Happy Birthday
By Sean Carter McGiverin
Your mother says, “Happy Birthday.” That, to her credit, is the first thing she says once you have answered the phone. “Happy Birthday,” and then your name: the name you have chosen, not the one she gave you. She emphasizes the name, to demonstrate that she is trying. It sounds vaguely obnoxious, like she is begging to be rewarded for doing what every mother should do, simply because not every mother does.
If it were your father calling, he would have continued by telling you the story he always told you on your birthday – the story that began, “I was there when you were born.” A remarkable sentence for him to utter, a man born in 1929. He knew to be grateful for it.
But your father died eleven years ago next month. It is your mother who calls, and she wants to talk about her support group, about the woman whose husband died last month, and about how only another widow can understand what it is like to be married for decades and suddenly to be alone in the house, suddenly not to be able to eat your meals at the table because that is where you ate with him.
You grunt noncommittally because you have learned, after more than 40 years of arguing, that her insensitivity is not calculated, and that pushing back makes no lasting impression. You do not argue, even though you, too, are alone after having been married for decades, and you, too, now eat all of your meals standing alone at the counter, just like your mother.
No, not all your meals. There are those you eat in front of the television, and those you eat hurriedly in the car. And the fair few that you eat at the table with your daughter who you share with the not-dead-no-longer-husband who lives up the road.
You can recognize that you do not understand what it is to grieve a man who you did not particularly like and who did not particularly like you, a man who died without having said, “I love you” in more than a decade. Just as your mother does not understand what it is to grieve a man who was holding you on the sofa not five months ago, even though you both knew it was over. You told the truth and it was too much for him, as you knew it would be. He wants to know if it was “all a lie,” and you don’t know what to tell him, because none of it was, except for all the parts you learned to suppress and leave unexamined: the clothes you learned to wear, and the postures you learned to adopt, and the questions you learned to stop asking. At the moment, you don’t hold it against him. You’re not sure if he still holds it against you.
The other usual calls don’t come. “Happy Birthday,” your brother never says, and your best friend never says it either. You reach for feeling that it doesn’t matter, not knowing whether it was an accident, or if instead they meant for you to notice. You decide not to mention it next time you speak, assuming you are still speaking to one another.
You wonder if your father would have called, or if he would no longer be speaking to you. You can’t be sure. So many things that had always ranked as unforgivable with him suddenly became forgivable when it was one of his own children doing it. This, though. If there was one thing he found less forgivable than anything else, it was being a gay man.
“I was there when you were born…” The doctor proclaimed you a girl in this story, before handing you to your father. “A daughter!” your father said, every year, in astonishment.
If it were your father on the phone, and not your mother, he would not have told the story. It would have been too difficult to know which parts to tell. You wonder if this is why other people do not call - because the old words don’t fit anymore. Are they afraid that they will call you by your dead name? Do they wonder how you feel about having been born?
If they were to ask, you would say that you are, generally speaking, in favor of it. You would want them to say that they were glad you were born, but this is not the sort of thing most people say on birthdays. It strikes you as really the only appropriate thing to say on a birthday: “I’m glad that you exist.”
You say it out loud to yourself, “I’m glad that you exist.” And it is true. But it is not the same as hearing someone else say so.
There have been lonelier birthdays.
Your 19th birthday, you visited your ex-boyfriend, bringing along an occasional hook-up partner; the evening ended with them leaving to give one another blow jobs in the next room. It would have been tolerable not to be having sex on your birthday, but to be adjacent to sex and not invited was worse than simply being alone.
Your 21st birthday you were getting married to a bully of a man who, when you left less than a year later, whined, “But who is going to clean the litter box now?” On your 22nd birthday, your newly ex-husband was throwing all of the wedding china, plate by plate, off the side of a mountain at the same time that you were wrecking your car. He was afraid when he heard of the accident – he thought he had nearly killed you at a distance. It makes you laugh now, how powerful he thought he was.
On your 30th birthday you were in a haze of painkillers, recovering badly from gynecological surgery. As you were on your 32nd birthday. And your 42nd.
And of course, there is your 36th birthday – the week that hospice was called for your father. “I was there when you were born,” he said to you for the last time, and you both knew it was the last.
No, as bad birthdays go, this is not in the top ten. You are 47 – your mother called, and whatever else she said, she called you by your own right name.
Sean Carter McGiverin (he/him) holds an M.Div. from Duke University. He lives and writes in Durham, NC. He had only published under his dead name until now.