Believe it or not, I'm not big on birthdays. Sure, I may exaggeratedly start building up to the big day, like a week or two prior, detailing out every little thing from the logistics of midnight surprise cakes to soiree moods. But on the day itself, I'm a total buzzkill.
Oddly enough, I find myself dwelling more on the what-ifs than the what-is. With each passing year, I make fervent resolutions to get going and catch up with the race of life, only to be repeatedly assured by loved ones that life is happening right now, in the moment. And since that sounds straight out of a Deepak Chopra non-fiction and seems really, really far away from the realities of my chaotic mind, I never quite got to fully appreciate what that means.
Coming back to birthdays. My birthdays as a grown-up, as everybody else's perhaps, have been about carefully-curated surprises, a home deluged in gift wrappers and flying pollen with the day gone by in the company of loved ones and in attending phone calls from the rest of the loved ones. As time goes by, some phone calls fade into oblivion, some are replaced by social media texts and a lot of them come as welcome additions from new members to the boisterous circle of family and friends.
As fun as my grown-up birthdays are, I can't help thinking of a time when I could happily dive straight into the white and brown mess of a cake with my tiny mouth and blatantly lick the extra cream off the cake box. While now, it's maybe a guilty, lone slice or two, savoured and swallowed with violent promises of an additional 3 km brisk walk annexed to my fitness repertoire. I think of the time when unravelling birthday gifts, ripping apart bright and cheerful gift wrappers, were an after-party ritual by themselves. The surprise element was so crucial to that ceremony! And now, it's about hoping that our not-so-subtle hints have been successfully decoded. Or let's just skip the gift-wrapping part. We'll save paper. Take me birthday shopping beforehand, will you hubby dearest? Hahaha. I reminisce the time when birthday pictures were ill-timed, out-of-focus, random and blurry. And now, they are posey, air-brushed and staged for the benefit of everyone.
I should say that, as much as I was prepared for this evolution of birthday as a grown-up, there were some things about this birthday that I had not anticipated - that just took my breath away. You see, I don't quite recall a birthday where I was swept off by the feverish excitement of a four-year old girl who let me in on all the juicy details of the big birthday surprise she'd been planning for me. I don't recall lending my helping hand in wrapping MY birthday gift only to hear her whisper in my ears, "Shhhh, it's going to be a secret surprise." I don't quite remember a birthday morning that started with someone casually walking in on me in the toilet with a proud grin across her face holding an awkwardly wrapped newspaper across a book that was lying in the depths of my bookshelf. While I continued to perform my private morning ritual. I can't place the time when a little girl in her high-pitched voice kept yelling "Surprise!" every ten minutes during the day, staging how my birthday cake is to be kept and how many candles I'm going to blow and going through every clichéd proceeding of a birthday, re-packaged in a whole new bottle of energy and enthusiasm. I don't remember seeing a four-year old finding more joy to freshly-baked home cakes than shop-bought , baked-to-perfection masterpieces. I don't think I had a birthday that involved making art on paper while waiting on our orders in a fancy restaurant setting , random uninvited bursts of dancing on the restaurant floor and playing hide-and-seek in party clothes, making the most of blue ambient lights.
And I don't remember a birthday ringing in with so much unadulterated joy and sweetness, at least in the last ten years. Well, beyond that, my memory fails me :P.
Nope, still not ringing a bell.
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| Surprise! |
Do you have a favourite birthday? I'd love to hear about it.
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