Dear Mrs. Bluth,
Please forgive the unimportance of my problem, because next to the issues you deal with, mine will appear to be most insignificant. It is something I have been unable to deal with throughout my entire life, although something changed the last time I was faced with my yearly ordeal. To make a long story short, I never did well with “Mother’s Day” calls and tributes from my children and others who celebrate that day, and facing my birthday every year is almost painful for me. My children can’t understand why I abhor the day and choose to deny their efforts to celebrate it with me, but it is a day where I choose to disappear and become invisible. I even went so far some years ago, to reach out to a friend who is a therapist and she couldn’t understand my aversion to my birthday day and my desire to wipe it out rather than enjoy the love from friends and relatives to celebrate my being here. So I finally decided to draw up the nerve and fortitude to reach out to you and see if you can find the crux of the problem and how I might overcome it.
I just turned 78 and had to go through the same trauma I do each year on my English date of birth. Plans to run away for the day and “forget my phone at home by accident,” or just ignore the constant ringing and doorbell intrusions exhausted me because it was the one day I preferred to be alone. Why, why am I so ready to celebrate these milestones with others on their special days but not my own? I ask myself the same question every year. I spend the day pouring over photos of every one else’s parties, but something hit me this year, I noticed for the first time that I had no childhood photos of any of my own birthday parties!!
I went and dragged out every album from when we first arrived here in the States when I was one-year-old, every memory sharply evident and waking up a thousand memories, but nowhere could I find a photo with a cone on my head or a cake with my name on it. Not until my 12th birthday when my mother told me I was too old for a party when I asked to have one because all my friends had parties on that special birthday. My mother made it clear it was a birthday to contemplate becoming a woman and of taking on all the mitzvos that came with becoming a bat mitzvah. Not even a cupcake with a candle in it. In truth, we had very little in the way of money, my parents both worked so that they could pay their bills and ‘s’char limud’ for myself and my brothers without having to borrow from anyone what they might not be able to pay back.
A great sadness fell over me, a sadness deeper than my 78 years ever felt on this day. I knew my parents loved me and that they always did things to make us happy. My younger brothers had one or two pictures of birthday parties in kindergarten, but for me not a one. Foolish thoughts with no basis I thought as I collected all the loose photos and heavy albums ad returned them to their archives in the hall closet. But today, five days after the fact, I am still in the throws of sadness and inability to shake it off. I am grateful to Hashem for every year He gave me with the hopes He will bless me with many more. I am hoping you can shed some light on my sadness so I may yet get to celebrate that day with my children and grandchildren and enjoy being fawned and fussed over. It is something I truly want to experience, as foolish as that sounds. Is there hope still for a foolish old woman to be able to wear a crown and blow out candles without the heavy cloak of guilt and sadness?
Dear Friend,
I almost feel that you might have been my twin in an alternate life. Your birth date and year are off from mine by a few days, up to where you call yourself an old lady, that is, and I have been battling the same feelings of having missed out on so many birthday celebrations from when we arrived here. Post-World War II, as immigrants. So I’ll share with you my thoughts on the matter and perhaps, by helping you see why, I’ll be helping myself as well. By the way, I’m a pretty lively 78 and can still outrun some of my grandkids. And I intend to stay that way with Hashem’s help.
I, too, have no birthday party recollections, let alone photos, I recall going to other cousin’s birthday parties, but they were born here. I guess, each time I did attend a family birthday party for one of my American cousins, it made me feel that perhaps I was less deserving or worthy to have one, that I was less in some way. That revelation, through your letter, was a great jolt of awareness I’d never attributed to my hurt feelings before. A child denied, for whatever reason, the same celebratory recognition as other children the same age would automatically send subliminal messages of inferiority and diminished self-esteem to her unconscious Id, and as we grow, those childhood impressions grow with us. When we grow to adulthood and have children of our own, we made them grand birthday parties, possibly to compensate for not having had our own and living vicariously through them as they gloried in their special day! But the child that lives in each and every one of us is not appeased and still feels the hurt and the sadness we feel when our day comes around…. even at 78.
Wow, what a revelation to both of us! I can’t believe it took your letter to make us both aware that we are going to shake the rafters when number 79 comes around again. Oh my goodness! Why wait until next year?
I’m going to call my kids and claim every bit of the accolades and good wishes I denied all of us from giving and receiving all these years. And then I’ll go to Gourmet Glatt and buy myself the biggest, most elaborate birthday cake that can hold every one of those 78 candles and invite as many of my children and grandchildren that are around to watch me blow them out and enjoy a lovely bar-b-que in the backyard. I hope you will do the same. We have so much making up to do that we deserve a couple of our own birthday celebrations a few times a year to make up for all those we missed!!!
