When I turned four, I had my first birthday celebration. My dad had cooked a table full of my favourite dishes, carved a two-tiered cake out of watermelon, and stuck four candles on it. Watermelon was plentiful in the summer in Nanjing, and I loved it. I didn’t really like dairy at the time, so watermelon was a great alternative. My parents sang happy birthday to me and, my dad took a picture of me as I blew out the candles.
Four days later, he left for Canada.
When I turned 8, my parents allowed me to host a small birthday party in our tiny one-bedroom apartment. My dad was doing his PhD at the university, my mom was working night-shifts at a pharmaceutical company. They were both dead-tired all the time and never let me have friends over. So I was ecstatic that I could finally invite people home. I only invited four girls, because I didn’t want to overwhelm my parents. We were poor, but they went all-out that day. They bought a huge bucket of KFC chicken, my favourite, and bought me a fruit cake (notice the theme with the cakes). I prepared little gift bags for all my friends and let them play with my stuffed animals.
The summer I turned 12, I was in China. My cousins and I were staying with my grandparents in Shanghai. No one remembered my birthday. I cried myself to sleep that night, and for the first time the whole summer, I missed home. Missing home made me even more angry, because I never missed home, ever. I hated my parents, who never seemed to understand me and always lectured me. I hated my parents because I never seemed good enough for them, like I wasn’t the child they wanted. The next day, I received an email from my parents wishing me happy birthday. I cried some more.
When I turned 14, I was allowed, for the second time, to host a birthday party in my home. Again, I invited only four girls. We played cards and had Asian snacks and I made fun of my dad while he took pictures of us. Most of the pictures turned out terribly, with a couple of us cracking up, hiding our guffaws (and our faces) in our hands. But we looked happy.
The day before I turned 16, I was on the phone with WAF and she asked me what I was going to do for my birthday. “Nothing,” I replied, to her surprise. She asked me why I didn’t plan something, and I said because everyone was gone for the summer and no one would come. She said she would come. Then she suggested we go to the CN Tower, because in all my years in The City, I’d never been up there. I agreed.
The next day, we met around noon downtown, and to my surprise, about a dozen of my friends showed up. “What are you guys doing here?” “WAF called us,” they said. They apologized for not having a birthday present, since it was so last minute, but to me, I’d already gotten an excellent birthday present. That night, we had dinner at Richtree, and at the end of the meal, a group of staff came up to our table with a slice of cake, a lit sparkler, and everyone in the restaurant was singing happy birthday to me. “Who did this?” I asked around the table, embarrassed. They all shrugged their shoulders and laughed.
For my 17th birthday, I was at a camp in Halifax. I use the term “camp” loosely – it was more of a month-long “enrichment program” held in Dalhousie university. The 50 of us became a close group by the second week. I was in charge of the “monthbook” (like yearbook, but for the month), and as the summer was drawing to a close, I was starting to get stressed out with the deadlines. On the morning of my birthday, I woke up early to work on the monthbook. I had completely forgotten it was my birthday, and was simply bitter about having to do all this work by myself, again. Why does this always happen to me? I wondered. Am I just a magnet for all slackers and I end up taking responsibility for everything? My roommate had left the room when my friend knocked on the door. “I need help with Photoshop,” he said. I followed him down to the boys’ floor, and complained the whole way. I was not in a good mood.
As he opened the door to his room, I was suddenly greeted by a chorus of “SURPRISE!”
What? This was a surprise party? For me?
That was when I remembered it was my birthday, and I immediately felt sorry for being so pissed off the whole morning, and whining to my friend about it. My roommate was there too. Apparently the night before, she’d tried to keep me up talking so that I wouldn’t wake up so early in the morning, but I fell asleep halfway through our talk. So, they’d been scheming all along!
They had made a giant card out of bristol board for me, and everyone at the camp had signed it, including the counselors. There were balloons lying around that read “It’s a boy!” and “Congratulations!” – my friends explained that they couldn’t find any birthday balloons, or any normal balloons for that matter, so they had to settle for the baby shower balloons. They also weren’t able to find cake that early in the morning, so they had bought me a bowl of fruit. I liked fruit, didn’t I? Yes, I told them. I love fruit. How well they knew me.
I was so stunned that for the first half of the “party,” I was pretty much silent. No one had ever thrown me a surprise party before. Heck, half my birthdays have been utterly forgotten! And here these people were, people I’d only known for three weeks, getting up at the crack of dawn to buy me a bowl of fruit. MFL was there, and I eyed him curiously. “Did you plan this?” I asked, amused. No, he shook his head, “I wish I had.” The girl who planned it was one of my closest friends at the camp, and after that day, I deemed her a life-long friend.
