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October 24, 2020

I’m turning twenty-six in a few days. It’s my first birthday with my family since I turned twenty-one. For some reason, my first birthday after brain surgery is replaying in my mind.

A little over a month after I had brain surgery, had complications, and was home, I turned twenty. My birthday was….difficult. It was not my finest hour. We went to dinner at a restaurant in downtown Montgomery, a seafood place, and then came back to the house for a chocolate ganache cake my mom had gotten me. It was fancier than our normal tradition of devil’s food cake with cream cheese icing. All I can remember though is getting back from dinner, going into my room, sitting on the floor with my back against the bed, and crying. I felt…something, and I don’t know what. Trying to communicate it with my mom, she reached to put her arm around me and I pulled away, violently. Not to hurt her, but because physical touch is painful when I’m emotionally in pain, due to a miswiring somewhere along my nervous system.

I just remember thinking that I had wanted a bigger celebration of life on this birthday so soon after my brain surgery and I was upset that we just went out to dinner, just the four of us, and had cake.

My reaction was…extreme. But the doctors warned us that I’d be very emotionally dynamic for a while. The Chiari Malformation had compressed my brain and the chemicals were far from balanced. It was going to take a while for my brain to adjust to its new environment and it was basically like my whole brain and body got a reset.

And they were right. I was incredibly emotionally volatile for a while there. My emotions would swing wider than I thought possible and out of nowhere, I’d be sobbing. I’m pretty sure it was miserable to live with me at that time. As much pain as I was in, I’d still have rather been recovering from brain surgery than be the person who had to put up with me while I was recovering from brain surgery.

But here I am, celebrating my birthday with my family once again, and once again, I’m crying.  

It doesn’t make sense. At first, I think it’s just an emotional memory or something. Put the circumstances together again and my mind recalls the memory of how I felt. I’m afraid it may not only be memory, though.

My birthday is coming up. Three days ago I mentioned it and my dad said, “That’s right! It’s Monday?” “No, Dad, it’s Wednesday, a week from today.” “Well, we need to go out to dinner! Where are we going to go on Wednesday night?” I reminded him that we can’t go to dinner on Wednesday night because my mom works in Talladega during the week and won’t be able to come. Dixon usually has a gig on Wednesday nights too. So he says we’ll go out on the Saturday before. “We can go to Sushi Cafe! They’re open then, right?” I just kind of shrug and I start to feel sour inside. He throws out a few more ideas, Chili’s, Olive Garden, some of my favorites. “Then we can make that cake that we always make for everyone’s birthday. What’s that cake we make?” This feeling is growing and I kind of snap at him, that we can’t go to Olive Garden because he’s low carb and we can’t make that cake because mom’s no sugar and we probably just shouldn’t do anything because it’s nearly impossible with all of us.

He wisely lets it drop for the moment and I go into the kitchen and open the freezer door, eyeing the ice cream, before I remind myself I don’t eat to make myself feel better emotionally anymore. I close the freezer, open the fridge, and pull out some strawberries.  

“What do you want for your birthday?” he calls from the other room.

I eye him and say, “I told mom about this ottoman I wanted.”

“Yeah, so is at Target? Go get it! Or do you need to order it online?” 

“Dad, I’m not going to buy my own birthday present that’s supposed to come from you guys.” He laughs as I continue, “I already sent mom the link.”

“Yeah, so I know about the ottoman, but what do you want?”

Slicing up the strawberries I retort, “Well aren’t you off the hook? Mom’s getting the ottoman.”

I know that wasn’t a great thing to say. My dad’s more gracious than I and simply shrugs. I know, logically, that came from a place of hurt, but I don’t want to explore it, so I take my strawberries into my room and grab a Dee Henderson novel off the stack I acquired at a thrift store and lose myself in someone else’s story.

The next day I’m at work when I get a text from my brother, “hey sis! dad and I were chatting about your birthday dinner this Sunday night, what did you wanna do for dinner? I was thinking Olive Garden, since you love the OG, but i figured i would ask now instead of day of”

I instantly feel sad again. First, because his disregard for capital letters and punctuation drives me wild. He set his phone not to capitalize any letters. Like why even??? Insane. But also because my birthday dinner was changed to Sunday without my knowing and because he’s texting me about my birthday in general.

I just reply that I don’t know. Recognizing my bad mood, I add that I appreciate his planning in advance because that is really kind. He accepts and adds, “well it’s totes your choice, so think about it.”

But I don’t think about it.

I try to, I think through options and feel paralyzed in making a decision and my mind just stops thinking of options.

My mom and I are on the phone Friday as I’m leaving work and she brings up my birthday, and I tell her I’m sad.  I try to figure it out while we’re on the phone, but I’m crying inexplicably, and it’s not a productive conversation.

That twentieth birthday, when I felt this way, it was because I had expectations that I didn’t share with anyone or communicate, and then when they weren’t met, I was upset with everyone. That’s not mature. I recognize that now. It’s unfair and really unrealistic. But that’s who I was. Or the way I operated, at least. It was actually pretty commonplace for me to do so. As a result, I trained my family to ask me exactly what I expected and then they’d carry that out so that I wouldn’t be disappointed.

The problem is, I’m not like that anymore.

I’ve changed so very much these last few years. I’ve been in regular counseling for over two years. I’ve been writing for three or four years. But as I’m now looking back over my journals from five and six years ago and seeing more clearly and objectively who I was before the brain surgery, I can see that I’ve changed. The brain surgery changed the chemical landscape of my brain. But it wasn’t all chemical,

it was character too.

