Oops.

Photo by tabitha turner on Unsplash

Today I have been doing laundry, catching up on paperwork and housework, and basking in the afterglow of a 4 day visit from one of my best friends. We met freshman year of college and have been friends for the 40 years since then…which frankly blows my mind. We’ve known each other through marriages, raising children, career changes, health problems, aging and dying parents and all the everything of adult life. We haven’t lived in the same place for the entire time and sometimes have gone years without talking or seeing each other, but somehow we always get back in touch and it just feels like picking up where we left off the last time. This is a rare thing in our modern disconnected world, and I treasure it as one of the most precious relationships of my life.

We haven’t seen each other in nearly a decade but the stars aligned for her to stay with us for a few days on her way home from a West Coast trip. We had a wonderful time hanging out and talking, and at one point we were discussing my friend and my daughter’s upcoming birthdays and messing around with an astrology app.

For the past 20 years I have been telling people the story of how my daughter was originally going to share a birthday with my friend, based on my pregnancy due date, but kiddo decided to hang out in utero for another nine days. At that point, my friend told me that her actual birthday was 2 days after that date.

I have been sending her “Happy Birthday” wishes on the wrong day for the past 30+ years.

Oops.

She laughed and then went on to say how much she has treasured my birthday greetings that have arrived with clockwork consistency, two days early, for decades. Fortunately, in her mind remembering the birthday at all is more important than getting the day right. It also pretty much sums up my personality: I often don’t quite hit the mark when it comes to being “normal”, but I am deeply devoted to those I love.

I can’t begin to express what it feels like to find out that despite getting something consistently wrong for decades, she saw not the error but the love I feel for her. She apparently never even felt the need to correct me. This is something rare and wonderful.

Despite appearances to the contrary (probably because of my Leo ascendant), I have always struggled a lot with believing that I have value and am lovable. My neurodivergent diagnosis came recently in my mid-fifties and I have been having an unending stream of “Aha!” moments ever since. For the past few years I’ve been integrating this new knowledge and discovering a new life and identity that capitalizes on my strengths instead of keeping me on a never-ending treadmill of “trying to be normal” and trying to fix everything that’s “wrong” about me. It’s been easy for me over the years to get into relationships with people who breadcrumb love and approval and keep me believing that if I can just “fix myself” and work harder then I’ll be deserving of being treated the way I want to be and we’ll all live happily ever after.

Spoiler: it’s a scam. These people can’t love, they can only manipulate and extract.

I’m having a good laugh about the decades of premature birthday greetings and reframing the way I look at “getting it right” and “being normal”. Devotion and showing up, however imperfectly, are vastly more important than precision a great deal of the time in life. People who truly love me see that I keep my word, clean up my messes and care deeply about the stuff that matters. My socks don’t always match while I’m doing it, but oh well.

My heart is full of gratitude for my friend and her big loving heart. All of the things that I love about myself today are things that she has seen, nurtured and believed in over the years, and it has made all the difference in my life. I’m incredibly lucky. Thanks Suzanna Barrett for being your wonderful self.

May all of you be seen so clearly and loved so well by someone.