Suzy Says

Love/Hate, Friday, March 15, 2002

Birthdays

John and I both turn 40 this banner year. He is much older than I am, since his birthday is in April and mine is in distant June, but his feelings about his birthday verge from the indifferent to active dislike, whereas I love my birthday. I always have. There have only been two birthdays where I had mixed emotions:

1. When I was 8, going on 9 (at what age do you stop “going on” or being a fraction, like 5 and 1/2? Probably when you realize growing up is much less fun than you previously thought) and my mother was expecting my little sister Megan on MY birthday. Of all days. I considered this an outrage, since it was my birthday and that’s what counted. Clearly, having a baby born on my birthday would take attention way from me on the one day when I should be able to count on it. But good news, she was born 9 days before my birthday. And OK, she did come home from the hospital on my birthday, but it was after the cake had been eaten by my friends and me and thus was more in the nature of a floor show than the main event of the day.

2. When I turned 30 and realized that my youth was speeding by faster than I could spend a thousand dollars at Tiffany’s, and I would never be a child prodigy, or any kind of prodigy, and pretty soon, high school boys would stop noticing me, and then it was just a greased slide into wrinkles and all the other horrors of aging and then death and oh my GOD is that a wrinkle?! John applied jewelry, which calmed me down considerably. Guys, note this technique for future reference.

But other than that, I love my birthday. It is completely satisfactory. I like the date (June 4) and it isn’t during one of those bummer months with bad weather, not that there’s real weather in San Francisco, but still. I grew up in upstate New York, and it was nice enough to have my birthday party outside, but it was not yet the zillion degrees that made us flee to Maine every summer, and there weren’t mosquitoes yet. School was almost over, the glorious summer vacation stretching ahead.

Also, my birthday is not on or near a holiday, so I don’t get chintzed on the presents, which is, after all, one of the best things about birthdays. My birthday is conveniently located 6 months before (or depending on how you look at it, after) Christmas, the other major present date of the year, and what could be better than that? The people I know with birthdays even 2 or 3 weeks before Christmas get routinely ripped off and made to do with a combined present, which is one of the worst notions ever invented, right up there with Republican presidents and school all year round.

My birthday is the one day of the year which should be exactly as I want. I feel like that about the other 364, too, but it’s much harder to enforce on non-birthday days. I never, ever work on my birthday, because work does not fall into the category of what I want to do. It falls into the “I have to do it to pay the mortgage” category. So no work on the great day, and sleeping in and waking up sans alarm is also required. After that, we’ll see. It’s my birthday and I’ll do what I want to.