Birthday Curse

One of my earliest memories is of my father giving me “birthday spankings” the year I turned 8. I started crying because they hurt and then he said, “I’ll give you something to cry about” for being a wimp about his “gentle” swats and indeed, he gave me something to cry about. On my birthday. But this example has been compounded by repeated trauma, leading to a deep superstition on my part to avoid either celebrating or making mention in any way of my birthday.

I will try to list some of the traumas here. On my tenth birthday, I had just moved to a new state, invited some brand new friends over, and ended up crying when they didn’t bring presents and told me my party wasn’t good enough and left. My parents repeatedly refused to buy any gift for my birthday that I asked for because I apparently asked for “foolish” things that I didn’t really want. So they gave me more practical things each year, making sure that I understood what kind of a girl I was supposed to be through these nasty gifts.

At age sixteen, I remember making dinner for my family because it was my assigned night. I made pizza and ended up ruining it so badly that it was literally poisonous to eat. My father went out and bought frozen pizza instead (Totino’s) and as I was putting the dishes in the dishwasher (too loudly), he told me that I was being a petulant child and that I hadn’t once thanked him for buying me pizza for my birthday dinner. (No cake, no presents, just the pizza) When I continued to not be grateful enough, he literally kicked me to my room, chasing me so that his foot kicked my ass multiple times as I tried to escape from him.

By the time I was an adult, I disliked my birthdays intensely. But I had some hope that I would be able to make my own birthday happy when I celebrated it without my parents’ interference and with real friends. One of the birthdays I remember as an adult was when I woke up in the basement apartment of my parents’ house that I was living in, and stepped into several inches of water. I spent the entire day cleaning up the flooded basement. My father bought a wet/dry vac for me and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t appreciative of this gift (I left this for my ex when we divorced).

I was heavily pregnant one year, waiting for a baby to arrive who was weeks late, and a friend tried to wish me a happy birthday and I told her “that isn’t going to happen.” I’m well aware that the proper response to “Happy Birthday” is “Thank you” and a smile, rather than a complaint and a wish that people would stop saying that. But I tend to be too honest for my own good.

Then came the year I suffered a concussion on my birthday as a result of slipping down icy steps when I went out to go walking. And the year that another racer crashed into me and wrecked my bike and sent me to the hospital on my birthday triathlon race.

Worse than all of these was the year my daughter died two weeks before my birthday, and now, eighteen years later, it’s hard to separate the two dates. Then three years ago, my husband demanded that I leave the house four days before my fiftieth birthday in the middle of the pandemic. He filed for divorce without my knowledge and I got served a few weeks later. That doesn’t help my memory of birthdays, either.

So when I say that I believe I have a birthday curse, I know it sounds ridiculous and superstitious. Nonetheless, I literally feel my chest constrict and my breathing increase when people wish me “Happy Birthday.” I feel light-headed and sick to my stomach all day on my birthday, waiting for the “birthday gods” to send me their curse again. The only hope I have is that they forget my birthday this year and leave me alone.

I know I’m weird, but if you see Facebook alert you to my birthday, I’ve chosen a day that is not my birthday where I’m fine with people wishing me well. If you poke around online, you can probably find out my real birthday if you wish to for some reason. I am absolutely and totally serious when I say the best gift you can give me on that day is not to mention it at all, even in a sly way, and to totally ignore that it is my birthday. If you want to send a gift or send me happy wishes, do it on my fake birthday so the birthday gods do not become enraged.