No More Preciousness

For ten years now, particularly online, I have refused to enter my birthday in any profiles.  At jobs, I try to act as if I have no birthday.  I'm proud of my age, have earned every second of 45 years ... but ...

Ten years ago, my father died on my birthday.  And for ten years, it's been an awkward revelation and conversation every time.

In the state he was in at that time, I would not have had my dad live one single more day just to clear off "my" little day.  The fact that the two things share an anniversary is not a point of sadness for me; I was already at an age where celebrating a birthday like a five-year-old was silly, and in our family birthdays are anything but a religious event anyway.  But our culture encourages birthday parties for middle aged people, and office culture in particular enforces expectations of celebration and recognition I can tell you (particularly/even as the admin) it can be surprisingly difficult to get around.  And I really don't give much of a hang about happy birthday stuff, on its own merits.  But when you tell people what else happened that day - it is incredibly embarrassing for them.  It is also, if not emotionally painful, simply an unpleasantry I would prefer not to bring into public awareness.

So for this past decade, my strategy has been to take time off on my birthday.  This year being the tenth, I took off a lot of time in fact.  From yesterday through Monday (the anniversary of his memorial service - and, though I won't get too personally-identifiable-information about this, the birthday of someone else in our family).  Yesterday, I spent alone - the first time since dad died.  With the two of us in the same town, most often I spend the day with my mom.  We talk a bit about dad, sometimes we get sad, usually we laugh at some point.  But it's not as hard as it was the first few years, and last year we didn't talk about him a lot.

This year, we hardly mentioned him at all, and spent today together instead of yesterday.

So the secrecy or at least evasiveness about my birthday, over time, has become itself as much of an embarrassment as the conversation that usually makes other people regretful and embarrassed and contritely sympathetic when they find out.  I hate doing that to people, but yesterday I realized that over time the balance has shifted for me off of "this is about me" and wanting to just avoid it to "the not-telling is as stupidly dramatic as the telling, and I've gotten good enough at deflecting other people's at-a-loss emotional reactions to this accident of facts that I'm going to stop not-telling."

So.

Yesterday was my birthday.  And the day I lost my dad.  He was peerless and funny and wildly intelligent and the best dad in the business.  I was blessed to have his gruff, warm voice in my life for 35 years to the day, and say prayers of thanksgiving for him perhaps every day of my life.  He was a parent to be grateful for, and I am sorry that in his name I have to make people awkward from time to time.  But it is time to stop the game playing.  My name is Diane - and something truly awful happened on my birthday ten years ago.  And that is not about me.