I have long believed that what happens on your birthday says a lot about the year ahead — mostly because what you decide to do on that day says a lot about what you value at that moment. But that’s not the only reason. It is also because I believe life is more mysterious and crafty than most of us realize.
I came up with this theory in my 20s, and after seeing it proven year after year, I started to make birthday plans based on the year I hoped lay ahead. Did I want to travel more? I’d take a birthday trip. Did I want to focus more on friendships and homemaking? I’d host a cozy dinner party. At some point, I had to admit that the unexpected things that happened on my birthday almost always were more defining than the events I’d orchestrated.
Once I became a mom, celebrating birthdays changed, but the theory held. For several years in a row when the kids were tiny, one or more of us had the puking flu on my “special” day. Talk about a terrible omen! That did feel accurate; most of those years revolved entirely around caring for and cleaning up after children. I am nostalgic for it now, but it was an emotionally and physically exhausting time.
Last year, on a whim, I looked up airline tickets to NYC, a place I lived in my 20s and still love. Amazingly, I found incredibly cheap flights, so I spent my birthday showing my husband and kids a place that still holds a huge place in my heart. It felt like my young adult self and my middle-aged self were meeting for the first time and that has been a very accurate metaphor for the year in so many wonderful ways.
Which brings us to this year’s birthday plans. Tempted to try and influence fate, I told my husband all I really wanted for my birthday was a camper for my traveling summer shows, as well as camping in the pasture. Some of you may remember that I bought a tiny teardrop camper a few years back for a similar purpose. I loved (and still love) that camper like a person, but I clearly wasn’t thinking about the future with that purchase. By last summer, it was already impossible for me and the kids to use it for gigs as the three of us could barely squeeze inside anymore. Truth be told my husband had always been too tall to fit comfortably.
There were a lot of layers to the problem of finding a new camper, however. Like most things in life, when it comes to campers you can either find something that is cheap but needs a lot of work, or something that is very expensive (and will probably need work soon, because, well, it’s a camper…) In other words, you pay with time or you pay with money.
The other barrier was finding something small enough that my smallish vehicle could tow it, but that could also sleep all of us. Finally, though I was more than willing to compromise on this aspect, aesthetics are not entirely irrelevant, and I was secretly pining for an old-fashioned canned ham-style camper. After many laborious months of searching, I was fairly sure that the camper of my dreams was not going to materialize EVER, and certainly not for my birthday. But somehow I still hoped birthday magic would intervene.
I’m going to skip to the end here because of word count considerations, but in a truly stunning twist, I didn’t get a camper for my birthday…I got two. One will be for family camping in the pasture, one will be for gigs when it’s just the kids and I. Both are adorable, vintage, and also “rustic,” which means no amenities whatsoever. I don’t mind a bit. And I don’t know what that portends for the year ahead, but I’ve never been more excited to find out.
