Birthdays

 In 1974, I turned eleven years old.  Life was pretty good.  I was doing better in school, and I had a paid-up subscription to Famous Monsters magazine.  Birthdays are a big deal to a kid.  I was looking forward to mine.

In 1974, my brother turned seventeen.  In years past, watching him live his life was probably my favorite thing to do.  By 1974 watching him live his life was really very painful.  His part of his generation was characterized by anger and rebellion.  The war in Vietnam was not yet over, and the music was getting angrier and angrier.  Nobody said it, but he had begun having addiction problems the year before.  Some of his friends had it much worse.   I can't really say when his problems turned from addiction to full-on schizophrenia and paranoia, but it was coming.  The police had to bring him home for a few nights, but he didn't get into any real trouble.  His best friend nearly died from eating the wrong kind of mushroom trying to get high.

My father belonged to a group called the Young Presidents Organization, which was basically a group of second-generation business owners who ascended to positions of power at a young age and wanted to make the best of it.  They met three or four times a year, but the summer meeting was always the "family session" where the members brought not only their wives but their children.

In 1974, the trip was scheduled to be five days at the Ponte Vedra resort in Florida.  Since this was the Rebel Chapter of YPO, all the conference spots were in the South East.  Since Ponte Vedra was big enough to host the group, we went there a few times.  

My grandmother lived with us for half the year, so in preparation for getting us all to Florida, my mother had to arrange for my grandmother to fly to my Aunt's house for her half of the year.  My brother was flatly refusing to go to Florida.  Part of his rebellion was being really angry at the establishment, which basically meant my parents.  

My mother had to get my Grandmother to Atlanta, somehow make peace with my brother since he couldn't be left alone, pack my other brother, my sister and me, and herself and my father, and get someone to take care of the dog in the days leading up to our flight to Florida.

Watching her struggle to plan everything, I said offhand, "That's my birthday." and my mother looked at me with a very quizzical look on her face.  "No, no, that's a couple weeks after." She said.

I was ten, turning eleven.  I knew when my birthday was.  I wasn't going to challenge her on it.  She had a lot on her plate, I knew, and family dinners had become very tense between everyone and my brother.  I looked at the dog and said, "You're right.  We'll deal with that later."  and went to my room.

YPO family meetings didn't actually provide much family time.  The grownups had seminars all day and golf and tennis when they weren't meeting.  The entire point of the thing was networking with people other than your children.  Counselors were provided by the resort to take us kids swimming or golfing or some other activity.  One day they took us to a marine park.  I'd seen dolphin shows in Biloxi, so I wasn't impressed.

During one of the tween movie nights, I said to one of the counselors, "Tomorrow is my birthday, but nobody knows."  I'm not entirely sure why I said it.  I had resolved myself to not fretting over it.  My mother would take care of it when we got home, I was sure.  Maybe I just wanted to have something to say to this person in a power position over me.  The movie about the lady trying to raise a great dane and some dachshunds had already been on television and didn't interest me.  I didn't say anything else about it and continued watching the movie.

The counselor I talked to had to be no more than twenty.  She was pretty, but in a natural sort of way; she wore no makeup and always had her hair pulled back.  Her main job was to make sure we didn't drown and give tennis lessons.  The next night, when we gathered for kids' dinner around the pool, she came out with a cake lit up with candles.  It wasn't a birthday cake.  I think they just got a chocolate cake the hotel had for their restaurant and put candles in it.  I was really embarrassed to get so much attention from strangers.  

My parents walked by on the way to one of their functions, and when my mother saw what was going on, she developed this very pained look on her face, then she did a very curious thing.  She looked at me with a very pained look, like I had betrayed her.  I really have no idea what she was thinking.  Clearly, she was hurt, but I started feeling like I was the one who had hurt her, like maybe telling other people it was my birthday was a really bad idea, that it was some sort of private secret between us.

When we got home and got unpacked, my mother asked what I wanted for my birthday.  I listed off the Aurora Monster Models I didn't have yet, so the next day she took me to Play Pen and got the models, paints, the kind of glue that was safe for kids, and a GI Joe Action Set with a white tiger.  Most years, I had some sort of party to mark my birthday, but not that year.  We didn't speak of it again until forty years later.  

I should have told my mother that I understood she was very busy and had much more serious things to worry about than my birthday, but I didn't.  I don't think it hurt me, and I wasn't really angry so much as I didn't really know how to handle it.  In a family of four kids, attention went to whoever was having the biggest emergency, and in 1974, that was never me.

When I turned sixteen, it happened again.  My brother had been in jail, and when my birthday came around, he was living in the mental care facility at St. Dominics.  My family let June go by with no mention of my birthday.  My girlfriend baked me a little cake from a box.  Her father had died just a few months earlier.  I found the body after he'd shot himself.  It was a really sad, uncomfortable birthday.  Just like in 1974, whoever was having the biggest emergency got all the attention, and at sixteen, that was anybody but me.  By then, I learned to take up as little time and space in the family as I could.  I don't blame them for overlooking me because I was doing my best to hide from them.

I never bothered much with birthdays after that.  My mother would always try to take me out to dinner, usually Nicks, because that was the nicest, closest place she could think of.  Some of the time, I would do it, but most of the time, I would say I was going to schedule the dinner with my mother but never would.

Sometimes relationships die of a thousand tiny blows rather than one big one.  My mother created me.  She taught me how to read when my teachers couldn't, but a thousand tiny blows ended up breaking the bond between us.  Her life was very complicated, and I was but one character in a cast of thousands.  There was pretty good proof all around me that there were far worse fates than being overlooked.  

Being the child that didn't need attention meant that if I was quiet enough, I could get away with whatever I wanted.  And did.   Living under the radar like that had its advantages, but I missed some very important lessons on how to share my life with somebody, and that would come back to hurt me later.  

I miss my mother very much.  When she died, it'd been fifty years since I confided in my mother the way a child should.  I was still the child who needed the least attention.  By that time, I was absolutely the child who wanted the least attention.  I don't resent birthdays; I just don't celebrate them.  That ship sailed quite a while ago.