My birthday is December 30, five days after Jesus’s and one day before New Year’s Eve. It is the perfect day to be born if, like me, you prefer your birthday slide by unnoticed. I never had to bring any classroom cupcakes. Not a single black streamer hung from my office door on my fortieth, which suited me just fine.

On my twenty-first birthday, my mother threw a party for me at her favorite Irish pub in my hometown of Cincinnati. Although she’d finished graduate school and was teaching history by then, we didn’t have a lot of money. I knew she had spent a lot on this party to make it special. That night, my high school friends and I, home from college for the holidays, ate fried mozzarella sticks, drank pitchers of cheap beer, and played pool, but I couldn’t wait for the real party to start, when we would leave my mom behind and head out to the bars on our own. I never imagined a time she wouldn’t be there, waiting for me to get home.

In my early thirties, my family started an annual tradition of spending the holidays on one of Florida’s barrier islands. The year I turned forty-three, our tenth trip, my mother had been too sick to come. A card had arrived from her a few days before we left.  Underneath a photo I’d snapped of her at Thanksgiving, she’d written We will miss you at Christmas! That was the last picture I would take of her, and the last Christmas she would be alive.

Before she died, she sent me a video of an Irish wake in a small pub packed with the dead man’s friends standing shoulder to shoulder drinking pints of beer. One friend has climbed up on the bar and is slur-screaming his words, clearly a few pints in. He was salt of the earth. Never be replaced. But we will remember him forever. He breaks into the song “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers and the entire place erupts, screaming the lyrics in unison. They seem to be saying we are alive, and we miss our friend.

My mother and I never spoke of her impending death. I sensed she wanted to protect me from the anguish she knew it would cause. This email was the only time she ever admitted to the possibility of dying. In it, she wrote one sentence: This is what I have in mind, but I don’t know if this guy has a passport!

She got her Irish wake, in the same pub we’d celebrated my twenty-first birthday, but I was too sad and self-conscious to climb up on the bar and belt out a song. I never told her how desperately I would ache for her. I never told her how lucky I’d been to have her as my mother. There are times you must do things that seem impossible and sometimes you only have one chance to get it right. Life is urgent. It demands we get over ourselves and just come out and say what we mean.

This year I turned forty-five. By now I have found my tribes. I have a tribe of fellow writers who double as therapists. I have a tribe of old high school friends, the only people who share certain memories of my younger self.  One friend and I are closer now than we were as teenagers. We have known each for thirty years, a length of time so long it doesn’t make sense to me. A time so long I only see her inner self, that unchanging core of her being within us all that doesn’t change from year to year. You look exactly the same, I tell her, and it is true.

We’ve both worked hard and had successful careers. Like my mother, her father died of colon cancer when we were in our early forties. Our other parent, her mother and my father, are both living with late-stage Alzheimer’s. We’ve talked about the best adult diapers and what to do when a parent has a phone conversation without the phone. We talk about how sometimes when no one is paying attention, my dad eats plastic.

My friend is trying to get pregnant. I do not tell her how hard it is to have a child. I do not remind her about my severe case of post-partum depression and anxiety about keeping the baby alive, which only led to more insomnia. Like a plane crash with multiple failures, I was an unhinged pilot in bad weather with unintelligible instructions blaring from a faulty instrument panel. I didn’t sleep more than three hours at a time for weeks on end and nearly crashed.

When a call from my doctor finally came, I was on the staircase. I lay down on the landing and listened to her advice, too tired to make it the rest of the way up. She told me I had to sleep and prescribed Ambien. The night I took it, my husband woke me up to breastfeed and handed me a baby I did not recognize. At least you didn’t try to drive anywhere my mother had said. That can happen, you know. Yes, things could have been worse. I mention none of this to my friend.

Last year, when we thought the pandemic was about to end, she and I rented a house together in Palm Springs with a few other friends. One night after dinner, a few of us curled up on the couch by the fireplace, opened her laptop, and shopped for an egg donor. The search criteria at the top of the page included weight, race, and hair color. I did not think these were the best search criteria for choosing a human. My friend indicated her favorites by clicking a heart at the top right corner of each girl’s picture. Her top picks were thin blonds who were very cute babies.

