OK, tomorrow (God willing that the day dawns :) I will be officially fifty years old.

Wow.

I don't feel fifty. (OK, I know, but the truth is I don't especially feel 5K, either. Well, most of the time. But sometimes...)

Maybe I sort of look it. (Watch yer'self, buster...)

I had my 'mid-life crisis' on my 21st birthday. So I'm WAAAAAY past that, thank-you.

Pregnant out to there with my daughter, 'Lexie, I was not permitted to ride the camels at Lion Country/Africa USA-can't blame them, I was almost as huge as the elephants the park operators also declined to let me ride.

You know, what was the ex thinking, taking me to a safari park on my birthday while out to there pregnant with the child who refused to be born? That's right, she was a month late, and they ended up having to go in after her.

They told Tom that I was probably going to die; they told him the baby would not come any other way. (I must be one of the few moms telling the truth when years later I looked at my 15 year old daughter and uttered those words, "I almost died giving birth to you, how dare you talk to me that way?")

So he asked them to wait until the next day, so she could be born on his birthday.

Two months after she was born, I left, and raised her alone until she decided she would rather live with him and his newish wife. She was close to 16 years old by then.

(An interesting side note-about a year after her father remarried his new wife called and told me she understood completely why I'd left...)

Most of my birthdays have been um, less than great. OK, none of my birthdays have been good, much less great.

I had pretty high hopes for my fortieth. Oops, didn't happen.

I have given up on me, for the most part, so I cherish no big hopes for my fiftieth. I didn't come here to this life to live it alone; I don't matter much to me, really, although I do have feelings, and what happened at work yesterday is going to hurt for a long time I think.

This life I'm living is not what God planned for me, this I know, and nothing the enemy whispers in my ear and the ears of others will ever change that.

So I know that my birthdays that have been so, well, meaningless to those I wish it meant something to-my son, a real husband, neighbours, real friends...

Well, I know those are in the past.

My fiftieth birthday is still in the future, so who knows, something could happen. Fox could knock on the door, hey, it could happen, right?

Hope floats for the future.

Last year was especially bad. After enduring IVAN a year earlier I was astounded to watch Katrina take aim on the Gulf Coast with a predicted landfall of on or very near my birthday.

I'm getting worried about this trend-in just after my birthday in '01 one of my hospice patients was in the second tower stairwell; then, in '02 something horrible happened; in 'o3 something horrible happened; in 'o4 IVAN happened to me personally; in '05 Katrina happened. HUH? All these horrible things happening right around my birthday??

Every year it seems to get closer, right, until Katrina hits on my birthday; perhaps you will forgive what appears to be an unbearable ego-centricism-I'm gobsmacked to see...

Ernesto is working his wicked little way into the Gulf.

Maybe I should give up birthdays.