A Decade of Birthdays
Twenty: the last summer that I lived at my parents’ house in Boulder. I’ve spent a record amount of time reflecting on this summer over the past several months—it’s the central period of time in my graduate school thesis, about The Great Faith Crisis of the Summer of 2013. I spent that summer trying really hard: trying to be patient and to wait for what God had for me, trying to convince myself I wasn’t scared and angry, trying to take pictures that made my life look like Tumblr. (I was more or less unsuccessful on all of these counts.) The day of my birthday, some friends from high school came over—the same people I’d been celebrating birthdays with since I was twelve, though we wouldn’t celebrate together again for years. We went swimming and played Titanic on a floating dock at the lake by my parents’. I felt caught somewhere between childhood and adulthood, a liminal space, a surface tipping until you slide off.
Twenty-one: Charde, DeMo, and I led Too Hype teen camp during the day. After we cleaned up the community center and taken all the teenagers home, DeMo talked us into going out for Taco Tuesday. The bar he picked was called St. Dane’s, this shitty little red clapboard place along one of the highway ramps that emptied cars into downtown Houston. The alleyway where I parked would eventually get turned into a Whole Foods, where I would shop for leg wax years later. But that was before I waxed my legs, before I knew what to do with men’s interest. At Christian college, attraction had been coy, delicate, even secretive. Not so in Houston. DeMo sat next to me at the wooden patio picnic table and complimented my jeans (that is, complemented my ass in my jeans). He bought me a fireball shot for my birthday—what else did we drink? I can’t remember, but we must’ve downed a few rounds of beer—and Charde sang Amarillo Sky on the karaoke machine.
After years of fixating on futurity, consequences, and eternal rewards, I let myself relax into the belief that that single summer of working at the community center was enough, even if it never turned into anything else. I was so sick of calculating value based on duration—which is why, when I realized the way DeMo looked at me, how close he was sitting, the invitations he kept extending to hang out after work, even though I knew we wouldn’t sustain a relationship past my allotted two months in Texas, I accepted his offer to come over a few nights later. I was twenty-one, I figured. I could do whatever I wanted.
Twenty-two: the summer I spent farming at Serenity Knoll. David, my boss, was out working his day job in medical supply sales. The potatoes needed mounding. Mid-afternoon it started to thunderstorm, but I didn’t mind. I had short hair and wore khaki-colored clothing and got so slathered with mud I looked like a potato mound myself. David came home and snapped a picture of me out there in the rain and the dirt and I look so happy. That night we drove back roads to a restaurant in some tiny neighboring east Tennessee town, and we brought our dinners back in Styrofoam clamshells so we could eat by the newly installed fire pit behind the dance pavilion: blackened catfish and fried green tomatoes.
Twenty-three: my birthday fell in the final month of the nearly-year-long volunteer program, which I experienced as one of the most healing and wholesome years of my life to that point. My housemates let me plan the evening (which turned into a classic example of McKenzie Overdoes It), so we loaded sliced watermelon into our backpacks and set off under the highway. I’d planned a series of stops: the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Brazos Bookstore, and a park with splash pads where we played Ultimate Frisbee and ate the watermelon we’d carried all that way. I felt so loved: slick with it, sticky with it. Maybe that was the watermelon juice dripping from my chin, the sweat pooling in my knee pits, the municipal water from the splash pad that soaked my baggy tank top. But I told myself it was all love.
After four birthdays in a row in four starkly different contexts, I’d started to crave a valence of stability. I’d grown tired of attaching to birthdays the whimsical, untethered declaration, “who knows where I’ll be next year!” I wanted to see the same place through a full year of growth, I told God in my journal. So I decided to stay: in the house on Beulah Street, with the program for a second year. Everything but the house would change—and on the hardest days ahead, even it would feel foreign and inhospitable.
Twenty-four: one of the only birthdays from the past decade that’s fuzzy to me. It must’ve been on a Saturday, because I walked over to the chess tree during the day. Even going around the neighborhood by myself was a point of contention during that difficult year. I told the chess guys it was my birthday and they asked if I was going to do anything fun.
“This is exactly what I want to be doing,” I told them. And it was true. I remember feeling blessed, even in the midst of how stressful that year was, that the things I normally did were the same things I wanted to do on my birthday. I didn’t need to do anything out of the ordinary.
Twenty-five: Michael and I had just returned from our trip to Italy. I went to church at Holy Family in the morning. That was the summer Brandon, an intern (the technical term was “postulant,” I think) at the church, lived with us in the collective house on Beulah Street. After church a big group went out to lunch at Ramen Tatsu-Ya. Houston was home; I felt settled there, comfortable with landmarks and regular spots on every side of town. I had rhythms and routines and friends. I remember feeling light and free—unburdened. Michael made me a zucchini carrot cake because I’d told him that was the cake Mom always made for our birthdays. He’d slathered it in cream cheese frosting and roses—orange ones, my favorite color. He’d already said it out loud, but the cake made it inescapably clear: he loved me.
That night Alina and Naomi came over and surprised me and everyone sang Happy Birthday out of key, which always makes me laugh. Twenty-five. I didn’t know that I was a few months away from splitting our household apart, insisting on moving out, living on my own for the first time. I didn’t know that my departure, and the immaturity with which I handled it, would rupture my relationships with those housemates, such that they would never truly be repaired. That year set me on a different trajectory: I would get engaged before my next birthday.
