I don’t get birthday fuss for adults. I more than don’t get it, it strikes me as
patently weird. It’s not just the aging
factor (Why celebrate that? Why lament OR celebrate it?? Why remark it at all?
Weird.) It’s the infantilizing of adults
by those around them ft. the self-absorption factors that freak me out. Christ gets a fuss for his birthday, which is
weird enough if you think about, and you’re not Christ, F Y I. I start balking about birthdays when a kid
hits, ooooh, about 5 years old or so. Up until then, you’re still “new”, so ok,
YAY you turned ONE or whatever, and that seems ok through the years of a Chucky
Cheese pizza party. That lasts until you turn, like, 90 years old, at which
point a fuss is again in order. Once you’re too old for a Chucky Cheese party,
then you’ve entered the age span during which birthdays are “here’s some money”
and enough said, pretty much. I’m in
trouble this week for this attitude. TJ
turns 13 today, and I am making him a special roast chicken recipe and his
favorite vanilla apple sauce cake (or some ice cream if I run outa time to make
cake, which is not unlikely and which is what I’d do on any day, i.e. make a
homemade dessert or buy ice cream) and he’s mulling over how to spend his 50
bucks. MAYBE I’ll get him a hamster…probably not….and no, no balloons, no party
pack of fuss at an indoor adventure land (despite Aa’s mom half off coupon for
it), and if pushed to fuss more, I will have to fight the urge to do something
like say “think about what you’ve spent those 13 years on and ask yourself, is
it enough?” Aa’s brother also has a
birthday this week, which feels like an onslaught, I can’t help it, I’m
virtually appalled by the idea of a big bakery bought cake with that nasty
frosting and 32 candles on my brother-in-law’s cake and we blow those party
wooper things and stand around and sing at him like he’s just turned one year
old. I mean, I could do it, but the look
on my face would be inevitably “this is fuuuuuucking weeeeeird”. And since it’s always someone’s frigging
birthday, I can pretty much spend the whole year in the partypooper dog
house. Aa does not understand my point
of view on this subject, to say the least.
Meanwhile, the funeral … my family is nuts, first of all, as
in half my relatives are SSI for mental disorders, my several favorite aunts
have thorazine shakes in their hands, my aunt Mu gets an “asthma attack” i.e. a
panic attack over, o, pretty much anything, the smell of jolly ranchers might
send her into her “allergies”, and she’ll be huffing the albuterol like she
needs a stiff drink. So I’m willing to
suspect our funerals will be a little weird…though, I dunno, people wailing
away and looking at old pics and overcoming their lifetime estrangements at
least for the span of overwhelming grief, while little kids run around and
don’t understand why they’d have to be quiet around a box of ashes … that’s a
standard funeral, right? People get up
and say things, or try to as they feel gripped by urges to sob, and the things
they say are woeful in all sense of that word.
Plus poems, “I am my mother’s garden” typa deal. An entire life, one more impactful on all
these people than could ever be captured even if I were Virginia Woolf and had 2000
pages, reduced to this small sad fuss and someone (my sister) organizes a
buffet. Then back at my aunt’s house, we
popped grandma open so we could take a bit of her, those who wanted that
(including me), and I did the honors, both because she and I were especially
close and because, well, because I have a high tolerance for weird. So we popped the little urn open, which
looked just like a Bose shelf speaker, with a screwdriver and a wire snip, and
I dug into the ashes with a little silver teaspoon and portioned her out into
ziplock sandwich baggies. Aa was fearing
that I’d run into a knuckle or something, “incomplete combustion”, but I knew
about that risk, and rather than avoid it, I dug down. Like when you make Quik milk, ya know? Ya gotta stir from the bottom, death being
similar I figured. I dug down with my
little spoon to get a scoop of the heart of grandma. My cousin Georgianne, after discussing the
possible amount she would need to have a small glass bauble made (you can do
that, render human ashes into glass) with my sister, came back for a couple
more scoops for her ziplock just in case.
Aa was a trouper through all of this, holding the ziplocks open for me, though
the look on his face was “this is fuuuuuuucking weeeeeeird”.
On the way home, we decided that there are certain ways in
which we feel like we married into other cultures entirely, which must be
respected as far as we are capable, but which are fucking weird to each of us
respectively. I call these occasions
“Vietnamese Celebrate Your Foot Day”, on which maybe your in-laws would
sacrifice a goat (or hamster), and which you would show up for if you married
into it (but it’d always seem weird).
Now… what is Easter?
It’s got a (re)birthday in it, of Christ (and didn’t we celebrate his
birthday just a couple months ago??) and a funeral more or less since he also
died necessarily, with a dragg-ass-to-a-cousin’s-house fuss event at the center of which are colored
eggs and a butter lamb. How weird is
that? It seems pretty weird, but I might just be overtired.
