What Sharing a Birthday with my Grandson Has Taught Me

I’ve had so many memorable birthdays —73 at my last, grateful count.

Three stand out:

1. 1982, when I celebrated my 29th birthday as an inpatient at Memorial Hospital in Nashua, New Hampshire, two days after the birth of our firstborn son, Adam. The best gift I’d ever received.

2. 2016, when our grandson Everett was born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, on my 63rd birthday. I’ve loved having Everett as my birthday twin. June 12 will still be celebrated in our family long after I no longer need the date.  

3. 2023, when Mike gave me a round-trip ticket to Newark to spend my birthday weekend with daughter Amber and her family as I turned 70 and Everett, 7. Amber and I had a perfect Saturday in New York City: visiting Lady Liberty, biking through Central Park, seeing The Lion King on Broadway, and having dinner at the iconic Tavern on the Green.

On our actual birthday that Monday, we celebrated Everett with a party at their neighbor’s pool. Everett held a balloon shaped like a 7, while mine was an 0. But as I told him, zero equals nothing, so we were actually the same age.

“So that does mean when I’m 8, you’ll be 80?” he asked.

It became our inside joke.

But when he turned 10 this year and I was “100,” our little fiction was showing its age.

Everett’s birthday math may not hold up, but I like how it minimizes the distance between us. For a moment, seventy years and seven fit side by side, with a zero we can laugh away.

I wonder if that’s a small glimpse of how God delights in us—not tallying our years or asking what we’ve accomplished since the last birthday, but enjoying the people he made.

Looking back, my favorite birthdays have given me something a calendar can’t measure: the joy of belonging to a family. Perhaps you’ve had a birthday like that, when the gift was a person, a  shared adventure, or simply the quiet relief of having made it through another year.

And the best birthday gift of all? The privilege of having another one.