birthdays

Our family were never really big on birthdays. As children, our parties were always a joint celebration with friends born on the same day, or near enough, and as teenagers they served as an excuse for underage drinking, as we raced towards the day it would lose its novelty. Our dad wasn’t keen on them either - for himself, at least. The only time I really remember him celebrating it was when we forced him to go out for dinner on his fiftieth, and even then I think we were home before ten. But there was something special about a birthday in our house. A quiet acknowledgement of a new year, the slow incline towards adulthood, an earnest nod towards the fact that our parents had successfully sustained us for yet another year. It was a day when our dad, instead of turning a blind eye, would pour us a drink, and we’d sit back to bask in a family moment that wasn’t vastly different to any other, but offered a glimpse of what our future moments may hold: more adult, more trusting, more calm.

I miss those moments, now. Don’t get me wrong - I’m still not big on birthdays. In fact, this is the first time since I was 18 that I’ve actually been in the same country as my friends, and even then, I actively didn’t disclose that it was approaching - let alone plan a celebration. But those little evenings were special. Maybe they feel even more special now, as they offered a seldom-captured insight into a future that we never got to live. Maybe that’s why I don’t want to do birthdays anymore. I want to keep it as it was five years ago, and never celebrate it again. I want to be 17-turning-18, on the day that my dad discharged himself from hospital when he probably shouldn’t have, to spend my eighteenth birthday with me. It was one of the last times he was at home.

I don’t like my birthday anymore. It reminds me of every year, the night before, being wished goodnight in an almost ceremonious way, as it was my last night as a 14, 15, 16 year-old. It reminds me of the strange emotional nature of it all, my dad almost reluctant to admit that another year had passed, and that adulthood was approaching. I understand it better now: the trepidation towards moving on, and the inevitable distance that comes with time. I understand it every New Year’s Eve, when I go to send my dad a message, and feel the sinking feeling in my stomach as I realise how many of these annual messages have stacked on top of one another. I understand it every August, on Ellie’s birthday, when I wonder how someone so young could have been through so much, and done it so brilliantly. I understand it every Christmas, every Father’s Day, every anniversary. I understand it with every new milestone and achievement, with every new friend who enters and old friend who leaves, with every job offer accepted, and leaving party hosted. I understand how scary that distance can be; I understand what it signifies. It’s not just stepping towards adulthood, towards the real world, towards those little glimpses of the future shared on birthday evenings. It’s stepping away from our childhood; away from our family home and its oddities and tensions; away from those birthday evenings themselves. It’s further away from the person I was when my dad was around - the person who didn’t know grief, and could hardly know love. An unavoidable, undesirable, uncontrollable distance.

I don’t know when people start to accept that. I don’t know whether it stops being terrifying. I suppose that’s part of the problem - the continuity. When you experience something ‘life-changing’, it becomes difficult to relate to whatever life was before that. That’s not to say I became a new person: I still make inappropriate jokes in supposedly-solemn moments, and I still practically piss positivity. I still love music, and dogs, and over-sized jumpers. But even that’s changed. The jokes are no longer there to distract others from hardship, but more so myself. And the positivity isn’t optimistic: it’s appreciative. Before, it came in the form of assuming that, although sick, our dad would live forever, and that I’d have all the time in the world. Now, I’m just glad for the moments I had, and regretful of those that I didn’t. The music has changed too, but I suppose that’s normal.

I think that’s a part of it, actually. Less than a month after turning eighteen, I lost my dad. I arrived at adulthood at almost the exact same moment that it was unceremoniously thrust upon me, unwanted and unwieldy, and entirely brutal. The hard part isn’t supposed to happen that quickly. It makes me wonder whether everyone is like this - whether we’re all as over-analytic, obsessive, confused - or whether my experience of adulthood is so entirely confused with my experience of grief that I can’t disentangle the two. It makes me wonder whether I’ll ever be free of it, or whether I’ve fed into this monstrous amalgamation of life and grief to the point that I’ll always be the grieving eighteen year-old, even when I’m thirty.

I really hate my birthday now. It makes me want to retreat, small and unnoticed, into a swathe of blankets and warmth. It makes me want to sleep through the entire day, and wake up the next as if nothing has changed at all. It makes me want to go downstairs in the evening to a cold beer or some fizzy wine, to the warmth of our living room and its cup-crowded table, to bask in those moments we used to share. The quiet acknowledgement of a new year - the slow incline towards adulthood. More adult, more trusting, more calm. Those glimpses of the future are now forever in the past. And I wish I could get them back.