49 1/2

My birthday has traditionally been a bit of a doggy downer for me. Maybe it’s because in some unconscious way it reminds me of the trauma of my birth (for a recount read my post “The Gift”), the origin of the deep feeling of having been banned to a hopeless state of separation. What I can say for sure is that my birthday has most always felt like a disappointment. I’m serious about the unconscious connection to the original event. I mean, honestly, imagine being in a fight for survival just wishing for it to end only to be birthed into another fight for survival equally as intense as the one before. Oh, you get it. We all get it.

I’m not sure when my chest collapsed in to protect my heart, but I’m going to guess I was born this way. My shoulders roll deeply forward, creating this hollow wall in front of my heart. It’s been called to my attention in various ways throughout my life. I don’t have flexibility in my shoulders and that was always a struggle in gymnastics. It is point of contention in yoga, this effort to roll my shoulders back to give my heart space. When my Reiki master first worked on me she said the vision that she got was that I have a picket fence around my heart. And then there is my tai chi master who would give me hugging lessons to try relax this physical wall that is encoded into my body. Yes, our traumas get encoded into our bodies.

Then there is breathing. Just ugh. I have a love-hate but mostly hate relationship with breathing. Honestly, do I have to? You want me to actually breathe as I move?? Why??? My breath runs shallow. I used to near pass out at the end of a floor routine because I hardly took a breath the whole time I was doing it. When I am sleeping you might not think that I am breathing at all. Seriously, people have checked to see if I am. When it comes to energy, I don’t connect in the yogic sense, through prana. That requires breathing. Just like heat flows through convection, conduction and radiation, I would say that it is the same with our own energy flows. You can move energy in and out through breathing (convection), through your chakras and energy meridians (conduction), or through your general aura (radiation). These are just metaphorical equivalencies. I tend toward conduction. In the meantime, I keep my aura pretty tight to my body and as for breathing- just no. I don’t get it.

Aerobic stuff, especially running (and partly because of a bum knee), are not fun. But these days I am doing it. Running that is. I decided last summer to figure this whole thing out, so I started trail running to see if my knee could handle it (pavement is out of the question). So far, so good on the knee front. Then there is the breathing. Of course running forces me to breathe deeply. Because my shoulders cave in so much, my arms have always pumped side to side across my body rather than front to back. I decided last week to experiment with that by forcing the issue (making my arms swing front to back) the entire time I was running. A funny thing happened. It opened up my chest. And guest what? I could breathe. I am almost fifty years old with a lifetime full of athletics and nobody has ever made that connection for me. I could breathe. And you know what else? I felt my heart chakra open up. As it did, these words immediately entered my head: “Lead with your heart.” You see it really is all just one thing- body, mind, heart, spirit. Just one thing. Adjust any one of them and the others change. They have to.

So five years ago I decided to start taking this birthday matter into my own hands. Rather than just sit around dreading the disappointment that was sure to come (unconsciously, that is), I decided to start planning fun things to do for my birthday. One year it was a trip to New York City including a party with my NYC peeps. The next year it was LA, the following Mexico City, and then Stockholm. That has worked beautifully! One of the things that has been so great about it is that it has given my wife a framework to plug into rather than having to approach it through a minefield that she didn’t even know was there until she stepped on one. And trust me, she has stepped on a few!

So this is a big year for me. I will be turning the big 5-0 in December. First things first, I don’t mind. It’s not the age that bothers me. It’s the separation. So I’ve been thinking about how to celebrate this one with varying thoughts, but no concrete plans as of yet. We are still in the midst of getting ourselves settled in Vermont, so it’s not at the forefront of my mind even. It especially wasn’t at the forefront of my mind last Saturday.

There is no polite way to say it, last Saturday was a shit show! Literally. All I wanted to do was sleep in, relax, unwind, etc. after my trip to DC. I was exhausted, having left at 3:30 AM one day only to return at 3:30 AM 48 hours later. The next thing I knew Shannon had come up to report that we can’t use the toilet- again. It’s not flushing. It had been acting up for a couple of weeks. And did I mention it was Saturday? Overtime plumber fees will kill your weekend for sure. Of course it also kills their weekend too. So our friend Jean came over from across the lake to crawl under the house with Shannon to see if they could tell if there was anything wrong with the pipe, as has been the case before. No dice. Mind you, I still haven’t gotten out of bed because I am cranky, tired as all get out, and I have to pee like a racehorse. I would not have been any help in that state of being.

