I turned 50 this year. My friends range in age from 30 to 86, but naturally there’s a concentration around my own age, and few of us threw parties. Perhaps I just don’t befriend party people (perhaps they don’t invite me to their parties), but it seems that many of us are ambivalent about our birthdays.
I don’t think it’s the same as reluctance to age, because friends who are unsettled by their own birthdays now felt the same in their 20s. Children can also find birthdays hard: so much anticipation; the hope and fear of so much attention; the pressure of being a year more grown-up, which is sometimes exciting and sometimes unwelcome. For some children, one’s own birthday party can be overwhelming, demanding the playing of a role there’s little chance to practise, requiring a tricky combination of being a good host and the star of the day.
It’s sometimes hard to tell what it means when someone says they don’t want any fuss about their birthday. Do they truly find attention embarrassing, feel afraid of ageing and would rather repress the whole business? Or are they, by reason of culture or upbringing, obliged to pretend to be modest and retiring while secretly longing for, or worse, expecting, a ‘surprise’ with fireworks, balloons, multistorey cakes and dozens of their closest friends?
The stakes can feel high here: someone who truly, deeply dislikes birthdays will be understandably wounded if people they love insist on ‘celebrating’ despite a clearly expressed wish to the contrary. Someone who longs to feel seen and loved but cannot say so might – less reasonably – be as wounded to be taken at face value.
READ MORE
I am generally of the view that children should learn and adults should practise a clear articulation of needs and desires. In an ideal world, a person would say, for example, “I dislike large gatherings and consider balloons crimes against the planet, but I want everyone in the family to go to a film of my choosing and pretend to like it and then I want champagne and a big chocolate cake with candles.”
I’ve learned to do better the last few years, but I used to be among those who understate desire for an event, because of a tricky double-bind in which I wanted family and friends to want to celebrate me, not to do it because I said so. If I said what I wanted, it meant they were doing it only because I asked, when I longed for my exact preferences to be magically known without me having to take responsibility for expressing them. This is a childish and self-sabotaging position unbecoming someone committed to good communication. It was also hard to outgrow.
Many aspects of birthdays are charged with such dilemmas. My working assumption is that someone who says “no presents please” means either “I need to be seen as the kind of person who has no desire for material possessions while in fact liking shiny new things as much as everyone else” or “my house contains too much stuff already so please stick to gifts I can eat or drink”. Probably I have annoyed the rare person who truly doesn’t want even chocolate, wine or flowers, but guests must be allowed their own self-regard and many of us are well trained not to show up empty-handed.
So there’s a turbulent confluence here, in which birthdays are a test of how well we are known and loved; how much we can or do trust those we know and love to meet our needs; how much attention we long for and how much we can bear to expose that longing. Add inevitable ambivalence about growing up and growing old, many people’s complicated relationships with alcohol and cake, the long shadows of childhood glories and disappointments, and it’s no wonder these can be chancy occasions.
Even so, this year I got it right, for me. I was in London anyway, so I gathered my oldest friends there and took them out to dinner. I didn’t say “no presents” because I wouldn’t have meant it. In my family, we each have a birthday week rather than a day, because birthdays are usually school days and often it rains or someone has a cold, but it’s relatively easy to make sure fun happens in a week.
Enough fun happened, partly because I shamelessly named the quality and quantity of what I wanted.
