What hurts you blesses you.  Darkness is your candle.

 — Rumi

I’m slamming things around the kitchen.  The girls are sitting at the counter in front of me, wide-eyed.  I’m on the verge of tears, telling them that I feel like they don’t do their share of cooking and cleaning, that they aren’t children any longer, that they’ve become complacent, working diligently on the farm where they get paid, but letting their father and I handle all the household responsibilities.

Saoirse, 19, is on the verge of tears, apologetic.  Ula, 15, is presenting me with a classic adolescent poker face.  I can only imagine the angry thoughts she’s hiding.

Cooking dinner is my joyful time.  What’s gotten into me?

Somewhere between chopping onions and sautéing ground beef I slip out of the kitchen and into my office to breathe. Like most teens transitioning from childhood to adulthood, my kids require reminders about cleaning up and pitching in. But the emotional charge around that conversation was too intense.

I can’t help it.  I’m angry.  I’m sad.  I’m scared.

I’m scared?

These thoughts don’t make sense.

…. Until I realize it’s February 25.  One day before my birthday.

The first time I hated my birthday was the year I turned ten.  My fourth grade teacher thought that a charming way to bring multiculturalism into the classroom was to have students run a gauntlet on their birthdays.  When someone in the class had a birthday, he lined the students up in two facing lines.  The child with the birthday had to run down the line while each student got an opportunity to kick or hit them on the ass.  Following, he would take down a wooden paddle, stand the birthday child at the front of the room, and hit them on the behind with the paddle, one thwack for each year, then another for good measure, and one last one for good luck.

For the sake of self-preservation, I tried to keep my birthday a secret.  But he found out.  To this day I remember the humiliation of that day, the sting of that paddle.  It is intertwined with the pain and anxiety I was feeling because of what was happening at home.  My birthday that year was when I recognized that having both parents working full time jobs while we tried to run a farm was putting my family on a collision course with disaster.  No one was  saying it out loud, but I was going to bed each night, my stomach knotted in terror, worried that my family was on the cusp of disaster, and that we would lose the one thing I loved more than myself — Sap Bush Hollow Farm.

That was the start of three years of absolute hell, a blur of memories of my parents’ pain, my brother and I trying everything we could to help them hold together the house and keep up with the chores while balancing school and homework.

And each of those three years, my birthday marked yet another year of living on pins and needles.  I knew what I most wanted: — a happy family, a farm.  And each year ground at my spirit a little harder, reminding me of my powerlessness.  Just as I had no control over whether or not a teacher and all my classmates got to hit me on my birthday, I had no control over those two simple things that I most wanted.

Sitting alone in my office, away from my kids, I recognize that my birthday is actually a trigger.  I cannot approach a birthday without these memories bubbling to the surface.  I’ve had many happy birthday memories in the years since, but always, somewhere around that day, there’s a child inside who remembers that pain, and she cries out.

But the truth is that those three years turned me into a cook.  I learned the power of putting food on the table – -of interrupting the chaos of each day with the peaceful act of  nourishing bodies and spirits.   Those three years crystalized my commitment to Sap Bush Hollow Farm and my life here. Those three years turned me into a financial planner, figuring how to to manage money in such a way that preservation of family and quality of life was always the top priority.  While a child may not technically have had any control about where she lived or what her life entailed, I invested every bit of my spirit, as did the rest of my family, into fighting for what we held most dear.

And here, on my 49th birthday, I have it.

Now, I look back at those dark years and acknowledge that they made me.

On the morning of the 26^th, Bob reaches across the bed and wraps me in his arms.  “I love you,” he says.  He leaves a pot of daffodils, my favorite spring flower, on my dresser.

I sit up and look at my life in amazement.  To be in love on my 49^th birthday — with my husband, my children, my work, my friends, my farm, my life.  Later that day we have a music night, and my friend Carle serenades me on the tuba with the Beetles Birthday song.  We all laugh and sing.  I feel nothing but joy.  The darkness is gone.  Yet I can’t help but wonder….if it weren’t for that darkness, would I ever have recognized this light?