I read through the donor profiles. I gave no points for height, looks, or former chubby cheeks. By forty-four, I knew the only thing that matters is your child’s happiness. As such, I vetoed all painters, writers, and musicians. Artists seemed too risky. I passed on those who described themselves as an emotional child. My friend will be sixty when this egg turns fifteen and, out of my love for her, I search for the happy-go-lucky girl.

My daughter had been an especially angry toddler. Intellectually, I knew these were the terrible twos, but I couldn’t see beyond them. The parenting books advised not to give into tantrums. Stay calm, wait it out, they all said. My best friend said don’t negotiate with terrorists.

One day, terrified I was ruining her life by creating a spoiled and miserable child, I said no. At that, she lost her mind. After fifteen minutes of screaming, I put her in her room and shut the door. When I returned, I discovered she had removed the wooden bar from her closet, slid the hangers off, and beat a small, wooden stool to pieces, like the fax machine in Office Space. I resigned myself to the fact that she might not be happy, which meant I wouldn’t be happy, either.

But my fear was unfounded. She turned into a tween who pirouettes across the living room and sings in the shower. I stay in these moments, leaning my ear to the bathroom door, listening to her little voice. But I know she won’t be happy forever. I’ve heard teenagers take a trip around the moon. If you are lucky, they come back. I came back, and I was happy. Maybe in this way I gave my mother what she needed most. Life changes, for better or worse and I try not to anticipate it too much. I try not to write the ending before I get there.

 Months after our trip to Palm Springs, I visited my friend in San Francisco. I told her to purchase a glider, which is not the same as a rocker, and to get swaddles with Velcro. My advice was sincere if not comprehensive. She was sitting at her desk in her living room with her jeans unbuttoned on a Zoom call. She works for the promotional division of Staples that sells logoed tchotchkes. She and her colleagues were discussing an idea for a care package that companies can send to new mothers. She asked me what should be included. I said earplugs, Preparation H, and an enema. A good therapist and, if possible, a stay-at-home father.

She said no seriously.

I said I am being serious.

We walked to Souvla for lunch and cried over Greek salads because her mother will never know her baby and my father will never again know me. I did not tell her that if I had a baby now, there’s a good chance I wouldn't make it to my forty-sixth birthday.

Except for existential terror and the few times I tried to make a phone call using the calculator app on my iPhone, I don’t mind being middle aged too much. Even it if I did, there’s nothing I can do about it. Acceptance is something I am still learning.

 Middle age has brought humility I didn’t have in my youth. When a tennis opponent slams a winning ball at my feet or hits a return shot so low and hard that the ball sails past me, I swallow my pride. Nice shot, I say. I wish I had a shot like that. Everyone deserves their time in the sun.

Every year I feel more and more grateful to have been born in a free country with economic opportunity. But I am also achingly sad about the world. I read about gorilla poaching in the Congo and set up a small, monthly donation to the African Wildlife Foundation, even though I wonder what good it will do. I try to solve the North Korea problem before falling asleep on my pillow-top bed. What about tunnels? Has anyone thought about tunnels?

At forty-five, I am less likely to become destitute, a fear that had looped, barely perceptible, in the background of my life’s soundtrack. Gone are the days I complained about the price of a cup of coffee. When I was too broke to fix my car and had to bike to my waitressing job all summer. By now, I have worked for many years and have saved some money. Plus, I am older and the money needn’t last as long as it once did. With the pressure of making money lifted, I am granted a certain freedom to decide how I want to spend the rest of my life. I know this is a clichéd, mid-life-crisis type of question, but I don’t care. Plus, the word crisis is all wrong. It is a mid-life awakening. The decision about how to spend the rest of one’s life is imperative, because this year two friends were diagnosed with serious diseases, one with breast cancer and the other with leukemia. They underwent chemotherapy and surgery and other horrible things like having to tell their children they have cancer. Their lives are saved, but it is a wake-up call. There is no time to waste.

