A Birthday, Three Messages and A lot Going On

2:42 a.m. It's my birthday, a step closer to the third floor. I am lying on my bed, sandwiched between my three-year-old and my four-month-old, staring at the ceiling, enjoying the silence but wondering what exactly it is that I am doing. I look at my phone and I have three messages. One from my cousin who literally never forgets people's birthdays and wished me happy birthday at exactly midnight. God bless her soul, she is a gift. The other one is from my mum. She said it in the most casual and sweet way. The third is from another cousin she sends me wonderful wishes.

I read all these messages and to me, they feel just like simple messages because in as much as it is my birthday, the novelty of the day died a while back. The day doesn't hold the same excitement and importance it used to hold five years ago.

Year one was spent locked up in a health facility where I was involuntarily held, my autonomy and dignity stripped away from me. I was pregnant, a foreigner in a new land, and on that day I was not even allowed to speak to my mum or family. I don't know what the purpose of this was. Maybe the doctors assumed I would choke myself with the phone on my birthday. On the bright side, the kitchen staff at the hospital sent over a cupcake and I was expected to jump for joy with tears in my eyes grateful that someone there remembered. I was grateful for the thought, but I was not grateful about the whole situation.

The second was spent battling homelessness in a very hot room in the CT suburbs. We had a six-month-old baby and nowhere safe to lay our heads. We didn't have a car to at least drive ourselves to a park to drive our sorrows away. All we had was uncertainty, empty wallets and a pile of hardship from every corner. All we had was our lives, Joel Osteen on a cracked phone screen and each other. That was enough to keep us sane.

The third was spent in a dingy neighborhood in Hartford in a huge three-bedroom apartment with no furniture but a single mattress on the floor, a bedsheet on the window as a makeshift curtain surrounded by roaches that attacked us even in our sleep. We had to leave the lights on at night to deter them. We had reported the landlord so many times to the city and he had sent numerous exterminators but the roaches were resilient and persistent. We were still grateful for the house with the house guests because after a year of homelessness it was a place we could call our own and could cook and rest our heads. It wasn't that bad after all. We counted our blessings.

The fourth was spent battling difficult emotional battles with tears and no one to reach out to for support because the system had been so cruel and we had learned that asking for help can have unintended consequences. So we held one another and thanked God we had each other, and were now living in a guest-free apartment somewhere in a rural town in Ohio.

This year, Ohio has become a hostile jungle. We are battling uncertainty and recognizing the fragility of our freedom and the fortune of living paycheck to paycheck. We are grateful for the growth of our little family and for being housed but now we miss our guest-infested apartment, because even though it wasn't comfortable, we felt safe and human.

I don't know what the purpose of this story is. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the point is just that I am still here, at 2:42 in the morning, sandwiched between the two people who made the last few birthdays survivable.

I am exhausted in a way only a mother and a survivor can understand and I have prayed that something good would come out of today.