happy anniversary.

Today was my 14th wedding anniversary and Sunday is my 38th birthday. The last time I celebrated my birthday as a single woman, I was 23 years old (technically, I was 22 because I met my ex shortly after my 22nd birthday). Yep, that makes my jaw drop too...all the way to the ground. No longer (quite) that young woman, I will be celebrating this milestone birthday with my best girlfriends this weekend, and when telling the plan to another friend of mine (male), he laughed, saying we were cleverly disguising a divorce party behind a birthday and he's sure it will likely turn out more like a bachelorette party. (Which in our case is more of the "dance party" variety rather than the male-models-jumping-out-of-the-cake variety, just to be clear.) Of course, if that were the case, this time I am being sent out of marriage rather than into it and therefore, there are some mixed emotions. It's nearly the perfect scenario in which to use the word, 'bittersweet.'

My wedding anniversary and my birthday have fallen in the same week for all of my adult life, so it shouldn't have come as any surprise that these two milestones would once again butt up against each other this year, but honestly?...I nearly forgot. And I definitely didn't appreciate the significance of the two events until today. Five days separating the last anniversary that I will officially be married and my first birthday on my own. Surreal. I had several friends pause in their day to send me encouraging messages, and of course my mother went above and beyond, leaving flowers on my desk before I even got into the office, and I was once again finding myself grateful and humbled by their affection. But what does it all mean, all of this emotion? To say goodbye to a significant part of your life and turn around and celebrate all that remains, and all that is still ahead? What an odd paradox, but I'm also finding it oddly comforting to address both things back-to-back.

I watched a movie recently that was set in India and there was some brief discussion about Kali, the Hindu Goddess of Destruction. If you've ever seen her, she can be deemed as a fairly disturbing image. In one hand she wields a macheté-type of sword that she uses to hack off the heads of men, many of which she has strewn around her neck in a form of gruesome garland. She is standing over a conquered soul and in general, she emanates terrifying power and strength, with blood dripping from her sword. I started reading and then thinking about Maa Kali and the idea that maybe sometimes we have to endure the destruction of something to make room for something new—a better way, a more enlightened path. Like how a forest fire ravages a hillside, but we also know it's a necessary cycle to life, to the re-birth and the very sustainability of the forest.

Maa Kali is indeed the Goddess of Destruction, but she is said to represent the death of the human ego, of all that is evil, false and phony. She is depicted with four arms, two of which she is using for this great battle, and two to bless her devotees. She is seen as a mother figure and is one of the few goddesses that never married and renounced all worldly pleasures. It's said that those who look upon her image and tremble, do so because they are egotistical and attached to worldly pleasures. If you find the sweetness and compassion in her image, you can be released from your ego and can more easily reach spiritual enlightenment. But who among us divorces ourselves from our ego and worldly pleasures that easily? Exactly. Thus enters Maa Kali.

I know what has been destroyed in my life to make room for the change that is needed. Change in myself, change in my life. Some of it painful, as a proper 'destruction' promises (insert tongue-in-cheek emoticon), but not without the awakening that is inevitable from such a drumming. And this idea of Maa Kali battling it out to bring forth a better path translates to everything I can think of in the human experience - nature, death, society, science, the economy. This is a universal idea, but ironically such a tough, tough thing to accept. We fight fires, we fight death, we build stronger sea walls and bail out banks. Trust me, I'm not suggesting that we stop doing any of those things, and I'm not even pretending like I understand what we should and shouldn't fight for, but I do find the concept of accepting destruction as a means to a better thing as illuminating. Think of the incredible ingenuity that often comes from destruction, like houses being built above the high-water mark that are affordable and easier on the environment, and a return to the power of the small business operator, after the fall of large national companies, on who's backs we are re-building our economy, just to name two from recent memory.

Don't we learn more from our failures than our successes? Don't poignant, beautiful things often develop from the ashes of destruction?

I remember exactly one year ago sitting at an incredibly over-priced restaurant, arguing with my ex and eventually crying at the table on what was then, our 13th anniversary. But all couples fight. Someone ends up crying some of the time, right? I don't think that meant we were destined for failure, but it is interesting to fast-forward one year and to be sitting here at midnight, penning a blog entry about destruction. Choosing it, enduring it, accepting it and letting it unearth a new path.

I have no plans to celebrate the end of my marriage, that would be totally disingenuous to who I am as a person and what I really believe about marriage and my marriage in particular, so I am honoring today's milestone with humility and appreciation for the life in those years. For the good that it did bring, most especially our daughter. And in five days I will celebrate my birthday and be truly grateful for all the years of my life, including how good I feel today and how optimistic I feel about what is to come. That, I am comfortable celebrating and honestly, I can't wait. Maybe it would be fitting if I were to buy myself a Maa Kali statue and have THAT come out of the cake?! That would be a destruction that would be utterly painless...my friends and I would devour that cake bite-by-bite, I am certain of it, and maybe I'm onto something...