Happy Birth— Shut Your Mouth!

I don’t totally understand celebrating birthdays. Aside from falling out of my mother’s vagina, I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything too remarkable the day I was born.

So when my birthday arrives each year—songs sung, cakes cut, lines blown off hookers’ asses, donations made in my name to various charitable causes—I always feel a little silly and undeserving of the celebration. It’s not about low self-esteem. I have a sizable ego. It’s just that if anyone should be wearing a party hat, shouldn’t it be my Mom? Or her uterus?

After the standing ovation for my initial arrival, why the need for annual hubbub?

Couldn’t we store up our celebratory energies and money—I’m such a cheap Indian, I know—for just the actually significant birthday benchmarks?

How about ages:

13: Because Bar and Bat Mitzvahs are awesome and I’ve wanted to convert since sixth grade.
18: Porn, cigarettes, and the person you’re sleeping with is no longer a felon.
21: Because America, with regard to its legal drinking age, is stupid.
30: Because People kind of start freaking out about 30. You know what? When you have what you thought you wanted, celebrate! I get the sense it’s a short lived sensation.
40: Because this is when people really start freaking out.
50: Because you magically start getting the AARP magazine for free. How do they know?
65: Official senior citizen, baby! MEEP! MEEP! [Yes; that’s the sound of a Rascal horn.]
72: Because you can now run for president and lose.
80: Because your grown children won’t realize it, but you’re still young enough to, as the kids say, “beat the pussy up.”
90 to forever: Because now you’re allowed to be completely out-your-damn-mind belligerent. Go buckwild! Date 65-year-olds! Tell your grandkid she looks fat in that dress. Shake your cane at strangers. No one is going to stop you!

Good grief, even my list is daunting in its length. That’s so many required gifts to give throughout a single, traditionally unremarkable lifetime. The expense! The expectation! The inevitable disappointment because non-spontaneous gifts and gestures are so awkward!

It’s painful when the ungraciously anticipated birthday gift you give is received with that glassy-eyed, forced grin that says, “Wow. Thanks.” [**cricket chirp**cricket chirp**] If it’s a dinner, you look uncreative. If it’s tickets, the show could suck. If it’s money, you end up looking like some sort of sugar mama. I’m not a mind reader, or Oprah! Just tell me what you want.

I find accepting birthday gifts to be equally nerve-racking. I quake with terror just before unwrapping a mystery birthday box. I wasn’t always this wary of friends and family bearing gifts.

“Dear god,” I pray, “please don’t let it be. . . . ”

Let me take you back, using the blurry flashback special effect, to the birth of my birthday-gift-phobia. Several years ago, as the end of January crept closer, ye ol’ New Haven, Connecticut became colder, grayer, and sadder. During this dark time, all those years ago, I made an executive decision to submit to my winter depression and skip my birthday.

The directive I issued to friends and family was, “Please don’t do anything for my birthday! I’m not where I wanted to be at 20 years old. This year I am—we are all—conscientiously objecting to my birthday.”

“I’m not where I wanted to be at 20 years old?!” If I could go back in time, I’d punch me in the face.

The second directive I issued specifically to my then most-recent ex: “Stay away from me! You erode my sanity.”

To be fair, this person was a completely decent human being. That being said, he was the Bunsen Burner to my beaker of Crazy.

This of course means that he showed up, at my door, on my birthday, and gave me—in earnest—the worst present I’ve received, maybe ever.

It was an Anne Geddes book of weird, squidgy, fetal-looking infants.

EWWWWW! And not in the complimentary way.

Now, I know many of you will reid this and think me heartless. You think I’m being purposefully mean-spirited for the sake of punch line dramatics. But how to describe my genuine confusion and dismay? Hmm?

I used to hate babies. Specifically Caucasian ones. HATE THEM! Totally inappropriate, I know. On a more general note, I used to hate babies! It’d be like gifting an agoraphobic a walking tour of Manhattan. Or taking a skinhead to a Bernie Mac memorial screening of the Original Kings of Comedy.

It wasn’t just the book itself, though I wanted it taken away, Away, AWAY! It was the deeply troubling idea that someone who had been in me, with whom I sometimes had whole conversations, actually came to the logical conclusion that, “Yes! She is really going to enjoy this gigantic book of creepy, mushy, vaguely amniotic infant photography.”

I was, in a word, disgusted. Disgusted with the weird fetal babies. Disgusted with the book. Disgusted with my ex. Disgusted with my birthday—this event that had precipitated the giving of this horrible gift. Disgusted with my own disgust.

Over the years, The Wife has tried to rationalize, for me, the psychology behind the giant Anne Geddes book birthday gift. It remains an illuminating moment of my early twenties. A large format reminder that people can love you, but actually have no idea who you are. Usually these people are called grandparents with Alzheimer’s. And you don’t have sex with them.

More importantly, your parents give the birthday gifts on their behalf. As most children would find it upsetting to receive a box set of catheters each year.

Secondly, The Book taught me that you never, ever purposefully let people buy you things for your birthday. Meals, good! Drinks, even better! The moment you venture into the territory of tangible objects, there’s only one layer of wrapping paper between you and your Anne Geddes book equivalent. What might that be? I shudder to imagine.

The Wife refuses to let me either return the book, or re-gift it. She told me it was totally unacceptable birthday present etiquette. She got Oklahoma-stern on me, and I didn’t want to cross her. I think she just wants to preserve a perverse piece of my personal history.

Also, so long as the book remains in my possession, no birthday present—no matter how odd or misguided—can possibly be as bad.

Now, any time my hand begins to shake as I finger a decorative bow on a birthday gift I say, “I told you not to bother, really!” And inside I’m thinking, “It couldn’t possibly be a Limited Edition Anne Geddes book with an amniotic sac autographed by the author. It couldn’t possibly. . . . ”