🧁Personal Reflection: Birthday Memories

 🥳🧁A Quiet Birthday

It’s my birthday, and I don’t feel like celebrating.

I didn’t celebrate any of my sons’ birthdays this year either. I don’t fully understand why. I love them deeply—fiercely, even—but something hurt too much. So I didn’t celebrate mine, and I won’t pretend that’s okay or not okay.

It just is.

I did cry today. 🌧️

🧠 When Memory Arrives Without Warning

I was pulled back into one of my birthdays with my dad. I think it was my 11th.

With my dad, I always got special treatment. I was allowed into the shed with the adults while the other kids stayed outside. But I never stayed long. I always drifted back to the other kids. Even then, I didn’t want privilege if it meant exclusion.

Belonging has never been loud for me. It’s never been about being chosen over others. Even as a child, I seemed to understand something instinctively:

Belonging that costs someone else their place isn’t real belonging.

🖤 The Aunties Who Felt Like the World

That day, I drank my first alcoholic drink. One of my aunties gave it to me—Kat or Jenny. I can’t remember which.

They were tall, long black hair, slim, striking. Staunch when they needed to be. Kind overall. They were my idols. Looking back now, I realise I never really knew what they were—but if I had to name it now, I’d say:

✨ Kind

✨ Gentle

✨ Beautiful

✨ Tough

✨ Staunch

Jenny died not long after that birthday. A car accident. She was the first death I ever experienced. I don’t think I understood it then—but today, I felt it fully. The shock. The weight. The suddenness. 💔

Kat stayed.

🚗 A Body That Remembers Before the Mind

Kat drove a black Mercedes-Benz with tinted windows and electric seats. She’d take us to the natural hot pools at night—no planning, just go.

I didn’t realise until much later that she had cared for me as a baby—when my dad had taken me from my mum. Knowing that now explains something I could never put into words back then: why I felt calm with her, why I felt safe, why I felt an ache of envy toward her son.

My body remembered her long before my mind ever could. 🧠❤️

🏍️ Noise, Fear, and Belonging

That day, I sculled a purple Guarana and started to feel strange. The bikes started up in the driveway—loud, roaring. My dad did burnouts, tearing into the ground.

I cried.

He paid me five dollars to ride on the back of his Harley. I screamed the whole time. I never rode on the back of a bike again.

As an adult, I’ve always been wary of bikes. My dad lost his leg in a motorbike accident before I was born. That danger lived quietly in the background of my life.

And yet.

When my son turned 11, he got his first dirt bike. Then came more boys. More bikes. The same whizz. The same roar.

Somehow, instead of fear, it became comfort.

The sound that once terrified me became the sound of life continuing. 🏍️✨

🌱 What Belonging Really Is

Belonging, I’ve learned, isn’t always a place or a celebration. It’s a moment where you don’t have to perform. Where your body feels recognised before your mind catches up.

As I grew older, belonging became conditional. Fragile. Something that could be withdrawn for saying the wrong thing, needing too much, or refusing to be quiet. I learned to survive without it. To keep moving. To build scaffolding where there should have been ground.

But it never disappeared.

It hid in sound.

In memory.

In repetition.

In my children moving through the world.

In the strange relief of realising that something from my past no longer meant danger—it meant continuity. 🌊

🎈 A Different Kind of Birthday

That’s where I am now.

On my birthday.

Not celebrating.

Remembering.

Some days aren’t for cake or candles. Some days are for acknowledging where you came from—and what you survived carrying with you.

I don’t belong to a perfect story. I belong to fragments. To moments of being held imperfectly but genuinely. To a lineage of survival that didn’t always know how to stay, but did know how to show up.

Some birthdays aren’t meant to be loud.celebrations 🎂

Some are meant to be reminders of who you are and where you came from. 🤍