Happy Birthday to Me (and You)

celebrating the things that get better

I used to avoid mentioning my birthday. Getting older was fine, but birthdays were best left unacknowledged. It was of course a childhood thing, like so many others. I reached adulthood with a deep belief, instilled by my mother, that wanting attention and celebration and presents was greedy and selfish. This applied to me in particular, and not at all to my brother, because naturally some things were just different, or so it appeared. My mother felt equally strongly about the birthday desires of children whom she didn’t like, or whose parents she didn’t like, or who had birthdays that represented a social obligation she didn’t want. So I did not feel singled out, merely part of the always substantial group of people who in my mother’s eyes quite frankly had no reason to think they deserved to ask that other people pay attention to them.

Cake was another part of the birthday problem. I was a fat child, scion of a long line of successful famine-surviving Eastern Europeans on my father’s side. (To the surprise of few and the dismay of many, I became a fat adult. Still am.) Had I been thin, as my sibling was as a child, perhaps birthday cake would’ve been a pleasure and a cause for glee. As it was, my wanting birthday cake was grudgingly tolerated because it was my birthday but really, no one who was fat had any business expecting to be allowed to eat cake.

Portrait of the author as a young typist.

This, naturally, affected my mother’s enthusiasm for my attending other children’s birthday parties. At home, she could supervise my access to cake and ensure that a strict one-slender-slice maximum was adhered to. If I was somewhere else, all she knew was that her fat little offspring was going to be chowing down on some damn cake. Once in a while she’d drop me off at a birthday party and pull the birthday child’s parents aside for a Concerned Conversation to instruct them in the one-slender-slice protocol, and sometimes she’d send me to school with a stern note in red felt-tip impeccable schoomarm cursive on a sheet of yellow legal pad that informed my teacher that I was under no circumstances to consume one of a classmate’s celebratory cupcakes. Other times she forgot or didn’t have time or perhaps I maybe somehow omitted to note that it was Marcus’ birthday on Thursday and he said his mom was bringing fruit punch and cupcakes from Heinen’s (the grocery store with the best bakery) for the whole class. In those cases I ate cake that should’ve been freedom-flavored but which, after the first two bites, always had the stale taste of anxious guilt.

Cake was bad, presents were greedy, expecting attention was selfish, and thus I grew up into a person who tended on the whole to squirm a bit if the occasion was noticed and otherwise let the day flow by, always with a sad little veil of feeling like perhaps, in another life, it could’ve been otherwise. Over the years and then decades and a not inconsiderable amount of time spent in therapy that fog lifted a bit but the day was never completely devoid of the humorless echoes of my mother’s voice.

To this day I remain absolutely useless at planning anything for my own birthday. Writing this post a week and a half in advance is the most birthday planning I’ve done in quite a while, if I’m honest, save for a few dinner reservations and homemade cakes. I have, however, gotten quite a bit better at allowing the possibility of celebration for celebration’s sake and thinking it might be okay to celebrate my birthday just because I want to. Or even because it might, you know, be fun.

Not to knock the heavy lifting of a couple of decent therapists, but most of the shift I’ve experienced actually came courtesy of my fabulous husband, an armful of dollar-store tat, and the color pink. A few years ago, prior to the moment when COVID shoved such festivities into quarantine, he surprised me with a high femme girly-girl-a-go-go birthday fiesta complete with crepe paper and party hats and special ribbon birthday badges. Ridiculous? Yes. Impractical? You bet. Transformative? One thousand percent.

I came downstairs that morning to find banners and streamers and the bright rainbow-maned unicorns of my six-year-old dreams all over the dining room. I stood there and laughed until tears ran down my face, then sobbed until I laughed at it all again. Later that day I would insist that a friend’s Very Seriously Stone Butch sweetheart don one of the pink ribbon birthday badges for a few minutes, both to watch them blush fire-engine red and for the pure glee of exercising Birthday Girl Privilege. There were cupcakes and sticky cranberry gingerbread and fresh homemade bread, butter and cheese and other things I no longer recall, and friends came to eat cake and blow noisemakers and sing me “Happy Birthday” whilst wearing shiny mylar-festooned paper hats. It was fantastic.

On that February day, what felt like a shameful, shabby little curse I’d somehow never quite managed to break lost its grip, pummeled into impotence by the powers of all the things that were too wasteful and un-utilitarian and frankly too girly for my mother to ever be able to bear them. A healthy quantity of fake pink rose petals and long-eyelashed cartoon unicorns and plastic cups with Disney princesses on them, it turns out, make some damn fine weapons in the arsenal of light.

This year, I’m doubling down. Not only am I celebrating my birthday because I can (though at the moment that I write this I’m not sure exactly what that looks like yet), I’m sharing it, Hobbit-style, with you.

Sometime during the day of my birthday I’ll choose a few free subscribers to upgrade to a few months of Paid status here at Reasons Not To Quit. I’m planning to also randomly pick a few paid subscribers and send them email asking for their mailing addresses so I can mail them some stickers from my fairly awesome (if I do say so myself) sticker stash, a bit of which is pictured below. If one of them doesn’t want stickers, I’ll ask someone else.

If you’d like to celebrate my birthday too, I’d love that. Having had such excellent luck with letting other people dream up birthday goodness in the past, I’ll leave the details up to you. Other people, I have to say, are usually much better at my birthday than I am. If you wanted to help keep my household running by supporting my work, though, that’d be fantastic. Classes! Editing! Book Coaching & Writing Mentorship! Subscriptions!

And with that, I gotta go figure out what kind of cake I want.