Unbirthday

Today is my mom's 58th birthday. Or rather, it would be if she weren't, you know, dead. This is the ninth unbirthday that she's had and in June, it'll be 10 years since she passed. I often wonder what she'd think of my life choices in the past decade. I don't wonder whether or not she'd be proud of me, because I know that she would be; I've attained a fair amount of personal and professional success and the future looks bright, albeit momless. I think that the hardest part about this unbirthday is not that it's the ninth, but that there are (countably) infinitely many more. The past ten years have been turbulent from the largest scales down to the smallest, but in the past two years things have begun to settle. I just wish that I could have known her as an adult.