Thursday's Child

It’s amazing how one moment you are enjoying the summer sun, laying out at the beach and barbequing, and then suddenly you are pulling out fall sweaters and picking out pumpkins for the front stoop. I love October; I love everything about it. I love the chill in the air, the smell of freshly fallen leaves, and the crunching sound of the dried up ones. October means Halloween is around the corner. It also means that I will be turning one year older.

I was born on a Thursday, at the end of October. My mom makes the story of my birth seem about important as the birth of the Christ Child, and every year she will call me up and recite the story. Although this is embarrassing, I still enjoy it, because, besides being un petit bit egocentric, even at age 25, I’m as attached to my mother as a one-year-old with detachment anxiety. Every year, my mom would try so hard to make fantastic birthday parties. One year she designed a pirate treasure hunt to search for Trolls (twenty of them laid out in a treasure box) in our backyard. Another year she organized a party at a farm, where fifteen wild girls ran rampant around the place, throwing hay bales and screaming the song from Voyage of the Mimi. She baked cakes and cut them into fun shapes like caterpillers, fish, and pumpkin faces. So what if no kids wanted to eat the cake out of fear that there really were caterpillers in the cake?

Despite all those lovely birthdays, sometime, over the years, I have grown to detest my birthday. One of my problems with turning older is that I was always the oldest in my class. Having a fall birthday, I could either be the youngest, or the oldest in the grade. Due to child care arrangements, my mom decided to send me to kindergarten older, as a five-year-old. For the next decade, I would have to explain to the other children that, no, I was not left back, and no, I was not too slow to start kindergarten “on time.” I didn’t even care that I was one of the first to drive, buy cigarettes, and buy Smirnoff. I just felt old.

Later, in college, I always felt awkward celebrating my birthday. Unlike some of my other friends who threw themselves birthday bashes, or treated themselves to big birthday dinners, I felt uncomfortable celebrating my own day. “I love your birthday,” my best friend Jo would tell me. “It’s so exciting to see you get to the new age first!” I wish I could see it like that!

A sense of regret always lurked in the shadows of my attempted birthday joy; a feeling like I’m disappointing someone by letting the year go, a feeling like I didn’t finish something.

Like any narcissist, I indulged in some self-reflection, and one of my earliest birthday memories took form…

It was very early in the morning, barely dawn, when I crept into my parents’ bedroom. For the first time, I was very aware that today was my birthday, my own special day!

“I’m five today!” I exclaimed, bursting with pride. My dad reached out an arm to pull me in.

“But I liked you when you were four,” Dad said.

After I returned to my bed to wait for the day to begin, I thought about Dad’s response. “Too bad,” I thought, miffed. “I’m turning five anyway.” And there it was. That first tinge of regret.

When I told this story to my mom, she agreed that my dad responded quite strangely, but then she added, “But Cece, you really were the most adorable four-year-old.” (Over the years, I've learned that the last time I was cute, funny, or lovable was in 1988.)

“Too bad,” I thought, “Now I’m twenty-five!”

I know part of the anxiety I have surrounding my birthday is related to the timeline I created in my head. Married by age twenty-four (like mom, of course). Doctor by age twenty-six. Buy first house at twenty-seven. Kids at age thirty. And the list goes on. Well, age twenty-four came and went, sans wedding bells. I’m still years away from my medical degree, and have no plans to buy a house anytime soon. My OB/GYN rotation scared me away from having any kids at all. (Well, for now anyway...)

Although I’m not “on schedule”, for some reason, this year I don’t feel the same dread about my birthday. Maybe because that’s it--I’m entirely not on any schedule. Maybe it took missing the landmarks to free myself from the burden of those self-imposed deadlines. I am now charting my own course, and living without an agenda feels great. (Well, of course I have some agenda, I am Type A after all!)

Like the nursery rhyme says, I have far to go, and I’m looking forward to the journey. And along the way, I’ll be enjoying homemade, pumpkin-faced cupcakes every fall.