As a child, I remember believing there were two days of the year I was guaranteed to cry: Christmas and my birthday. It’s a belief I brought with me into adulthood. It wasn’t until I said this to a friend and they reflected back to me the deep sadness held in that belief that I really looked at it with new eyes.
It was a belief based on the reality of my experience, so it wasn’t false. But I hadn’t thought to look underneath it, at what was going on beneath the emotions.
Here’s what I found when I looked into that particular shadowy, lonely recess of myself during my birthday last year.
My youngest son was making me a birthday cake and something wasn’t working the way he wanted. He got upset and his words and tone were harsh. It wasn’t the energy I wanted to be around on my birthday and, even though I wasn’t helping or involved in the cake-making process, I felt repelled by the energy, like I had to protect myself from it.
That seemed curious to me, so I investigated.
The belief underneath the one about my guaranteed birthday cry-fest is: Everything is supposed to feel good on my birthday. Things should go smoothly. All my emotional needs should be met. Like I’m at an emotional spa, my comfort assured. That’s what’s going to make it a happy birthday, different from all the other days of the year. I’m going to finally feel enough.
That’s a lot of pressure to put on one single day of the year. What day can live up to that kind of expectation? Anything at all that can go wrong feels devastating. No wonder I cry.
There is no day that can magically heal the hurt inside me, all the ways I’ve been let down and my needs left unmet. It just can’t do that. And the expectation that the day can somehow elevate my internal state and make me OK makes the contrast with the very normal reality that much starker. It points out all the things that feel wrong and broken in my life, within myself, plus, at the same time, doesn’t meet the idea that I’m supposed to be gloriously happy and at ease for the entire day.
No wonder I cry.
There’s no way a day of presents, of external things, can ever make me feel enough. That’s something I have to learn to feel for myself. Happiness, as they say, is an inside job.
My first glimmer of this understanding wriggled into my consciousness a few weeks earlier at Christmas, when one of our kids was upset about his Christmas gifts. He felt let down, disappointed, sad. It was a hard Christmas. Another one of our teens was out of state at a residential treatment center.
It reminded me of my childhood Christmases and how I hoped the magic of Christmas could somehow make my life all right, that my gifts would make me happy, just like he wished his gifts would do the same for him. I heard the echoes of my younger self in his rants to his friends. But gifts could never fill the emptiness I felt then inside myself. The only magic was the loving, patient hands of self-care, learning my needs and tending to them.
When my birthday came around four weeks later, I was ready for the full realization of what a birthday really is. Not a day to make all other days of the year bearable and you OK. But rather another normal day that happens to be your birthday. Once I was able to do this, I was able to enjoy it and it became a good and special day — teenage grumpy cake baking and all. The cake, in the end, was delicious.