Trauma changed me. Healing from trauma changed me. God has changed me, refined me, through deep, deep pain and suffering. My parents weren’t with me every day during the bulk of the time I’ve been in therapy and have been writing and the image they have of me is largely rooted in the twenty-one years they did spend with me every day. Sure, I talked on the phone with them regularly when I was in DC, but I didn’t come home all that much. Once, maybe twice a year. Sure, I shared with them what was going on in my life, but there wasn’t enough time in our one or two-hour weekly phone calls to share all of the facets of healing that were going on in my life and I couldn’t articulate it at that time. I recognize that people generally don’t change so much so quickly, but I had a lot of help in that department, some wanted and some unwanted.

So now, I’m living in the tension of how they see me and how I am, based on their experiences with me and based on my knowledge of how I am and who I am now. There’s a discrepancy in that tension. And it hurts me.

It hurts me because I’m seeing who I was and I’m embarrassed! I was demanding and controlling and high-strung and intense and rigid and inflexible and had high expectations. If things didn’t go exactly as I thought or wanted I wasn’t pleasant. I couldn’t laugh at myself. Hopefully, there were some redeeming qualities somewhere in me, but I can’t recall them.

Gratefully, through God’s grace and very hot furnace of suffering as well as my phenomenal counselor Anna, I can laugh at myself. I can go with the flow, I can release expectations, I can relax, and I can recognize when something’s off-kilter in me. Obviously, I’m not perfect, I still have a hard time asking for help, I’m working on communicating what I want and need, and I’m sure there are other things I’m not catching in my blind spots.

But I’m worlds different than I was.

And my family does recognize that. My brother will be the first one to tell you that I am a completely different person now than I was before my brain surgery, largely because I was not kind to him before my brain surgery (and that’s putting it in the best light) and now we actually legit like each other and want each other to succeed and want each other to have a full and rich life. It’s really cool.

But I think my family doesn’t realize how much I’ve changed since brain surgery. There are several years that I spent away from them and a tumor that happened during that time and arthritis and an arachnoid cyst and two years of healing and three years of processing through writing and also just the whole moving cross country alone and the whole growing through your twenties thing. I’ve noticed, over the last few months I’ve been back in Alabama, that they’ll say something about me, from a place of their knowledge and perspective of knowing me, and I’ll think, “Wait, that’s not right.” or “Wait, are they talking about me?” I don’t think I’ve realized how outdated their view of me is because I also don’t realize how far I’ve come.

I think they’re just now realizing that I’ve changed so much as well. I think reading through my writings has been hard for them because it’s shown them a part of me I didn’t really share with them. Not because I didn’t want to share that with them, or because I wanted to hide it, simply because we weren’t there. We weren’t in the same house every day. Also, they were things I couldn’t really share with people. I live so much of my life internally. I either just don’t think to share something or I have to be asked or it has to be drawn out or I hand you a binder of 70,000 words of all of my innermost thoughts and feelings from the last four years.  There is no in-between, and it’s not a great balance, I recognize that. Maybe I am still a little intense.

So my birthday is dragging all of this up. Because they’re asking me what exactly I want to do for my birthday and all I really want is to not be responsible for details. I spend my entire life responsible for details, for the details of an organization’s finances, HR, operations, communications, and fundraising. Responsible for the details of my complicated health and wellness, and responsible for the details of my healing.  I want to spend time with my family, feel special for a little bit, and not be responsible for planning my birthday dinner, baking my birthday cake, buying my birthday gift, and telling them to wish me a happy birthday.

I just want to be known.

And I’m realizing how far the gap in the knowledge they have of me is.  

And I’m sad.  

I’m sad that they don’t really know me. I’m sad for the me that they know. I’m sad for how that me trained them to react to me and interact with me. If they picked any one of the restaurants they know I like, made the cake they know I like and have liked for twenty-six years, and said, “Madison, we’re going to go to Chili’s, come home, eat cake, and watch a movie to celebrate your birthday. Which night would you like to do that?” I’d be really happy. I’d say, “That sounds fun!” Even if I had just assumed we’d go to Olive Garden or something like that. Those details aren’t what matter. What matters is that I get to spend time with my family all together and we get to laugh and eat good food and the days we get to do this are numbered. Because eventually Dixon or I will get married, and someday soon Dixon will make it big with music and be touring on my birthday or I’ll move away again and so on. What matters is that we’re here together and the details don’t matter all that much.

But yet again, my emotions are ruining my birthday.

My parents and Dixon are trying not to get an old-Madison reaction and I’m sad because of that and my sadness is reinforcing their view of me and it’s creating a cycle I just wish I could break. Because dinner will be uncomfortable now and it will be like nothing’s changed.

I guess it just takes time.  

In trying to explain some of this to my mom, before I could really figure it out for myself, she said, “I don’t know how to fix this. It will just take us time to get to know the new you.”

“New you” struck me. It hit a nerve. I suppose I didn’t realize there was a new me until this moment. But there is. And I am. I’ll have to share that new me with them and be patient while they replace a knowledge of me built over twenty-six years with an updated knowledge of me. That will probably take longer than my iPhone update. Though that too is taking longer and longer these days.

I need to actually share and be patient and communicate. I should have communicated that I didn’t want to plan the details of my birthday, that I just wanted to share it with them, feel special, that I’d be happy with whatever they came up with, and that I was free on Friday or Saturday.

So I guess we’re all learning the new me. Maybe we’ll be there by twenty-seven.

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