Birthdays

This year, on my birthday, I turned 44. I’m at an age where I’ve got a while to go before any kind of milestone birthdays, and I’m just sort of a boring, in the middle of my life age with nothing much to recommend it or dislike about it. This drives my kids nuts. They believe their birthdays to be national holidays, and cannot believe that I could meet one with a noncommittal “Meh.”

This year, my birthday came six days after my husband’s back surgery, and so I didn’t expect much out of the day beyond a phone call from my parents and a bunch of Facebook messages. I was not disappointed.

It wasn’t until about 1:00 pm that anyone in my family even remembered that it was my birthday. Since we had no cake in the house, my son shoved a half-used taper candle in a hot dog bun, lit it, and sang happy birthday. He then got offended that I did not eat the wax covered bun with gusto. My daughter, not to be outdone then wrapped up a pretty glass paperweight she had in her room and gave it to me. My husband, still coming off the anesthesia and on a steady diet of painkillers, said something incoherent about Dr. Bruce needing the VCR tapes and went back to bed.

Later that day, I had the pleasure of dropping my son off at band camp for a week. Jacob kept apologizing that I had to spend my birthday toting him across the state and dragging his duffel bag up four flights of stairs after shelling out $40.00 for the DVD of a concert that hasn’t even happened yet. (No elevator? Really? Isn’t that an ADA violation or something?) I didn’t care. Really, didn’t care.

Really.

And then I did. Not so much about the band camp thing, because that couldn’t be helped. It was more the fact that the best that anyone could scare up was a stale, waxy hot dog bun and a used paperweight. That night, my daughter had a friend sleep over and my husband stayed in La La Land in our bedroom. I stole away to the back porch where I attempted to give myself a birthday present, twenty minutes of sitting in silence in the hammock chair reading a book. I knew it was getting late, and I knew someone had to deal with the topic of dinner, but I just didn’t feel like it. Marin and her friend, who spends so much time at my house she might as well live here, came out every few minutes and asked me what was for dinner. I told them to chill out, and I’d get to it eventually. Around eight o’clock they began to get suspicious that it wasn’t really going to happen, and told me so. In a burst of self pity borne from the fact that I couldn’t even give MYSELF a successful birthday present (time on the hammock without being bothered) I barked, “It’s MY birthday! Why do *I* have to make dinner?” Marin’s friend apologized and swore she didn’t know what day it was. Marin just kind of backed away slowly.

And so the girls set to work, banishing me from the kitchen into my bedroom. They were going to bake a cake, but discovered that we had no cake or cake mix, or any kind of ingredients they could turn into a cake on their own. They came into my room, heads hung with failure. I mentioned that we did have pancake mix, and perhaps they could use that and some blueberries to come up with something. After some banging and chatter and some burnt smells, I was told perhaps pancakes weren’t such a great idea, and they’d make popsicles instead, only they probably wouldn’t be ready until tomorrow, so would I mind waiting.

I didn’t mind waiting. I didn’t mind that the next day the girls ate the popsicles they made themselves. It just made me happy that for a little bit someone tried to do something nice for me. That for a small slice of time my well being and my pleasure was the focus of some other human beings.

Isn’t that all any of us want? Well, that and a tropical vacation and a genie who grants unlimited wishes. (But only the kind you’re not sorry you make…..I’ve read enough of those fairy tales to know to be careful of what I wish for…..)

Lori B. Duff is the author of the Amazon ‘Hot New Release’ Mismatched Shoes and Upside Down Pizza, a collection of autobiographical humor essays. You can follow her on Twitter at @LoriBDuff and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/loribduffauthor. You can get her latest writing and news and more information about Lori at http://www.loriduffwrites.com