Tag: birthday

She’s Out of Her Mind

Would I normally have had a party for an unremarkable birthday in my mid-40s? Highly unlikely. This year, when all the parties were cancelled, we needed them more than ever.

Thirty years ago, I accidentally threw a great party for my 16th birthday. It was meant to be a low key “sit around and talk about nerd stuff under the unwelcome eagle eye of your parents while being gifted the entire discography of the Cure dubbed on cassette by the drummer of your boyfriend’s band who probably had a secret crush on you” kind of event. But then my skater friends turned up, and since we all traveled with music on us at all times back then, they threw the punk on the stereo and turned our dining room into a mosh pit and that was that. Nineteen years ago, I accidentally threw another great party for the last birthday I’d celebrate in Ann Arbor, which started off in the same “sit around the living room drinking too much whiskey and gossiping about your grad school professors” vibe, and ended up with my brother and a local illusionist called SuperWayne, whom I’d met at our bar earlier that year, juggling flaming torches out in the snow in the front yard while we all cheered like we were teenagers in an 80s movie watching someone do their first keg stand.

It’s not that I never try to throw great parties, they just tend to be for other occasions and they usually happen because we invite literally everyone we know to attend them and that ends up being an extremely eclectic mix. Our Halloween parties in grad school, our holiday parties here. I’m missing them like crazy this year, when both Halloween and Boxing Day are on Saturdays and they were going to be a helluva lot of fun.

Instead of all that, I convinced the DJ whose sanity-saving music streams I’ve been listening to for the past few months to let me sponsor a NIN-themed industrial and dark wave night for my birthday, complete with a mostly-all-punk hour long set of my favorites in the middle, starting with “Burn” and continuing on with “Burn.” It was more fun than I imagined I’d be able to have in the midst of all this, particularly the part where everyone fielded wild guesses about what would be in my birthday set. “These guesses are cracking me up,” said my old friend from high school. “They’re going to be really disappointed when they find out it’s Blink-182.” “I never know when you’re kidding.” “THAT’S WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT ME,” said I, a Sagittarius.

It wasn’t them, but it could have been! Happy pandemic birthday to me. She’s got a black shirt, black skirt, and Bauhaus stuck in her head.

Do You Realize?

Ten years ago, I went into labor three weeks early and twenty-four hours later, my heart was living outside my body. My child was born at 11:58 at night; once, I suggested maybe we should have had their birthday be the next day and my partner said, “Absolutely NOT, you were in labor literally the entire day, that is their birthday!” So. That is their birthday.

It is the most bizarre thing to grow another human being, to look upon someone and know that they once were just a group of cells inside you, and that you had to generate an entire additional organ solely to sustain their growth. So much growing, and then those cells become a being capable of independent life, which is maybe the most bizarre part of all. It only gets more surreal as that life that is initially so dependent grows and changes, walks and runs and bikes and swims, becomes truly an actual whole different person whom it is a joy to get to know.

I’ve had a decade to get used to having grown a whole entire person and I still marvel at it sometimes. Look at what my unreliable and prematurely aged body did! In the old stories that our child’s Waldorf preschool told, children wait in the spirit world until they spot the people they want to be their parents and then cross the Rainbow Bridge to join them once they’ve made their choice. I love this story, because it makes me reach for whatever there could possibly be inside me that called this lovely amazing beautiful surprising spirit who is my child into being.

Ten days after giving birth, I sat on the side of our bed and cried my eyes out because I realized that this tiny baby, whom I had just barely gotten to meet, would one day grow up and leave me. Which is, of course, exactly what every parent wants, a healthy well-adjusted independent child, but it was devastating to imagine then. My partner said, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves: they’ve only been here for ten days. We have time.” Ten years have gone by in the blink of an eye and it’s true that it’s a little easier each day to raise them to be ready to leave me, as doing so means we are privileged to witness them grow into who they are, a little bit more deeply each day. And who they are is absolutely perfect. I may have brought this child into the world, but I am only along for the ride.