Oh, God, Please Help Me

Editor’s Note: Kansas City Star columnist Jeneé Osterheldt recently regaled us with tales of her birthday neuroses in this column. We offer this rewrite of her piece in an effort to explain what’s between the lines of Jeneé.

He said the word birthday, and tears flooded my eyes.

My mailman just wanted to know how I would be celebrating my 28th. And whether I was expecting anything heavy. Harmless questions, sure. But for some reason, visions of what my life should have been (according to Sex and the City), would have been (if I knew how to write) and could have been (what’s the difference between “would have been” and “could have been”?) clouded my mind.

What about the husband, the kids, the life back on the East Coast? That’s what I had planned for myself years ago, at a My Little Pony party. It was just weeks before my 28th birthday, and I was slipping into a depression – obsessing over what to say just one year after writing about my last birthday, which I spent rubbing an old Salt N Pepa CD while watching Lifetime.

By the way, I’m totally 28.

Everyone who would answer my pleading text messages told me to grow up.