Birthday weekend

 

 We were blessed to be given an opportunity to return to Mexico, thanks to good friends and a destination wedding in Sayulita. Their wedding happened to fall the day after my birthday (April 1st), so it truly was a weekend of celebration.

To be honest.... I was a little stressed leading up to the trip. It required a lot of planning, and for my parents to fly out to watch Sava... and I have been fully immersed in painting my May show. It seemed  a crazy time to leave, and almost too soon to be returning to Mexico, as if I didn't deserve the trip (how could we ever deserve such luxury and abundance??)

What a silly person I can be.

Because this trip, again, saved me. On so many levels.

To start with: this five-day weekend was the first time I have been away from Sava for more than eight hours, since she was born. I was able to spend five days with my husband in which we never once had to have the conversation of who was going to make the breakfast or get the milk or make the bed or get her into the jammies. We could just BE together, and it felt like a honeymoon. It was so nice to get reacquainted with him without all the speech of obligation. I got to see him be silly. We got to be lazy and quiet. We had a couples massage in our room on my birthday. We got to party late into the night with friends every night and be irresponsibly hedonistic, and wake up on our own clock. Yum.

There were a few moments of missing her... mainly, when we would be lounging on the beach and there would be some cute little tyke running around on the sand and one of us would sigh, mournfully, and say, "Wouldn't Sava just LOVE to be here?". But that was the extent of it. Maybe, we were able to feel so free, because we knew she was in the loving care of my parents, and because every time I called home, she would hop onto the phone for a breathless moment (in between jumping into the pool, or sliding down slide, or getting ready to go bungee jumping at the mall) and say "HI MOMMY I HAVING SO MUCH FUN!!! BYE!" and then be gone. She didn't miss us at all.

I fell into somewhat of a trance, there. It was like time was suspended. I kept looking at the clock and it would not have moved much at all. I was waking up at 7am every morning with the sunrise and the pounding surf, and then floating through the day in a warm bubble of pleasure. Gradually wearing less and less clothes, my hair long and wild and tangled. Experiencing the quiet joy of seeing two friends (we introduced them: they were two of our closest friends, and they met and fell in love) get married, and their marriage was one of the most serene, drama-free, assured thing I have seen. Like, I think they spent three hours boogey-boarding on the morning of their wedding. I felt so proud and full.. almost like I was one of their parents giving them away to each other. Is that strange to say? I mean, you go through your life, and you do these things... you go to work, you make art, you make babies. You have an impact on the world... you help to give birth to the future. And I have to say that, helping these two beautiful people to meet and fall in love is one of the best things Jamba and I have ever done.

Oh yes, and then there was all that: COLOR. and BEAUTY. Tropical architecture. Surf and wind and clean sand and fishing boats filled with lacy shimmering nets of color. Fish tacos. Yep, my cup is full.

I just took a walk  in the woods by my house with Nico, after dropping Sava off at daycare, and it is the first warm day since we have been back. A soft quiet formless walk through the woods- I caught my breath. I felt the same bubble of timeless pleasure that I had in Mexico. The morning sun casting through the scraggly, budding trees. First carpet of bright green groundcover. And all these throaty birds, invisibly clamouring in the trees above. Man, they were loud this morning! I was happy to have recently learned the call of the cardinal. (I had come upon one sitting high in the tree- caught him in the act of making his warm round stacatto call. It is like being shot with a machine gun loaded with caramel.) So this morning, amongst all the other birdly racket, all those invisible wings,  I heard that distinctive call and could guess from the number of duets ricocheting back and forth above my head that there were at least five cardinals in the trees. It was such a voluptuous moment.

Okay, enough. I could talk for hours about birds and weather patterns, but I really have to go paint!