Birthdays and blues

The tradition. The birthday tradition. I don’t remember when it started. I don’t remember why it started. I can’t imagine a young foodie like myself would not have liked regular birthday cake. I also can’t remember if it was just me who had the alternate birthday cake tradition. Did Sherry have it too? What about Jeff? Wendy? Maybe. I only remember me, because after all it was about me. It was my day. It was my birthday. 

I looked forward to my birthday every year for the angel food cake. For the strawberries. For the cream. We never had birthday parties. Just us. 

Yesterday was my birthday. Yesterday I had the tradition. Angel food cake, strawberries and whipped topping. It was good. It wasn’t quite the same though. I healthed it up a little bit. I used fresh strawberries and canned whipped topping, instead of whipping the cream myself and instead of using the sugar-laden strawberries. The traditional strawberries were those little tin frozen containers that you had to use some type of key wrench-type thing to open. They were doused in sugar syrup and tasted heavenly. The kind of sugary sweet that you wanted to let run in your mouth when the container was held above your mouth. It was so good. So sweet and so comforting. The angel food cake was more dense than the traditional round ones. It was a rectangle shaped frozen one. I just had to let it thaw. It still tasted good. The strawberries are what I prefer, fresh. They actually had flavor. And the whipped cream in the can, it worked for its intended purpose. 

I got out my plate and carefully measured out each ingredient. So many grams of cake. so many grams of strawberries and so many grams of whipped cream. It is amazing once you start measuring things out how much you can start to see where you went wrong previously. You start to see where you would overeat. It is eye-opening. I have lost over 30 pounds doing this and I am not going back to the before. I won’t let myself. I saved room for my tradition today. I wanted to feel like I did when I was a kid. I wanted to be excited. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I did. 

My tradition seemed like it tasted just as good. I enjoyed it just as much. I thought. Towards the evening I started to feel a little sad. Not sure why. Maybe because none of the kids were here. Maybe because the house was quiet. Maybe because I wasn’t a kid anymore. Maybe because I was missing dad. It just felt like any other day, except I had cake. It didn’t feel like a birthday day. It didn’t feel like a special day. Just a day. 

It is so easy to feel sad about days gone by, about being a kid and being happy at the littlest of things. Missing the simplicity, perhaps. But, at the same time, I love being present for the now, for the exciting things happening. I love watching things unfold and happen how they are supposed to. I love being positive. I love seeing positive things and I love getting to live this life, even if the birthdays or the cake or something else makes me a little bit sad once in a while.