Kansas City News Blog

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.

My sister, five years my senior, warned me to stop bothering people. She assured me it was normal to encounter at least one hard birthday in your 20s. She then said it was far less normal to write about how every birthday in your 20s makes you a drooling vegetable. She suggested prayer and reminded me of all the things I do have: a career, good friends, a dog. Then she told me that I should have myself sterilized. Still, the sadness wouldn't subside.

Even though I'm 28.

Two of my girlfriends advised that I go lie on a couch and share my anxieties with someone else for a change. So there I was, planning my Strawberry Shortcake sleepover and thinking of therapy. What if the doctor told me I was crazy or, even worse, right to be worried about that biological clock and those statistics that say marriage is all but impossible for educated, beautiful women with careers and dogs and excellent shoes and no practical understanding of the world?

Then my butcher wrote a message to me on the paper wrapped around the tripe I buy every morning. It said "Tripe, $5.87," but by the time I finished chewing the first cold piece, I'd figured out that he wanted me to read The Secret, Rhonda Byrne's self-help book, which has helped millions of Oprah watchers understand that nothing outside their own heads is real. I don't much like self-help books. I prefer other people to answer my wilderness cries. But just a week before my birthday, I was still delirious with self-involvement and thoughts of babies and life away from my go-go-go life in the thrumming metropolis that is Kansas City, which is so unlike the backwater where I'm from, where all the people are naked and pregnant. So I found myself tiptoeing through the self-help section of Barnes & Noble, hoping to find someone I could quote for the end of this column.

Then a woman asked what I was looking for. I started to lie and say I was looking for He's Just Not That Into You, which would have been so much less humiliating, right, girls? I wasn't going to tell her what I was looking for unless she asked me what I was looking for or we talked about what people usually look for when they're looking for something. But then The Secret just fell right out of my mouth, along with six pieces of gum. She smiled and told me it was over near the Bibles and religious books. I told her about my birthday crisis and asked her to show me the baby books and the marriage books, and eventually she stopped smiling.

I began to realize I wasn't embarrassed by the book, or any self-help book, or therapy, either. I was embarrassed by the fact that I wrote that sentence, or other terrible sentences like it, too. Thoughts of motherhood and marriage and all of the classes I must have missed haunted me. Then death started to crowd my thoughts, too. I found myself writing a grocery list and listening to P.M. Dawn.

Then, in the middle of a dark and stormy night, I curled up on the couch and opened The Secret. Then I closed it. Then I opened it. Then I texted three people.

A chapter or two in, the book said I should make a list of things that made me happy - "secret-shifters," it called them, things that will bring anyone except my line editor out of any dark mood. I concentrated on my dog, cupcakes from Babycakes and the certainty that my BFFs never doubt my skills. Slowly I began to feel better. Really. So far, the book isn't the mind-blower it's being billed as, but I have to say it is helpful. Not as helpful as you, though, Diary. I love you, Diary.

I still had a meltdown the day before my birthday. I cried over my hair and then cried when a co-worker asked about my nonexistent boyfriend. I cried until I vomited my ovaries. They looked fine, so I swallowed them again and then added them to my list of happy things.

Now, my birthday has come and gone. And I celebrated the coming of a new year with a brave face and good friends and no scary talk of natural disasters or mine cave-ins or the way that quasi-journalists like me are helping to kill print. And just think - I haven't even written about turning 30 yet. If I'm still crying waterfalls by then, I'll get in my VW on a hot day, roll up the windows and wait to die. -- Scott Wilson