Birthdays, at least American ones, are supposed to be happy. Happy birthday! We text with an aggressive amount of cake emojis. (I love you, Rush Beam) But what about when they’re not? I want to know, after more than a few candles and birthdays blown.
How do we celebrate the passing of a happy-ish or okay enough or even a rotten bananas kind of year? Not because we are old, and being old is sad. (I’ve been telling people I’m almost forty for four years.) But because we are adults, and being adults is a lot, cake emojis and banana peels.
Any else started to overthink their birthday tidings as you’ve gotten older? I once texted my equally ornery friend Matt on his: Happy Birthday, if you’re into that sort of thing. Which is a really a non-wish.
What I am telling you is I think I’ve become a birthday atheist.
Celebrating other people’s birthdays was simpler, for some of us, when we were kids. If a friend was having a party, maybe you biked to Kmart, bought a Barbie you wanted, and then respectfully, resentfully, watched not-you open it. So, more of a Hope You’re Happy, Shannon.
But at least there was a wish, you know?
Or if you didn’t buy your way into the anthropological ritual that is “birthday”, the asks were more mechanical than mental back then. You didn’t have to prepare a toast or bring an appetizer or even be seriously profound in a card. You just had to, like, build a tower of styrofoam Big Mac containers until they fell down. Anyone else?
McDonald’s birthday parties were the tits in the Midwest.
When it comes to my own birthday, I’m somewhat responsible for the complexities. I’ve always been a bossy birthday babe. When I was seven, I invited every girl (and one girl’s little brother) to bring a Magic Nursery doll to my party, a doll whose diaper you dissolved in a bowl of water to learn if they were a boy or a girl or a triplet.
Yeah, you could get lucky and have triplets.
Of course, you had to send away for the extra two. The extra two came in the mail—which wouldn’t it be wild if this is how real triplets worked? You have one and then the extra two magically appear but only if you have the capacity for the paperwork? Because if you don’t have the capacity now, good luck with permission slips later?
But, gah, I was such a bossy birthday babe.
I was such a bossy birthday babe that I would not accept an off-brand baby doll at this soiree. You had to be a witchy little momma wielding a magic nursery. Oh, the swagger I had to insist. Oh, the swagger I once took for granted. I mean, I had a blunt bangs in those birthday pics.
To celebrate your birthday, happy or not, requires a good deal of swagger. And, perhaps, for all my skepticism of the ritual, this is why I still make a big deal of mine. Because this is a swagger that, until forty, has only felt appropriate for a witchy little momma like me to wield ONE DAY A YEAR.
Enter the adult birthday where I asked Rush if we could rearrange the furniture to celebrate, because on the other 364 days of the year, I thought he’d roll his eyes if I asked to see the upstairs couch in the downstairs den “one more time, just for funsies.”
And so, I came to think of my birthday the way some women think about weddings: as one of the few socially sanctioned opportunities to have an opinion on how I would like to be loved, and even then, not too strong an opinion. God forbid, I didn’t make others happy on my happy birthday.
All of this became more fraught when I became a parent. Until then, I had lazily judged adults who didn’t celebrate their birthday. It felt like a giving up, a trading in, an absenting of your own pleasure for the pleasure of minimal effort. Or the pleasure, if it can be called that, of not asking what gives you pleasure.
Then I magically “had” children—three at the same time, in fact, and yes, a good deal of paperwork was required—and my first birthday with them was trash. I served baked oysters in the backyard, while they cried inside. Rush boiled hot dogs, managing. More tears, these ones from me.
Birthdays were busted, I decided.
I couldn’t make anyone happy anymore on my birthday, not even me, and for a long time I didn’t know how to feel about this. Did this make me the Most Depressing Witch on Earth? Would lowered expectations help some? Or was this even more depressing?
I couldn’t make sense of it.
Then, recently, I had a thought that made all the sense to me. (You can decide for yourself.) Maybe my growing unhappiness with birthdays wasn’t the problem. Maybe it was my unhappiness with the unhappiness. The unhappiness was painful. But the unhappiness with the unhappiness was causing suffering.
You see, I think it’s the pressure to make this one day count, to live our best lives, to have no regrets, and, oh, right, exude “good vibes only” that can knock the wind right out of birthdays. It makes us dizzy with disappointment. It makes us feel bad about being feeling bad. Which makes it hard to feel much of anything else.
I want a better way to celebrate the “a lot-ness” of my gorgeous, graying life.
The last decade was a lot. I became a parent. I published two books. I bought and returned seventeen mattresses. I lost some of my swagger, some to sadness, some to self-doubt, some to numbing in the name of being present. There were nice birthdays. A child bought me a Diet Coke once. There were a lot of rotten banana birthdays.
Because I was asking birthdays to do in a day what I wanted for a life.
I want to be witnessed, for others to track my emotional growth like pencil marks on a door frame. I want to be loved, for being bossy and specific and pleased with the cleverness of my own invitations. I want to receive good gifts that don’t take up much space, like Diet Cokes and handmade signs and three nights of Rush “bodying” our children in the open wilds of our living room while I wrote this essay in bed.
What I am telling you is that I want every day to be a tiny birth day, which means every day a tiny death, too. Like how corpse pose comes before the fetal position in my yoga practice. Or how death comes before resurrection in my faith practice. They’re a pair. We need both. It’s a lot. It’s as it should be.
In this way, turning forty feels rather restful, inevitable.
So, this year, I am happy to release my birthday from being happy, in the American sense. Instead, may I be happy in the biblical sense, a happiness that grows like weeds out of the sidewalks of grief. May I have the permission to wield swagger on a Tuesday or a June day—and, also, the permission to trade swagger for sleep. (Minimal effort is, I understand now, an underrated pleasure.) May I, at any moment, know that I can extend an invitation saying, “This is how I would like to be loved.”
And may you text me an aggressive amount of emojis, cakes and banana peels, hearts and shit piles, sunshine and a lone woman salsa dancing, and say, “Ah, Adult Birthday!”
XO,
Erin