My 18th birthday came and went while I was vacationing in China with my parents. They forgot about my birthday until the end of the day, when we went to a temple that housed thousands of monks and you could buy a card with your birth date on it and a corresponding monk. My parents did not seem at all apologetic that they’d forgotten my birthday, and didn’t try to make up for it at all. “Getting that card on your birthday is good luck,” was all my mom said.
When I turned 19, I planned a big party for myself. I invited all the friends I still kept in touch with, some from high school and some from university, and we had a big dinner celebration. Except, it wasn’t that successful. First of all, a lot of people who I thought I was good friends with declined for no reason. Then, there were people who didn’t want to come because so-and-so was coming, or would only come if I invited so-and-so. Then, on the day of, a lot of people didn’t show up. Then, the people from my high school and the people from my university didn’t mingle at all, so I was sitting in the middle of the table with two factions on either side. All in all, it was not comfortable. I had a couple drinks and called it a night. I was the first one to leave my own birthday party.
For my 20th birthday, I had learned my lesson. I invited five girls to dinner and five boys to the lounge after dinner. We did the fine wine and dine thing. It was fabulous, but there was no cake, no fruit, no candles, and no birthday wish.
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Originally, I was trying to recall my previous birthdays because I was trying to recall happy memories. Ever since I was confronted with a “Are you unhappy?” after telling WAF about the bulimia thing, I have been walking around with a big question mark floating over my head. Me? Unhappy? No way! It was the exact same reaction I’d had in the doctor’s office, when, after all the questioning about my bulimia, he’d finally asked, “Are you depressed?”
So I tried to remember some happy times. And of course, birthdays were the first thing I thought of. I mean, birthdays are happy times, right?
But I was suddenly alarmed to find that I only had a handful of truly happy birthdays. In fact, even my most recent birthday, however fabulous it was, was missing something crucial. A birthday wish. Candles, some semblance of cake, a happy birthday song. It didn’t really have the usual festivities of a birthday party. Am I too old for them? Is it no longer appropriate to have birthday songs and cake and candles after the age of 16? Because that was the last time I saw a candle (well, a sparkler).
This realization also made me rather furious with my parents. Why didn’t they ever celebrate my birthday anymore? At some point between my 14th and 16th birthday, they’d decided that it was no longer necessary for them to give me a birthday present, or even to acknowledge that it was my birthday. It was just like when they stopped “being Santa Claus,” and then stopped giving Christmas presents altogether.
Should I be happy that the only time I can get a decent present now is when I buy it myself? Should I be happy that the only time my birthday gets celebrated is if I painstakingly plan it myself?
I know it’s not that big a deal, only as big as I make it. But that’s the thing, birthdays and Christmas have always been a big deal for me. I used to plan three weeks ahead of time for my parents’ birthdays, and the one year I forgot my mom’s birthday, I felt so terrible I went out in the middle of the night to buy her a present, before the clock struck 12. When I was younger, I’d put streamers all over the house for my dad’s birthday, and I’d make french toast and let my mom have breakfast in bed for her birthday. This year, I bought a birthday cake for my dad and sparklers and candles and insisted he make a birthday wish. What about me? My birthday was only a week before my dad’s and they didn’t so much as send me an email. I’ve never had breakfast in bed, I haven’t made a birthday wish since I was 10, and my parents never decorated the house for me. My only surprise party was thrown by friends who’d known me the shortest time of all my other friends, and most of the time when I try to plan my own party, I’m bombarded with political considerations of who to invite and who not to invite.
I’m so tired. I’m so tired of everything. I’m tired of navigating the social minefield. I’m tired of wondering who actually cares about me, and still not being able to call anyone when I need to talk. I don’t want to “make conversation,” I just want to be myself. Maybe that article was right. Maybe I am trying to please, maybe I am dependent on how others see me. Because I know that I’m not always funny and lively, but that’s how I always behave around friends. Sometimes I’m mellow and quiet and boring -
Ironically, as I was writing this, I got Courtney’s birthday presents for me1.
Perhaps I should give my friends the benefit of the doubt. That they do care about me, that they will be there for me. But I’m just afraid, because any time I start depending on anyone, any time I start really believing that, I get disappointed.
I feel kind of like a mussel. I’m cautiously feeling around my environment with my inner muscles, looking for something to latch onto. But as soon as I latch onto something, that something gets swept away and I’m alone on the beach again.
Maybe it has nothing to do with being tired or unhappy or cynical or disbelieving. Maybe it’s just about being afraid. The fear of being irreversibly hurt.
- Thank you so much! They’re so adorable! I feel like my phone is not cute enough for these, haha. [↩]
There’s a point in every girl’s life when she forcibly violates herself. It’s called, Using a Tampon for The Very First Time.
It recently occurred to me that if I put all my stories together and tied it up with a neat little theme and some subtle psychological character analysis, I’d have a damn good book on my hands.
This is why we have girlfriends, to remind us of the important things in life: