Today is my 48th birthday. Natalie asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday and I essentially told her I’d like to hide. I don’t care about the age thing at all. Day by day we get older, our bodies and minds change, whatever. But I would rather have this be a secret day where only the family that lives in my house knew about it. We could plan things to do (or not do) and I could feel more at peace.
A birthday, whether they are mine or someone else’s, feels like one more icky to-do on a to-do list. But instead of this to-do being something like clean the toilet, which is impersonal and could wait another day if I don’t get around to it, it’s something that has all this emotional weight to it. Whether it’s me trying to help someone else celebrate or vice versa, it feels like a performance or another expectation. I typically get a long list of happy birthday wishes on my Facebook page and think that probably some of those people I’ve watched via Facebook for years but not really interacted with are feeling as awkward as I do about wishing a near-stranger a happy birthday. I just paused from this post to go to Facebook and shut off the display of my birthday. A few people have already posted, but maybe it will reduce the onslaught.
I’m sure there are people who really like to celebrate their birthdays. I’m just not one of them.
The other complicating factor is that I share a birthday with my dad. And as I mentioned in my last post, I bought his cards and didn’t send them. No gift. Ugg.
I wonder if I had been more mentally healthy growing up if I’d feel differently about birthdays. I think there are some relationships and memories from my life before 30 that I can’t help but feel anxious about even though they are behind me and I can do nothing but try to do better each day forward. I felt stress about birthdays even as a kid. I felt my job was to make sure everyone else felt at ease that the birthday gift or way of celebrating made me happy. And frankly, I am hard to please when it comes to gifts. I remember feeling disappointed and guilty that I was disappointed by most of my gifts. That still happens. So is that having unrealistic expectations of others? Just being hard to please? Ungrateful?
Not just with my birthday, but when celebrating other’s birthdays I feel that anxiety. How do I pick just the thing they would like? Most of the time I don’t know what that is, except for the assertive kids I raised making their wants clear to me! At least when they tell me what the like or want it’s clear how they want me to respond!
Maybe this is why that, as an adult, clear and direct communication has become so important to me as both a good way to behave and a way to stay mentally healthy. If I tell people what my expectations are or are not, if I tell them what makes me anxious and what weird things there are about my way of thinking, it eases my mind. But like that other old baggage I can’t shake, I have a much harder time of that with my parents. I think Dad would take it ok and maybe even agree with me, but I fear it would hurt Mom’s feelings.
So how to proceed? The churning in my stomach over today’s dose of birthday anxiety is a little gentler than it was before I got the thoughts out. Maybe now I’ll come up with a plan for the day, ease myself off the couch and into some workout clothes and head for the gym. Natalie suggested bowling together and though I wouldn’t have thought of that for myself, it sounds like a fun way to spend the day with the kids. Of course, I need to work in some “shoulds:” I should get some groceries from Whole Foods to get us through the week; I should go with Catherine to ask for some donations for the choir fundraiser auction that happens in December; I should make a nice dinner for us to eat. And honestly, those aren’t too hard–easier than the find the perfect gift or make someone else feel special or being expected to enjoy or love something for me.
