My last post was pretty intense, and I think it might have given the wrong impression. Overall, I had a great birthday on Sunday. I did eat birthday cake, which was delicious. And I opened two cookbooks from my sister which I’ve had fun looking through and planning future meals with. It was just that moment of time when I looked at my cake where I was just inundated with memories of birthdays of old. From childhood to adulthood, 46 birthdays that I had with my mom. The one that really stood out in my mind was 1999. She had had a very close call with blood poisoning the summer of 1998 and was still recovering by the time January rolled around. When I came downstairs that morning, there sitting on the kitchen counter was an orange with a burning candle sticking out of it. She knew she wasn’t able to bake a cake, so she improvised. She thought it was a silly gesture, but it meant more to me than she ever knew.  I knew this birthday would be a difficult day, but I thought it wouldn’t be harder than my mom’s birthday or Christmas had been. It was just looking at that cake that caused a very large burble of primal grief to come rushing to the surface of my consciousness. The intensity of the feelings and emotions were just so overwhelming and caught me off guard completely. At that moment, I missed her so terribly and felt the rawness of that loss. That rawness stuck with me into the next day when it expressed itself in that poem. I posted it because I’ve come to see my blog as a safe space to express what I’m going through; the good and the bad. To be honest, it’s the first time I’ve felt so safe to say what is on my mind so freely. So, in a roundabout way, this post is a thank you to all of you who have accepted me into your worlds and lives. Like that birthday orange, you will never know the full extent of what that has meant to me.