Happy Birthday #29
Literal Birth Day
Dear loved ones,
October 17.
My birthday.
As I walked through the hazy blue of morning, my thoughts turned yet again — as they do once a year — to the question of what a birthday really means? What does it seek to celebrate?
On birthdays past, faithful readers will remember, I’ve meditated on the day primarily as a milestone, a chance to reflect on the incremental progress of one’s life. To be sure, birthdays are a celebration of a year past, a tick mark on the calendar’s Mobius-strip-march toward eternity; we pass Go on the great Monopoly board of life and collect $200 in existential currency. In this sense, the significance of the birthday lies in its repetition, its regularity, its cyclical nature.
But this morning, as I walked past the Lamborgini dealership and the man selling goldfish out of a donkey cart in the street, my thoughts wandered to that most obvious but perhaps less considered significance of the birthday: its anniversary celebration of the only thing in life that does not get repeated, the one-off singular incident that is, of course, our birth — our actual physical birth, the sweaty, bloody delivery from our mother’s womb.
I don’t remember being born, and as far as I know there is no video recording of the incident. I don’t know whether my mother was conscious or whether my father was in the room to serve as witness; these questions are just occurring to me now as I pen this letter and I haven’t had the chance to ask them.
As it is, the incident of my birth is almost a complete historical blank to me. I know the name of the hospital and the approximate time of delivery; I know (in a very telling clue to my personality) that my mother had eaten fudge brownies for breakfast before going into labor, and that on the evening of my birth the family ordered in Chinese food (how perfect is that?).
But what of the actual process? What of the moment of emergence, fetal little me climbing or sliding or poking or plopping out of the birth canal, dressed royally in a sheen of red slime, screaming at the light, hysterical and finally — finally — alive!
Could a birthday not be a time to reflect on that moment, that fruition, that earliest triumph? The birth — genesis — splash landing — game on — everything that has followed, all of those accumulating ticks and tocks, months and years, progress and maturity, all the interminable growth of a lifetime kicked off in a single grand discovery, the big bang of my universe, strutting out of Plato’s cave at 5.5 lbs.
And, of course, while the “birthday as milestone” narrative encourages valuable self-reflection on the path one has travelled in life, it so easily neglects the other equally important stakeholder in the birth process: my mother — the beautiful woman in her thirties that I simply don’t remember — I imagine her lying there, exhausted but triumphant in the hospital bed, the instant of birth cemented as the most painful and most joyous moment in her life to date. And nearby my father, one minute a nervous wreck, the next minute the proudest man alive in New York City.
