Birthday ramblings

There are a lot of holidays on which I aim to spend a few minutes being reflective. My birthday was never really one of those "holidays" until after my mom died--marking the anniversary of your birth takes on a new meaning when half your claim to life is no longer around--and it made me sad for the first two years. In fact, for the first 18 months after my mom died, which was on August 11, 2005, the eleventh of every month was a predictably shitty day, which by proximity sort of tarnishes the twelfth. But my birthday doesn't make me sad this year.

My mom used to give me hour-by-hour updates of what stage of the pregnancy she was at in the days and hours leading up to my birth. "Right about now we headed to the hospital" (February 9, evening)... "At this point you refused to come out, you little shit" (February 11, afternoon)... "OK, so right about now is when the doctor decided to do a c-section..." (February 11, evening). And until I turned fifteen or sixteen, she always made a birthday cake. When I was five, she made one that looked like a gumball machine. When I was six, she made a baseball jersey with a blue "6" on it. Those were the only two really involved cakes she did, clipped I think from Women's Day magazine, because from age seven on, she always made a frosted chocolate layer cake draped with gummy worms.

I remember my birthday during the year my grandfather died, which I believe was 1994, when I turned twelve, because my gift that year was the most substantial I had to that point ever received: a Kenwood portable CD player. You have no idea how badly I wanted that CD player. I had a mason jar with a note taped to it sitting next to the front door asking for portable CD player donations (mostly it was only my grandmother who put money into it), through which I probably raised $50 or so (twice Grandma put in twenties). I scoured the Sunday newspaper advertisements and flagged every Kenwood portable CD player listing and watched the price fluctuate by five or ten dollars every week. I never expected that they would just BUY it for me. That CD player was like a hundred dollars!! And don't you know that that CD player lasted YEARS longer than any iPod ever has. Guess what CD I got that year? Whitney Houston's "Whitney" album. My brother Max gave it to me.

Several years later, mom and Max took me to McGrath's for dinner and laid out my birthday gifts on the table, which ended up being my double-disc Rent CD and an old cribbage set with airplane tickets to LA hidden inside. Because it was a CD I already owned and because I thought cribbage was the stupidest game ever (and also because it took me forever to find the plane tickets tucked inside the cribbage box), it took me a few moments and some help to figure it out: I would be going to Los Angeles to see Rent with my Mom. I was thrilled--it was, like, the kind of gluttonous disbelief that you see on The Price is Right, rivaling my excitement at the Kenwood portable CD player. And the trip was amazing—it was the only time I'd been to LA. Daphne Rubin Vega was in that production. And we saw Frances Fisher, who was starring in Titanic at the time, on the street. When I wrote a thank you letter to my parents upon my college graduation, I recalled that trip vividly, how Rent managed to scandalize them (AIDS! Homosexuality--both gays and lesbians! Strippers! New York!) and yet their uneasiness with it didn't prevent them from supporting my interest.

I should also mention that between the ages of seventeen and twenty, they always gave me a bottle of wine to horde for my own use.

When I started this post I thought it would be heading somewhere somber, and I’d even begun writing a paragraph about how from the Kenwood portable CD player on the price tags just kept getting steeper and my expectations grew unattractively and how since then I've felt like kind of a greedy fraud when it comes to my birthday. But I don’t think that’s true, and these ramblings haven’t taken me there. Clearly I've been pretty spoiled and my parents were--are--very generous. But from this vantage point I see them as such active agents in making me to be who I am (and not just re: the wine), and I’m again completely in awe of their acceptance and support--God, I wish every parent would provide that. It would solve all the problems in the world.

You know how one of the rites of adolescence is some stupid birthday party with your friends? Whether it's at McDonald's or to go see "I Love Trouble" at the movie theater (I seriously have done both!), there was always an obligation to do something with "friends." I never had friends I liked until high school, but nevertheless, throughout elementary school, my mom organized parties with the Mormons at the bowling alleys and put-put-golf courses, never even flinching (she pretended to like them!). I didn't ever not enjoy those parties--and I always insisted on having them--but it took me a few years to detect the lingering bad taste in my mouth, after I had enough of a vantage point to connect the dots. (I usually had much more fun with my family than with my friends.) When I realized my kinship with straight females my own age, during my junior and senior years of high school, I finally came to and threw a brunch party, which Mom and Dad never batted an eye at either.

So I guess the point/lesson/first-person consensus here is that even when I have one of those birthdays that I'm supposed to dread--30, 40, 29, 39, whatever--I'll probably never actually dread it. It's a good feeling to have respect for your life and to acknowledge and admire the variables--cheers!--that constitute it.