Twenty-six: I threw myself a massive birthday bonfire get-together at Surfside Beach. Matthew, one of my best friends from college, flew in for the occasion, and to meet Michael for the first time. Michael gave me an inflatable duck tube—a perfect gift. The party was mostly people I’d met at tango, which was the social community I invested in after the volunteer program. While I was floating on my duck tube in the Gulf, one of the other women revealed she was pregnant. The church circles I grew up in cherished the idea of “doing life together,” but that tango crowd taught me that community isn’t exclusive to the religious. That group of dancers showed me how to build community around the higher power of connection, which may not be so different from what evangelicals worship.
Twenty-seven: my first birthday while married. My first birthday during the pandemic. My only birthday celebrated in our home at West Main, even though I think of us as having lived there around two years. During the summer of 2020, everything was small. Michael had already been required to go back to the office, but we didn’t go out for my birthday. He brought me home a massive ice cream cake, which I kept in the freezer and ate throughout the next month, one slice at a time drizzled with coconut milk.
I participated in my first real writing workshop that summer. I was writing about the contra dancing road trip Maria and I took together my junior year of undergrad, and I looked up Warren Wilson College to get the details right, and I found the webpage for their low-residency Master’s in Fine Arts. When Michael walked in on my birthday holding that ice cream cake, I was sitting at my covid desk in the front room, daydreaming about attending Warren Wilson’s MFA program. That’s when I started looking into grad school.
Twenty-eight: one week after we finally got the keys to our rental house in Boulder. My mother-in-law, Steph, and her boyfriend, Trey, came to help us get settled in. On my birthday, we took an e-bike tour of Boulder that took us up to NCAR, where we could see Boulder County laid out before us like a welcome mat. I didn't know what our time in Boulder would hold—that I would shift my focus from writing about race and neighborhood development in Houston to writing about growing up evangelical, church camps and holiness and all the boys I wasn’t supposed to like.
Twenty-nine: I worked at the liquor store during the day, and Michael and I shared a quiet night at home. What I told the men at the chess tree five years before holds true: I don't mind doing normal things on my birthday, because I like my life.
That summer is a blur—writing my thesis was my central focus, and we’d been back in Boulder for a year, so most of my attention went to stitching together all these different moments from the past. There’s a downside to this, in that the summer of 2022 is obscured behind all the other memories I inhabited during that time. It seems to be the dilemma of writing: in order to create another world, writing siphons you, bit by bit, out of this one. But I also can’t tell you how much joy it’s brought me to hole up in my craft lab and piece together a story. And that I hope that the work I’m doing is meaningful, contributory, and that eventually, when it’s ready, that story will be pressed onto pages and go out into the world and meet other people, and a bit of my experience can find a home inside of them.
Dirty thirty: this year’s birthday was everything I could’ve wanted and more. Naomi and her boyfriend Andrew flew in from Dallas for the weekend, so they were here when I got up. We drank coffee and sat on the back porch and talked until Michael told me to make myself scarce, so I drove to Lafayette and went to the dog bar with Hannah and submitted book reviews to literary magazines while Michael, Naomi, and Andrew went to Party City and got the house set up.
When I returned, a giant “Chateau Celebration” champagne bottle balloon was strapped to a table on the front porch. Two square canopies kept the sun off the front yard, and everything was bedecked in streamers. Michael had kegs and catering set up in the side yard, and we had the most fabulous party. Michael had arranged for us to play a celebrity-name-guessing game, which resulted in our sweet next-door-neighbors getting called Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley for the rest of the afternoon.
People played corn hole and I broke open a T-Rex piñata and Andrew (who’s a sommelier) taught me how to saber a bottle of champagne. Jace and Ira brought Baby Evan, who’s almost one year old. We drank armagnac that’s as old as I am and stayed up talking and (huge accomplishment here) I did not overdo it!
I woke up the next morning to an email on my phone that one of my lit mag submissions was accepted! So it was basically the best birthday ever.
The party was technically a three-for-one celebration: my birthday, finishing my master’s, and getting promoted at work. After nearly two years of cashiering, I’m now stocking the shelves in the liquor department. If you told me fifteen years ago that I’d be working in retail—liquor retail, no less—at the age of thirty, I probably would’ve tried to trip you on the sidewalk out of spite. But I love it. It’s a job that fits with my values: I don’t have to work too much, and it allows me to stay home, to hole up in my craft lab and write. And it forces me to confront my own internalized elitism, to choose to be pleased with the choices I’ve made and where they’ve led me.
A few days after my thirtieth birthday, Michael and I flew to Tennessee and picked up a rental car and drove two-lane highways through Southeast Appalachia to London, Kentucky, for his great-aunt’s eightieth birthday party. The decorations for her party bore some rose pink, mylar resemblance to the decorations for mine.
I’m still in the stage of my life where birthdays feel like starting blocks: what will I accomplish in the stretch of track ahead? Which of my goals will I check off this year? Will I finish the manuscript? What pieces will I manage to publish, and in which journals? Will Michael get a promotion at work?
But we’ve spent this week playing cards with fleets of relatives (I’ve sketched three overlapping family trees in my notebook) and telling stories and tightening distance-stretched ties. Aunt Judy’s easy smile, when everyone gathered in her honor sang Happy Birthday, invited me to see birthdays as a mile marker for gratitude. There will come a time when the accomplishments and the accolades don’t really matter anymore. If relationships and time together is what I’ll cherish then, that’s also what I want to make room to cherish and chase after now.
