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The
Birthday Blues
People like me should not be allowed
to have birthdays. At the start of our special day we should be taken
into a quiet room and sedated. When we wake up the next day, then we might
celebrate the end of our birthday - the over-ness of it. Celebrate that
we survived it (albeit passed out) and that we won't have to be medicated
again until Christmas.
Take this year; my own particular brand of birthday paranoia has been
sleeping nicely for months but that sleep ends as the first card hits
the hall floor. Flatmate has risen early to make a birthday breakfast
and she brings in my cards, "Look you got lots of cards!" I get ten cards,
but with each one I open I think of another three that should be there.
Why did X not send one, and when exactly did she stop?
I can't stop thinking of all the people who did not send them, so I try
to distract myself by studying each card carefully. I notice that most
of the cards have very little written on them, just "to Priscilla from
X", maybe "with love from X". My paranoia wants to know why there is no
larger message, something witty or kind, and something really for me?
Evidently this pile of card senders don't actually care, they are just
ticking the boxes of long-term friendship: cards for significant events,
phone calls for tragedies, or some other formula.
Still, I see that a couple of people have written personal, albeit inane,
messages: "Hope You have a Great Year!" "Must Meet up Soon?" "Blah de
Blah Blah". I am briefly happy until an unnerving feeling makes me take
out last year's cards to compare them. There it is in gold and silver:
the same fancy scrawl and the same inane messages.
Birthday breakfast is a temporary distraction from card paranoia. My flatmate
has overdone the croissants but this is good, because now the fact that
I am too sad to chew and swallow them, and basically too paranoid to let
them enter into my body, is disguised by their flaking all over me as
overdone croissants do. Card paranoia is swiftly replaced by present paranoia.
Mainly of the WHERE ARE THEY ALL? sort, and why were there only cards
and no parcels? Why did my flatmate get a parcel with a present in it,
today, when it is NOT HER BIRTHDAY. OK so my sister did give me her present
earlier, but that was a whole month ago, she could have sent me another
one; for goodness sake IT'S MY BIRTHDAY, and anyway I can't even remember
what she gave me. And, she has sent no card, where is my card? Maybe she
should have sent me a card containing a photograph of the present, as
reminder.
I do get a present from my long suffering flatmate, who wisely asked for
a list, but unwisely went off the list and bought me something lumpy and
bouncy looking. I open it and find 3 small cacti in a box. I am utterly
dismayed because I hate cacti and I am sure I have told my flatmate this.
I am stunned into birthday silence as I contemplate our friendship. If
she did not hear me tell her how I feel about cactus, is she ever really
listening? Maybe I am reading too much into this birthday but I begin
to wonder about the level of inter-self-knowledge between my flatmate
and me.
Still I have birthday manners, and attempt to hide my pain with frantic
questions about cacti, and their care regime. Reading the packaging I
see that the producers have given the cactus a first person voice "I am
very easy to look after...I like a little tepid water, about 50ml once
a month". How could anyone pick a less characteristic present? I am not
at all easy to look after and there is nothing tepid about me. Flatmate
spots a crack in my appreciation when I ask; "do you think they know they
are so ugly?" and I break down and admit my long-term hatred and fear
of the species. I also use this as a chance to clarify if with this gift
she is telling me that I too am ugly, and need to make more effort? Flatmate
descends into dishwashing and flatmate silence.
So like I said I shouldn't be allowed to do birthdays, not anymore. When
I was a child it was nothing like this. In the months leading up to my
birthday I used to pray frantically to God that he would not end the world
before or on my birthday, June 13. Now I redesign this prayer by removing
the word not. Later in work - where nobody acknowledges my birthday despite
my hints - I go online to print out the Irish instructions for coping
with Nuclear Disaster and fashion them into my own personal (and soon
to be favourite) birthday card to myself. And I don't forget to add a
meaningful inscription: "To Priscilla, Bring on the end Lord, bring it
on. With lots of love Priscilla."
The sinking feeling, which takes over my body and grows all day is not
a hangover, but the yearly insight that birthdays will never be like when
I was a more-or-less happy child. This time it all seems connected to
the missing present. This was my favourite present, a 1litre glass bottle
of coca cola, with a barley twist neck, and an old 50 pence piece cello-taped
to the top, then wrapped up, (and always from the dog). While our dogs
changed, the present didn't. But present paranoia then takes a new turn
with the realisation that it was not in fact me that got this present
but my brother. The same brother who always had money at the end of our
family holidays and on the second last day could go out and purchase a
Casio alarm clock or radio, while I was scrabbling to buy sweets.
Without warning I am swamped by all my bad birthday memories: me crying
at one of my parties, me fighting with friends at another, me overwrought
and crying on my first teenage birthday cinema outing, me jealous of my
party guests taking home our goodie bags (where was my goodie bag?), me
demanding Julie to swap a goodie bag for the birthday present she had
given me earlier, me sobbing over duplicate presents, over unwanted presents,
and lately, over my ageing self.
I have met other people who got this type of present from their dog or
a make believe auntie, and they don't seem to have left it behind either.
That is a hard thing about getting older, the baggage mounts and the fallout
sometimes threatens to smother you.
So I repeat, Bring on the end Lord, bring it on.
by
Priscilla Robinson
2th December, 2002
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