2023 Short Story & Essay Contest: Honorable Mention, Adult Essay Contest
January, the month of my birth. The month 75 years ago when my mother paces the hospital halls for 24 hours, begging for me to be born, her husband and parents confined in a waiting room to imagine the best and fear the worst. A veteran of World War II, married just over a year, my mother envisions the child within her as more than just her child. This baby will help rebuild a ravaged world, form a new bud on the tree of Jewish peoplehood recently stripped of 6 million people. Why do I linger in her womb? Do I suspect the world outside is cold? Do I fear the human potential for evil? Finally, reluctantly, I emerge.
As a child, on my January birthday, I watch the tentative sun dip and disappear, leaving the world dark too soon. I learn how snow mercifully blankets naked lawns and sparkles in the sun, until it melts, then refreezes, sullied and misshapen. I plan birthday parties then see them shrink or disappear due to snow or flu or measles. With birthday checks, I scour the January stores, decimated of the best merchandise by holiday shoppers, offering few gifts of value. January teaches me to reduce my wants to reduce my disappointment.
Januarys pass. Consumed with my own children, their needs, my husband’s needs, work responsibilities, I grow impatient with frozen roads, cancellations, power outages that bring life to a halt. My birthday but a blip against the backdrop of our cluttered lives. Soon my children are elsewhere with their own families, leaving two of us in our home.
Today my January birthday reminds me how time races. Those who remember my slow arrival are buried in cemeteries in Baltimore, Lancaster and New York. Their absence and the wan January sun signify my own shortening days. What have I done to rebuild the world as my mother dreamed? What can I still do? When I slip away, will I be remembered, as I remember her?
Sometimes my mother stirs inside me, as I once stirred inside her. She whispers to me about family and love and loss. She hints at new challenges and joys and ways to make a difference. She shows me through her own life how each day is a rebirth, how each January repeats elements of past Januarys but with new iterations.
Born again, I reach out to embrace it all. The darkness. The sun—here and gone, bright and weak. The sorrow and the joy. The endings and the beginnings.
