When I drifted awake I saw gray. The walls, slightly lightened by the crack between the curtain and the windowsill. My mouth, dry, as my nose was stuffed so I had been breathing through my mouth in my sleep. My ears, hearing the oddest sound, some kind of song that I couldn’t make out. I rolled over, threw my legs off the side of the bed, and did my daily ritual of getting up quickly and attempting to convince myself that I was awake, as my brain wished to slowly drift back to sleep, putting the pieces together: it’s my birthday. I open the door, my dog jumps up and starts to scurry down the stairs. She’s obviously been awake for a while. The music, still playing, gets louder as I walk down the stairs. Louder and louder it plays, as I walk through the dining room, and see my mom, standing there with her phone in her hand recording me. Her phone light is on, my reaction as I walk into the kitchen. Music blasting, waffles cooking, elves on the light fixtures and lights on full blast. The room is a daze, unlike any morning I’ve experienced this year, as an average morning for me is silent. A shower, breakfast, and a dark cup of coffee, its pouring what seems like the only noise I’ve made all morning: and that’s how I like it.
But today, loud music, noise, all the lights on, interaction not even 5 minutes after I’ve woken up. It’s startling, even draining, to talk to someone so early. But that’s what birthdays have become, at least for me, is making people around you as happy as you are. Birthdays are no longer magical, they’re no longer the most awaited event of the year, aside from Christmas, and they’re no longer just about you, even if your parents may think they are. It seemed as though the more quiet and isolated I became while eating, despite that being my everyday habit, they became slightly more sad, as if they expected more, more anything, more of “me”. So I put on a happy face, I hugged, and talked, and socialized, despite just wanting my normal schedule. But I knew that this wasn’t about me. My parents, specifically my mom, had put in a lot of work to make this morning special, hoping that I would enjoy it, that she would enjoy it. And I realized then, that my hypothesis had been correct; That as you grow older, Birthdays become more and more about making the people around you happy, not yourself.
But as I remarked on the events of the morning throughout the day, wandering through the halls of my school and brain, and experiencing the way my friends acted towards me, the same as always, their joking and laughing serve as reminders that birthdays can be normal, are normal. Remembering the way my family treated me, I harkened back to my previous hypothesis, and realized that I was wrong. The only reason my family was upset this morning is because I hadn’t had the reaction they were expecting. They weren’t disappointed with me, but rather with themselves, as they realized they didn’t know me as well as they thought they had, at least in that respect, and in reality they weren’t doing it for their own enjoyment, as I would notice later in the day, but verily and honestly attempting to make me feel better. When I began thinking deeper about my presumptions from the morning, multiple things were happening that would reshape how I thought about the experience.
The meal I requested was made, and the cake was prepared, and the whole family came together not to celebrate their accomplishments of celebrating and preparing such a great day for me, but genuinely celebrating me. It truly reminded me of being small and innocent; like a day in elementary school, when my chores were few and homework was almost nothing, and little me had not a care in the world except for when my bedtime was. Unwrapping my presents, seeing the Xbox One I unwrapped that night in 2016, a gift from my grandparents, thinking to myself about how lucky I was to have them, to have everything. Thinking back on that day, remembering the magic with which I celebrated that machine, a cover of Madden 16 on the box, Odell Beckham Jr. making perhaps the catch of the century and a letter from Grandma and Grandpa, Grandpa gone four and a half years now: the same controller in my hand. So much had changed since then, too much, yet not enough.
And when I thought back to how my sister’s birthday was celebrated, 5 days before the real event, on a cold night in late November, celebrating her life, I again realized, this time from an outside perspective, one of love and duty, that I wasn’t trying to make myself feel better about her birthday, but making sure she felt as good as she ever would. I realized that when I went to Target that day, a few hours before celebrating, scanning the aisles to find the perfect gift, eventually settling on a book, one of deception and murder with a red cover, that I wasn’t proving to myself that I was a good brother, like my original hypothesis would have predicted, but I was making her the centerpiece of my day. As I drove home from Target, buckling my seatbelt with a satisfying click, hearing the engine whirr to life as I turned the key, and hearing the crunch of ice as I braked at the stop sign, I thought about one thing: her happiness.
