Another Birthday Gone By, with a Broken Arm for Good Measure

So I’m happy to report that my headache/hangover from the event I described in my last entry was short-lived; I’ve just been super busy with job stuff the last few weeks, as I work at a university and fall term started up.

Still, I’m entering a difficult stretch of time, so it felt like a good time to re-engage. As a reminder, Chelsea’s birthday is late September (it actually happened last week), my birthday is three weeks later, she died the week after my birthday, and the week before our wedding anniversary. So what used to be an awesome time of year is now…complicated.

Surprisingly, her birthday last year was a lot easier than I thought it would be, given that she would have been 40 and it was the first birthday I experienced after her passing. I ended up having a lovely dinner with friends in which we talked about Chelsea and toasted her life at the beginning of the meal, but didn’t focus on her the entire time. I did something similar this year, and it landed emotionally about the same way, perhaps even a little less than last year.

The trend seems to be that, over time, the volume of grief is lowering, even if I still get whacked from time to time. My birthday last year was super hard, so I’m curious to see how I experience that day this year, as well as the two-year anniversary.

On a positive note, I am planning a quick trip back east in a month to see some friends. It won’t be the big event week that I had planned for August, but it will be a nice time to visit my old hometown, see some friends, and create some informal space to reflect on Chelsea’s life. The trip is also right after the two-year anniversary, so it’s timely.

Beyond that, life has been an interesting ride the last month, sort of akin to a game of whack-a-mole, in which one things goes well, but then another thing goes poorly. Case in point: my daughter E started kindergarten last month, which was great, but the increased activity led to a birthday party accident in which she took a tumble off a bouncy house and broke her wrist. We’ve spent the last two weeks navigating the US health care system, which is its own special treat (no offense to all my MD friends).

When I was a kid (cue the ‘get off my lawn’ motif), you broke a bone, you went to the doctor, you got a cast. Now, you go to the ER, who refers you to a pediatrician, who refers you to an orthopedist who may or may not treat kids, who may refer you to another ortho to get the cast. While I’ll concede that these new processes probably do lead to better medical outcomes, they do come at a logistical cost (and probably a financial one too); it’s been a frustrating time navigating all the logistics, as I was already super busy before this happened.

Part of being a parent is accepting that, with young kids, accidents are going to happen. I should also appreciate the fact that we made it over 5 years without an ER trip; apparently, by this age, I had already had a few ER visits, so I should be thankful that this was E’s first. The basic problem is that my daughter inherited my balance (which is suspect) but also possesses the confidence of a trapeze artist; a dangerous combination that lends itself to falls.

Still, the timing of this particular fall was less than awesome: I felt like we were just starting to get into a rhythm with kindergarten when, quite literally, the bones break. Hit one mole down, another pops up.

Although, very fun story: we were seeing her pediatrician to followup on the ER visit and he asked her what happened. Her response: “Well…I was jumping on a bouncy house and I jumped too high, then I fell (on the ground) and broke my arm, because gravity always wins.”

I was such a proud parent in that moment, as it took the pediatrician a few seconds to get the joke, and I reveled in the fact that my 5 year old has that degree of whit (to be fair, we had talked about the idea that gravity always wins earlier, but the way in which E spontaneously deployed that comment was amazing-kids truly are wonderful).

Back to whack-a-mole: The kindergarten transition was tricky, as all transitions have been. Open house night in particular was hard, in that I was there with E watching all these other mom/dad pairs with their kids, which foregrounded Chelsea’s absence. Her first day of school absolutely rocked me (and I’ve heard it’s common for parents on day 1 of kindergarten), although she was fine; “I love school” was her response when I picked her up that afternoon. Over time however, I think she’s had a little trouble adjusting to the environment, as many of her good friends are still in preschool and her preschool learning environment was amazing.

I’m not throwing shade on her current school, which is really good, but her preschool environment had an adult/child ratio of like 1:3 (compared to the current ratio of 1:20), and was much more student directed in terms of learning outcomes. Her current, kindergarten curriculum seems suspiciously like the 1st grade curriculum of my child hood, and I’ve got some larger concerns about the downward creep of academic standards in elementary school that prevents children from being children (more on that later). There are a lot of conversations and struggles I’m experiencing for which it would be great to have Chelsea around, again foregrounding the loss.

But I do have great friends, and a great community of support that continues to help me through this process. So I choose to be thankful, while simultaneously playing the daily game of whack-a-mole.

We’ll see how the next few weeks go. Hard to believe it’s almost been two years…