It’s my birthday. Forty-two. Historically, my birthday has sucked. Actually, all my life, though I have realized that the more recent sucking has kinda been my own fault.
History lesson: I don’t remember much about my early birthdays, except they were big family events until we moved away from everyone when I was six. My mother came from a family of four kids, my father a family of six, so lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins. But then we moved. Christmas became a cross-country trek every year (I don’t think I spent a Christmas at home until I was almost a teenager) and my birthdays withered on the vine.
I had one big birthday party, the kind where you invite friends, have a big cake, games in the backyard, that kind of thing. My father was so miserable by the end of it that he announced, before my friends even left, that I had just had the only party I would ever have. I’m not even sure what made it so awful for him; I don’t remember any major disasters or behaviour problems (but then again, I was only seven or eight).
The Holy Grail of birthdays happened a year or two later. Funny, I don’t even remember how old I was, but I remember it as the best birthday of my life. My mother arranged (read: forced) for my father to take me out for lunch for my birthday, just the two of us. She thought it would be a great tradition for my father and I to do every year. I got dressed up and waited an hour for him to come home for lunch. He wasn’t late; I was just that excited.
See, we were a little poor. Yes, my father was a doctor, but he had started his career later in life, had so many loans, and liked working for himself in small towns, so not great money. Eating out was a really big deal. I was raised to pick from the 2-3 cheapest options on the menu and order water, no dessert.
Oh, and to my memory, my father had never done anything with just me. I was over the moon.
He picked me up and drove to the restaurant. Not sure what it was called, but one of those chain restaurants baking in the middle of a giant concrete ocean of a parking lot, the ones that try to make poor people feel fancy. And I did. I was the queen of the world, walking in with my daddy on my birthday. He gave me a gift, which turned out to be a cute purple clutch purse with three silver bangle bracelets in the coin purse (I know now that he had absolutely nothing to do with deciding I should open a gift at lunch, picking it out, or wrapping it). I remember the cinnamon ice cream for dessert. I had dessert! In a restaurant!
Dessert at our house was Jello. And fancy dessert was Jello with a can of fruit cocktail in it. Company dessert was orange Jello with a tub of Cool Whip mixed in.
To this day, I can feel the ice cream melting on my tongue, the flavour filling my senses, the agonizing battle between wanting to slowly savour it, but also needing to eat it quickly before it melted and was wasted.
I have no memory of the rest of that birthday. It didn’t matter. Lunch was all that mattered.
So the following year, my mother set it up again. I could barely sleep for the two nights before my birthday. I showered that morning and asked my mom to do my hair, dressed up in an outfit I had been planning for weeks ahead of time, and made sure I had my three silver bangles and purple purse. I waited by the door again. For an hour. Then two. Part way into the third hour, my mother called his office; he’d “had to see a patient at the hospital” and would be late.
He never came for our lunch.
He didn’t even come home for supper. We ate without him and went to bed.
Around ten that night, my mother came to wake us up. He had come home with a cake from the grocery store bakery, and we were going to have my birthday now.
They sang a sleepy “Happy Birthday,” I blew out a candle, and opened a couple of presents while my mother cut slivers of the cake (“because too much will keep you up all night”).
It was carrot cake. The kind with the hard sugar carrots on the top and gobs of runny super-sweet cream cheese frosting. Though it may have been runny after sitting in the car all evening, who knows. But carrot cake. For a child’s birthday. I ached to cry.
He didn’t talk the entire time, and as soon as we finished our slivers, we were sent to re-brush our teeth and go back to bed.
I must not have done a good job brushing my teeth, because I could still taste the cream cheese coating my tongue as I lay awake long after. I felt like I was shrinking, getting smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter, less and less significant by the second.
I was allowed to have a small piece of cake for lunch the next day, but then the rest of the cake was thrown out. Nothing else was ever said.
My mother attempted the lunch date one more year, but I made no effort and neither did he. But that birthday set the precedent for the coming years. Late night grocery store carrot cake and sleepy “Happy Birthday” happened until I was a teenager and could use work as an excuse for skipping it entirely.
As I got older, I intentionally downplayed my birthday with friends and coworkers, saying it was never a big deal in my family (but never elaborating). I didn’t want to allow myself to expect anything and risk being disappointed. So I often worked on my birthday and barely acknowledged it even happened.
I thought I was protecting myself, but it hurt, every year. I guess a small part of me always hoped that someone would see through it and make a big deal about it in spite of what I said, but bless them, they believed me and honoured my wishes.
Now I realize I have spent my life feeling that I didn’t deserve to celebrate my birthday, that I wasn’t really anything worth celebrating. And that is fucking depressing.
This year, I want a birthday. A real one. I’m done feeling like I’m not worthy of any fuss and setting my expectations super low so that I don’t feel disappointed and even more worthless. I want a birthday, damn it.
If it wasn’t for Covid, I would so be having a birthday party this year (so friends, be warned, there will be a party next year and I guarantee it will be awkward, because I neither know how to throw a birthday party nor how to act at one in my honour. You have been warned. Make your summer travel plans accordingly. As in, leave town if you know what’s good for you). But I will still make the most of it. I ordered decorations myself, so I have exactly what I want. My toddler and I put them up yesterday; it was glorious. I also ordered a “chocolate explosion cake” from one of my favourite bakeries, and we are going to pick up food from our favourite “special occasion” restaurant and have a birthday picnic in a park.
Yes, I am having a real birthday.
And yes, I picked out the outfit weeks ago.
But this time, I am the one who determines that I am important enough, and I will always show up for myself.
And no damn carrot cake.