I returned to Florida for Christmas this year. I considered bringing some of my mother’s ashes to scatter off the deck of the Rod N Reel, her favorite breakfast place perched at the end of the island’s main pier. It’s the place where, over greasy eggs and bacon, we used to watch the double-crested cormorants and pelicans dive into the green waters. The year my mother was diagnosed with cancer, she drank her evening glass of Chardonnay alone on the boat dock just beyond the pool in back of the house we rented. One night I was watching her from inside when a great blue heron landed on the dock just a few feet away from her. She appeared to start talking to him, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. She was probably telling him how pretty he was. He stayed and listened for a long while.

When I get home from that week at the beach, I text my best friend.

What are you up to this week?

Just counting the minutes until you get home.

I missed you too I say.

Want to go for a walk?

I can’t think of anything I'd rather do on my birthday than walk with an old friend. We agree to meet at our regular spot on the path. I grab my winter coat, a baseball cap, and sunglasses and step outside to a blast of wind. That morning, sitting in my office, I'd heard the thwack of empty seed pods hitting my window, but the sky was blue and the was sun shining. Now outside, the wind is whipping brittle leaves into mini tornadoes. I see my friend approaching, dragged by her two young huskies. I suggest we head the opposite direction, away from the trees, just in case.

When we get out onto the clear space, the wind is even stronger. With nothing to block its path, we are blasted with gusts that last five, ten, twenty seconds. Some gusts are so strong we have to stop, turn our backs, and wait. When the wind lets up, we turn back around and put our heads down.

There’s no point in turning around since we are already halfway there. We turn and face forward, marching on. My hat blows off and is gone in a flash, skipping away like tumbleweed. I spot its pink and aqua colors against a monotone landscape and pry it from the burrs of a dried bush fifty feet away. I walk backwards to catch up to her.

The wind flattens the dogs’ ears, but they are bred for worse weather, I figure. I hold my baseball cap with one hand and wrap the leash around the other. I shut my mouth tight and try to breathe through my nose, but it is like sticking my head out of a car window while screaming down the highway. I glance up at the powerlines swaying and whistling. I see a fifty-foot evergreen tree across the street that has snapped in half. The top half lies limp on the ground, like a dead body.

A semi-truck has blown over and is blocking two lanes of the parkway. We see a dust bowl in the distance, but upon closer investigation, realize it is a single source of billowing brown smoke. I spy a thin orange line of fire running along the open space beyond.

The end of days, my friend says.

She is kidding, but also not. There is one more day of 2021 left.

The fire we see will burn a thousand homes to the ground that day. A woman who loses everything will say I didn’t take the right things.

And what will I bring, as time accelerates into the future, my youth shrinking to a small dot in the rearview mirror? Gratitude, inspiration, and everyone I’ve ever loved, grab a place in back. Sorry guilt and regrets, you’ll have to catch the next car out. The cat gets shotgun.

When we get back to our neighborhood’s main boulevard, I look at my watch and notice that our regular 30-minute loop has taken an hour. I unwind the leash, hand it to my friend, and hustle home. I am late for a dentist appointment.

I turn left onto the trail that winds along the creek, the same one we started on. I look up at the bare cottonwood trees bending and creaking over the path that is now blanketed in sticks and branches. I check for signs of cracked trunks and broken limbs, but there’s no way to predict where a tree might fall, so I decide to run. I jog at first, jumping over branches and placing my feet in the empty spaces on the trail, careful not to turn an ankle. Ten, twenty, thirty yards. I run fast. This year will be better, I think. I duck my head into the wind and sprint as fast as I can.  At forty-five, I can still run all the way home.

-Christie DeLuca

Christie DeLuca lives with her husband and daughter in Boulder, Colo. She is a member of the Boulder Writing Studio and is currently at work on a manuscript about her experience working in the male-dominated world of construction. Her work has been published in industry publications Marketer Journal and Aspire, a gripping magazine about concrete. This is her first work of creative nonfiction.