It was my tenth birthday, the first time it happened. It was a Monday night, and my mother and I went out to eat with my cousin who is two days younger than I. I'm not sure whether I made it to the point where our pizza arrived to our table before my migraine was so bad that I knew I didn't want to eat. I went out to lie down in the back seat of my mom's tiny little Honda Civic, while she and my cousin ate my birthday dinner without me. If I was mad at them at the time, I don't remember it. I don't hold anything against them now, certainly. But I still remember how extreme that headache was, and how horrified I was by the smell of the leftover pizza they tried to offer me in the car before I finally got to go home. I know they were just trying to be nice. I had no idea that night was setting an awful pattern that I have never been able to escape. I am always sick on the Monday of or before my birthday, without fail. I don't think it's a self-fulfilling curse, just because I am aware of it. I noticed it was happening in seventh or eighth grade, after three or four years in a row of it. It was usually a headache, sometimes but not always accompanied by nausea. It's almost never a full-blown medical issue. Maybe I'm allergic to growing older. Or maybe I have an underlying sensitivity to Columbus Day. On schedule this morning, I woke to a minor but nagging headache that grew over the course of the morning. Coffee didn't make it better. Staring in the refrigerator, looking for anything I was willing to eat, was a fool's errand. I made myself eat a carrot somewhere around noon, and it was an effort to finish it. Lucky for me, there is a professional eater in the house willing to help me with the last couple inches of carrot. It wasn't until early afternoon that it occurred to me what day it was. At that point, I gave up and took a couple ibuprofen and a nap. My headache went away, but food is still a turnoff. Tomorrow I should be right as rain, if the rest of my history is any indication.
My kids know how to speak my language. My younger daughter sent me a picture of her boy cat standing over her in her room, to which I replied with a picture of the boy who held me pinned to the bed this morning. My older daughter called to say she had time to kill before a job interview, and she was standing on the grounds where they film the exterior Jeffersonian shots for Bones, looking at a little tabby cat who roamed the premises. What did I do before I spoke entire conversations in cat pictures? It amazes me how much I can say through the poses and expressions of an entirely different species. What does it say about me that the body language I use most isn't even of my own body?
Tonight will be night two of the post-early-bed-early experiment. There were bumps in the road last night, around 03:30. My body will get the hang of it eventually.
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