and I share everything on twitter, so I shared my trauma and hurt about how badly things went. Then, the most amazing thing happened. My husband and son read my tweets and finally got how traumatizing my birthdays had been and planned a three day “un-birthday” celebration for me. I had celebrated un-birthdays for them before but no one had given me an un-birthday celebration. Chad shared it on twitter and the outpouring of unbirthday wishes and support also gave me a lot of healing. Historically I had just ignored my birthday and my birthday pain. This year it came to a head, and now I am dealing with it. There is so much trauma to unpack from my childhood that I often pick and chose what I am going to work through and sometimes trauma is triggered and then I am forced to look at the source. This was the case with birthdays. What was surprising was how much the outpouring from people on the internet made a difference in my ability to process it and get to a more stable and secure place. I feel so humbled and honored by the support I received. I am blown away by how valued they all made me feel. I will be forever grateful for their support.