Atypical ambivalence

I am feeling uncharacteristically ambivalent about my birthday this year. Narcissistic as it seems, normally I quite love the 21^st of June. I like that it falls in the middle of the year and to be truthful I like presents and I love cake and my own birthday ranks quite highly as an excuse to treat myself to both.

By this stage, ordinarily I'd have bought a few little things under the guise of it being a birthday treat and at least ordered one (or three) slices of a cake I'd otherwise try to resist. This year? Nothing. Not even a lipgloss. I ordered a muffin today but it had no icing so it can hardly call itself a cake.

Tomorrow may as well be the 20^th of June again or the 22^nd because I'm feeling nothing. This troubles me. Is it because I'm getting old? Or is that in the twelve intervening months between my 28^th birthday and tomorrow, I've become such a fulfilled, balanced and considered individual that I no longer need the joy of cake and presents midway through the year to break it all up? My instinct is the former. I'm ambivalent, not miserable, and there will always be joy in cake with icing.

I can't help but notice my new austere attitude towards my birthday coincides with one rather big thing. I am now a mum. I still can't quite fathom that. But somewhere along the line 29 years have passed and now instead of browsing The Australian Women's Weekly cake book to choose a creation for my mum to make, I have a little person whose cakes I am responsible (theoretically) for making.

Technically this isn't my first birthday as a mum. It's my second. But. Given the proximity of Miss I's day of birth last year and my own, it's entirely possible that my traditional birthday enthusiasm was generated because the wonderful, soothing and life-affirming concoction of drugs in my epidural were still affecting me. Who knows.

In any event, this year, for the first time, I am truly unfazed by tomorrow. My waning interest is likely because at the moment there are bigger fish to fry. Mr G begins his exams in two days, we fly home in less than two weeks and in light of Miss I recently turning one, my own birthday pales. Miss I's birthday was genuinely very exciting and an excellent excuse to eat cake.

I do hope in future years I might reconnect with some of my traditional enthusiasm though. Not because I am a raving narcissist but because if I don't, I'll know I really am getting old.  

Where do you stand on birthdays...love, loathe, dread, ignore, embrace? All of the above?