Member-only story
I Just Want a Birthday, Part 2
Time to Turn Fifty
Just twelve months ago, I acknowledged that I’d been shortchanged for most of my 49 years, not really getting to celebrate my birthday and having been trained to say I didn’t want to anyway.
You can read about it in my coming-out essay, “I Just Want a Birthday,” but the gist of it is that over the years, from childhood on, partly thanks to having a birthday just a month after Christmas and partly thanks to the short straw of an insensitive parent, I rarely got to mark my birthday in any memorable way. So, as reliably as a Pavlovian pup, I learned to simply say I didn’t care for parties or a fuss. I bowed out of birthdays. I sidestepped celebrations.
There were a couple of times that were fun along the way, like when I was in grad school and my birthday fell on the first Friday after we resumed classes for the 2nd semester. A bunch of us got drunk in the grad student office right on campus. Another was before that, when I was in college, and my boyfriend got tickets for a group of us to go to a hockey game in Buffalo, some 5 hours away and we road tripped, hungover, jammed into a tiny hatchback car with the radio blaring the whole way.
But when it came to family — whether the one I was born into or the one I married into — birthdays were overlooked, forgotten, and generally awful. So I learned to…
