Birthday Unparty

When I was growing up, birthdays were not so much celebrated as endured, tolerated, or, better yet, politely ignored.

Of course, my mother and father saw to it that my younger brother and I had splendid birthdays, but when it came to commemorating their own birthdays, they made it known that, generally speaking, no gifts were to be given, no cakes were to be purchased, and no mention was to be made. I cannot say when my parents stopped observing their birthdays, but it would have had to have been at some point prior to my arrival. By then, my mother was 38 and my father was 45, and evidently they had passed the point when they considered it fun or festive to make yearly observation of their advancing ages. 

In fact, I can only recall a handful of times when my brother and I were encouraged by one parent to give something to the other parent for their birthday. I have no idea what circumstances might have prompted these exceptions to the rule, but I remember how awkward I found the subsequent gift-giving. Having been raised in an atmosphere in which my parents’ ages were only vaguely known and their birthdays essentially unmentionable, it somehow did not feel right to give my mother a copy of her favorite movie, Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember, starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. Of course, I was delighted to give her a gift I knew she would prize, but I knew that the occasion risked tarnishing an otherwise wonderful memory: My mother would have loved for her sons to give her this gift on any day other than her birthday.  

In my mother’s case, I presume that her birthday phobia was a fairly straightforward matter of vanity. She simply did not relish getting older, and she had no appetite to be reminded of getting older by, of all people, her two young sons. As for my father, I have come to the conclusion that he simply thought celebrating his birthday to be something he had outgrown in, say, junior high. As an adult—as a husband, a father, a CEO—he would have considered celebrating his birthday to be a self-indulgent waste of time. 

In another of those anomalous parental birthday celebrations, I remember the three of us—my mother, my brother, and I—buying him a cake for his 64th year. (Not that we noted that it was his 64th year—I just did some quick math in my head.) Why, I do not know. Unlike my mother, my father was appreciative of the gesture, but he had for so long projected an image of unselfish giving when it came to his family that it still seemed a little strange for us to make such a fuss over his big day—which, to him, was just another day. I think he mowed the grass afterwards. Adding to the irony was the fact that my father did not even like cake.

Above all, my mother felt that birthdays were for children—tiny humans to whom a birthday is merely an occasion for fun rather than a marker of mortality. This attitude amused my grandmother, who seemed not to understand why anyone, of any age, would refuse a party in his honor. Perhaps significantly, my grandmother lived to be 100.

As I contemplate my own birthday next week, I have come to the conclusion that my parents were half-right. Setting aside the practical considerations impeding a celebration of my own birthday—am I to order a cake wishing happy birthday to myself?—I long ago outgrew the urge to treat each passing birthday as yet another invitation to rollicking merriment. I agree with my mother: These affairs are best left to children, who naturally delight in being made the center of attention on their own little holiday. For grown-ups to express the same level of unbridled joy at something they have no say in nor control over—the date of their birth—is a tad lame. 

At the same time, my parents’ firm birthday denialism has its own problems. To deny advancing age is to live in a void—untethered from the past, cut off from the future. Next week, I will certainly register my passage from one age to another. I may not do so at dinner, in the company of others, or with a caravan of gifts set before me, but I will permit myself to acknowledge the reality of time marching on. I will endeavor to do so in a spirit of gratitude and expectation. In fact, birthdays can confer an urgency upon one’s hopes and wishes for the future; if one is turning 42, rather than 32, one will be apt to pursue one’s goals with more vigor. In this formulation, a birthday is not something to be celebrated for its own sake but to the extent that it shakes up our indolent dispositions.

I would like to think that my parents were more aware of their own ages than they let on. For example, I am certain that they still exchanged birthday cards among themselves for some years after my brother and I were born, a far more restrained display than expecting gifts or baked goods from their children or each other. I come not to suspend the practice of adults commemorating their birthdays but to urge such commemoration to take on a more dignified and solemn character.