Birthdays and disabilities are like cake and ice cream for my family. We can’t have one without the other. For many years I didn’t appreciate this truth. Now I do. Today is my birthday again, and I’ll welcome joy and sorrow to my party. They’ve put in appearances before.
I have no doubt that they’ll do it again.
They first showed up the year I turned either two or three. I’m not sure which, but it was the first birthday I remember. My mom made a chocolate birthday cake with chocolate frosting. She decorated it with the outline of a clown holding a bunch of balloons. The strings were thinly piped icing and the balloons were round, sour ball candies. Then she covered the cake with foil, put it and me in the car, and drove to where my dad had been hospitalized since his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. We celebrated with him and a little girl he’d befriended. She was a few years older than me and lay on a stretcher throughout the party. She liked the cake and the candies, too.
Photo credit: Lorene Farrugia on Unsplash.com.
Two things about that day remain vivid in my mind—her joyful wave when the nurse wheeled her away when the party ended, and the sorrow in Dad’s eyes as he waved back.
Joy and sorrow visited on my twenty-sixth birthday, too. My two-month-old son was in a hospital 750 miles away from home, and I was with him. He was recovering from an emergency operation to correct complications related to the life saving surgery he’d undergone at birth. I sat next to our two-month-old’s crib and watched his chest rise and fall. The phone rang. It was my husband. He had called to see how our baby was doing and to say, “Happy birthday.” When the phone call ended, I cried. And cried. And cried.
That sad, hard birthday is marked by two contrasting memories—the joy I experienced watching my beautiful baby asleep in his beautiful crib, and my deep sorrow at not being able to shield him from pain.
My sixty-fourth birthday party will not take place in a hospital. Instead, I’ll sit in a lawn chair by the window of my mother’s room in the memory care unit where she resides. We’ve had many such visits in the months since the pandemic closed her unit. Today a nurse will deliver a piece of birthday cake topped with ice cream to her while I sit outside, and we chat through her window screen. After Mom polishes off the cake, she’ll make the same comment she’s made for sixty-four years, “You came into the world in a hurry and backwards. You’ve always been dramatic, Jolene.”
Two things will mark this day. The joy of another birthday with my remarkable ninety-one-year-old mother and the sorrow of not being able to hug her.
Birthdays and disabilities are like cake and ice cream. They are like joy and sorrow for those of us who care for loved ones with disabilities. They can’t be separated, because they seep into one another. As they mingle, both becomes richer and deeper. They draw us as believers closer to the One who brought wine to a wedding and died on a cross for our sins. When we celebrate birthdays and disabilities together, we proclaim the hope we have because Jesus, a man of sorrows and well-acquainted with grief, rose from the dead. We proclaim the truth of the resurrection which is this:
At the end of all things, joy wins.
Jolene Philo is the author of the Different Dream series for parents of kids with special needs. She speaks at parenting and special needs conferences around the country. She's also the creator and host of the Different Dream website. Sharing Love Abundantly With Special Needs Families: The 5 Love Languages® for Parents Raising Children with Disabilities, which she co-authored with Dr. Gary Chapman, was released in August of 2019 and is available at local bookstores, their bookstore website, and at Amazon.