I heard Shannon and Jean back in the house working on the toilet to see what parts might not be working. They came upstairs to borrow some parts off of the upstairs toilet, which hasn’t been working for awhile either. That’s right, we had no working toilet. Not a one. I have to hand it to those two- they were determined! Of course one is a native Vermonter and the other is the first female to have reached full retirement from the carpenter’s union in Boston (and both hockey players, of course). They were not about to get beaten by a stupid toilet. Finally, they figured out that there was no fixing the toilet. We needed a new one. Worse yet, there was no guarantee that the toilet was the root of the problem. Shannon came upstairs to give me the report.

Now, let me just say here that when I am in the aforementioned state of being, I’m not the kindest person in the world. There. I said it. In fact, I can be downright ornery (verbally speaking). Shannon, who had gently and mindfully let me continue to sleep while trying to deal with this ordeal, was prepared to go to the store to buy a new toilet and Jean was going to go with her. She knew, however, that her architect wife was going to have an opinion about the toilet. This wasn’t a short term purchase. It’s one we knew we would be making anyway, and it’s hopefully going to be our toilet for life. So, yes, I knew I had to have an opinion. I had to get up and accompany Shannon to the store. I knew I had to because Shannon is frugal (which is often a good thing), and what we were needing was going to cost way more than she was going to be comfortable with. Now it would have been nice if I had communicated that all to her in a loving, appreciative, and kind way. I did not. Let’s just leave it at that.

While I got up and put some clothes on, Shannon told Jean to run for her life! She’d call her when we got back. Then, rather than going defensive and then offensive on me, she so gently just stayed quiet and calm (on the outside anyway) on our drive into town, giving me a nonjudgemental space to calm down in. And I did. The toilet shopping was tense, but she trusted my judgment. It cost twice as much as she was anticipating, but she didn’t fight me. She trusted me.

I am telling you this in part to give testament to the amount of personal work that Shannon has done in the twelve years that we have been together. It is truly inspiring. I’m not sure I would have been as graceful if the roles had been reversed. As fierce competitors, our MO has been to get into standoffs that could last for days, weeks, months. But instead of going there, Shannon pulled the perfect tai chi master move. She didn’t resist. It allowed all of my negative energy and the underlying fears to dissipate. With the tension of purchasing the toilet behind us, I was able to say and truly mean those magic words, “I am sorry.” It needed a little more punch than that, so I added “I was a complete asshole.”

We went to lunch to give ourselves a breather before heading home to continue with the shit show. That’s when she broke it to me:

“So, I had this great idea. I’ve been working on it for two months now. Turning 50 is a big deal so I wanted to surprise you by throwing you a surprise 49 1/2 birthday party. I got in touch with some of your closest friends to see if they could fly into Vermont for a long weekend.”

Micki was of course first and then she rattled off all of the friends she had contacted, at least one of whom she had never even met or talked to before. A ton of planning had gone into it and the long birthday bash weekend was supposed to be starting on the coming Wednesday (now this past Wednesday) night. She went on:

“Everyone was so excited and trying to figure out how to swing it, but one by one something got in the way and the list kept shrinking. I kept telling myself it would still be great as each person regretfully declined. Then it was down to just Micki. I still thought it would be great. Then, this morning, about an hour into the toilet debacle, she called and left a message. She can’t make it because her daughter, Haley (also one of my former players), looks like she is going to give birth earlier than anticipated and she can’t risk it.”

I was stunned. I had zero inkling of an idea that she had been working on all of this behind the scenes. I could see the sheer defeat in her face. I was stunned. Did I say that? Hearing her tell this story literally took my breath away. In that moment, I felt so incredibly connected. I felt connected to her, for sure. But I also felt connected to every friend that she had contacted as she told me how excited each one was and how hard each one had tried to make it happen. She has done some super-sweet things for me in our time together, but this one might be the topper. And it’s because she knows me. So much knowingness went into this whole thing. To all of the friends who tried so hard to make it happen, thank you, thank you, thank you! Please know that I feel your love. As for you, Shannon, thank you for knowing me. That’s really the best thing that you can ever give me. Oh, and, did I mention that I’m sorry about the whole toilet thing??? By the way, we have a rocketship of a toilet now and the shit has been cleaned out of our (septic) system, so feel free to visit! All puns intended.