Happy Birthday

It's that special time of the year again. I think, as per tradition, I will try and put something up the day of. In the meanwhile, I want to address a very specific quirk of mine. I've been constantly asked since the age of 17 why I don't celebrate my birthday. Before that, I knew very few people, and they had all known me since I was a child. It never occurred to anyone to question what had always been.

When I joined college was the first round of questioning. When you attend college with 3000 screaming, tittering, butterfly-loving, pink-wearing teenage girls, it's hard enough to explain to them why you swear profusely or talk like a man. If you add in weird birthday issues, you have a bunch of young women all staring back at you with the accompanying soundtrack of crickets, when all they asked you was a simple question, "So what shall we do for your birthday?"

Let's start at the very beginning, I've heard it's a very good place to start. (Shame on you if you don't recognize that allusion) The beginning in this case is my family. My family as in my mother, my brother and I. We were never the happy birthday-rah-rah-rah family. Till date, none of us has a very big hoopla on our birthdays. We don't really even do presents. This is just horrifying to most of the social circle we travel in now, all of whom are middle to upper middle class to outright rich. I mean we acknowledge each other's birthdays. We've had a few stray celebrations here and there, but much like family vacations, this one tradition has simply never been a part of our family's DNA.

I think the biggest contributing factor was the very specific situation my family found itself in. We were poor, and were traumatized almost on a daily basis, both physically and emotionally. So for the formative years in our childhood, there was no question of celebrating or enjoying something. We tried to live life as quietly and unobtrusively as possible so that no one could possibly get upset or angry with us. Like I said, my mother, as and when she could, would really try hard to give us a 'normal' birthday experience, but these were few and far between, and often ended in disaster. During the early years, we did try and do presents. My mother would always try and get us clothes for birthdays, something that continued till we finished school. Our financial situation meant that she couldn't always afford to buy us nice things, but twice a year, on each of our birthdays, we would both get the nicest clothes she could buy us. Really, she took so much care and effort on this particular issue. 

Other than the clothes, we would try and do dinner, in as nice a place as we could afford at that particular time. At certain times, when there was decent income, it would be a nice 3 star restaurant and at others, when there was just very little, it would be one of the many small roadside diners that litter Madras. The clothes and dinner tradition continued till we could manage and till we all lived in the same city.

As a result of this, my brother and I never grew up with the idea that birthdays were special, that for some reason everybody should put on a party hat and parade around singing odes to the birthday boy/girl. We don't think that cake and soda and chips and samosas are essential to the birthday experience. We simply acknowledge wishes. As we are now respectable (HAH!) and contributing adults in society, we might indulge in a slightly expensive item of clothing or electronics. Beyond that, we don't really do the extravaganza. The same goes for my mother, who does manage to be a bit more festive than her two children, but not much more.

And then there is the fact that I hate my birthday. I loathe it with a vengeance. I have spent many a birthday curled up in bed, weeping. And I don’t even cry at funerals. This particular fact is hard for people to fully comprehend.

The hardest time is had by the friends I have made in the past 5-6 years. I have some friends now, that I see almost every day, that JUST DO NOT GET IT. I have no way to explain this to anyone without revealing deeply personal details of my history. I don't like my birthday. I don't like being wished. I don't like celebrating it. I don't like people remembering it. I don't like people singing to me. I don't like being reminded of my age. I don't like being berated because people believe that they have some special rights to pretend that their happiness for me should be the same as my own happiness on the day. I. DON"T. LIKE. IT. I don't want it. It's a personal choice, one I wish people would just respect rather than question incessantly. My birthday is not meant for your pleasure, it's meant for mine. And as I can not experience pleasure on my birthday, my solution is to hide from the world and pretend it's not happening. 

 

So, here's the thing, could you maybe, just not ask questions and leave me alone? It's what I wished for.