Sunday, April 15, 2007

5th Birthday Overseas

So here it is - my 5th birthday celebrated outside of the United States. One more and I will have celebrated the majority of my birthdays in my 20s as an expatriate.
Birthday flowers - compliments of my staff.
Oops, sorry guys, I don't intend to start a massive "you forgot my birthday guilt trip" - you actually haven't forgotten - yet! My birthday is April 15th (tax day guys - not an easy day to forget, just a hard day to remember for the RIGHT reasons), but also, according to my Dad's philosophy, I'm not actually allowed to truly celebrate my birthday until the hour I was born, so that means 6:05 PM April 15th - and THAT means not until 6:05 AM April 16th for me in Vietnam! My father used to love to tease me with that when I got overly excited about my birthday as a kid. I used to view waiting all day as the ultimate torture - but now as I move further away in distance and time from that blessed event it's become away to prolong the moment (and I suppose as I get to the age of regretting the annual celebration, a way of evading the inevitable).

One of my college professors gave us some of the best advice I've ever heard, and even more applicable to maintaining mental health when living as an expat: she told about an elderly friend of hers who for every birthday baked a whole bunch of cakes and invited all of her friends and then gave them gifts. She said she herself wasn't very good at remembering birthdays (except her own) but she always felt disappointed when her birthdays passed without much noticed. So she started throwing her own parties - and enjoyed every birthday after that. I think that's the best philosophy I've heard - and if you were here I'd bake cakes for you and give you gifts to thank you for being such great friends to me.

But as you are not here, I simply took that philosophy and combined it with another anticipated birthday of another staff member and the last day of our Japanese intern and the excuse of staving off Friday the 13th jinxes to arrange a semi-surprise post-staff meeting party. There were flowers (left over from a stakeholder forum the day before), fruit (some left from the forum, others fresh-bought), snacks, cakes (yes, there is a fine bakery just across the street from our office specializing in fancy cakes - heads above the quality of Madagascar cake) with candles, and even presents - rather than receiving, I (and Tomoko) gave presents to the staff in honor of the day.

And so the afternoon passed joyfully (I say Tomoko and I did a 90% good job of selecting gifts from the tourist shops in Hanoi for our staff members, and the cakes were loved by all), and all left to celebrate the weekend, leaving me in peace to enjoy my own little bit of downtime.

So today I'll use my birthday (and a half!) to 1) remember my mom and what she had to go through on this day - thank you for giving up your Easter dinner for me! and 2) count all my friends and blessings that I have already been honored with in the first 28 years of my life, and there have been many, and finally 3) look forward to all the adventures yet to come. Thank you all for your support in getting me to where I am. I could never have dreamed it before, but now, I can't imagine anything more right. Yet, the most joyful part is the number 3 - and that I can be thankful that there is still room in my life for me to have had a wish over the candles on my cake. What would the fun of life be if there was no room left for wishing?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Missing Easter dinner was worth it!