But her day was different. She spent the morning at her boyfriends, did an interview for one of her residencies, hoping she would find a fit and uncover her true desire for either surgery or family medicine, picked up the two boxes that she bought for me and came home after a somewhat less stressful day than she had been used to these past few months, the time of bone grinding 12-hour shifts and the least interesting work she would do in her medical career, and she was content. She didn’t have any misgivings over the way she would be spending her birthday, because to her birthdays are just normal days, worth celebrating, sure, but not important enough to interrupt any productive day. She made coffee and scrolled on Instagram, much like any other day. When she got to the clinic she saw her first patient, an older man with chronic heart failure who doesn’t take his medications because he doesn’t like to do what he’s told. He smells vaguely of cigarettes, an irony considering he carries around an oxygen machine… that he also doesn’t use. He’s a large man, over 260 lbs, needing a walker to perform basic tasks. He has a beard, gray, like the feeling in the room. A feeling of helplessness, as he wants help but doesn’t want to help himself, and she wants to help him but knows it is futile if he won’t take his medicine. He lumbers into the room, shifting from side to side, and sits down as she examines his body, starting with his arms, and moving to his chest, his heart and breathing, and finally she gets to his legs: legs covered with sores. The sores of desperation. Sores that seem to hold the last bit of hope that his body still has, waiting to burst, as if the body knows: I have a rendezvous with death. She checks his insulin, as the man is also diabetic, although any multitude of things could be responsible for his poor health, at least one is his insistence on eating fast food weekly, despite everything his doctors tell him. His face is wrinkly, white hair thinning, large nose and cracked lips, large eye-bags and a beard as scraggly as he is sick: terminally. She reads her measurements and calls her supervisor, as this man is going to the emergency room. Onto the next one. And although today is her birthday, or at least the day masquerading as her birthday, she doesn’t think about that, because there’s nothing special about today, other than the fact that she’ll go home and spend time with her family, like she does most every night when she’s in town, which she wishes she could do more when she’s not. Nothing special, except a warm chocolate cake that she eats twice a year, once on both of our birthdays. Nothing special.
On a typical day she sees about 10 patients, ranging from kids and babies to the elderly. Many with chronic diseases, their body slowly failing, as they “let their chronic problems get the best of them.” The waiting room is depressing, the floral colors failing to cheer up the fatal issues that fray their nerves and fight their body. But as they transition to the solitary room with the exam table and crinkly paper, the fight or flight reflex lessens. Problems are counseled and patients are both happy and sad, and the work can be draining, especially because many patients don’t take the medication that they need. “High blood-pressure patients need to take their medicine” she repeats for the third time, clearly frustrated with the inability of the patients to support themselves. But this is a typical day.
On her drive back to our house, she thought of many things: car payments, her boyfriend, and her medical career. She got home and sat on the couch, again, scrolling on instagram, like any other day. She remembers the dinner, crab pasta with breadcrumbs. She remembers laughing with me as I failed to blow out my candles. She remembers slowly drifting up the stairs, laying in bed on her phone before placing it on her nightstand and passing out from the exerted energy of the day. She thinks back on the day with indifference, remarking that she doesn’t “really remember what happened” because it was just “a normal day.” Unlike my changing ideas from the beginning of the piece, her thoughts were constant and consistent: just a normal day.
Birthdays are something special. They are something of warmth and love and care. They are something of beauty. And they are also something of cold, snow, and frost. Something that drains and numbs. Depending on the day, they may be looked forward to, or dreaded, or something altogether different that you hadn’t expected to feel. Sometimes they are a surprise. Birthdays are one thing here, another there, and a third thing in between. They are another normal day. Maybe this story has not been about birthdays, but about perspectives. Maybe it’s not about feeling good or bad, but simply about feeling. Birthdays, after all, are just another day closer to when the first meadow-flowers appear.