Hello dear ones,
Today is my birthday, as a watery Cancerian, this time of year is always one of deep reflection, of learning to hold joy and grief simultaneously.
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As a child I had the most magnificent birthdays. To be honest, I cannot recall all of the details. I mostly know this to be true from a combination of photographs and an intuitive sense within me. The one I recall most vibrantly was my eighth birthday. I asked my parents if I could have a sleepover in their bedroom, with their queen sized bed which felt like it belonged in a castle.
In the middle of the night, I woke up and crept softly to the bathroom to pee. While sitting on the toilet, I felt wetness on my leg, and in the darkness I lifted my fingers to my face and found blood. Turns out I’d sliced my leg open on a spring sticking out of the mattress.
This would’ve been a traumatic event except that my mother had once been a nurse at a children’s hospital. And so she took me downstairs, tended to my wound, and I managed to avoid having to go to the hospital for stitches. I can still see the scar to this day. A reminder of my birthday — but also, and more importantly, a reminder of her love for me.
A total Sagittarius, my mom loved to plan birthdays. After her death, when I was eleven, all memories of birthday parties disappear. I cannot remember what, if anything, was done to celebrate my solar return. There is a void.
The one thing I know for sure is that I never had to cook on my birthday — a task that I’d taken over in her absence. On years where we weren’t totally strapped for cash, my father would take me and my brother out to the Mandarin for their buffet and I would pile my plate with crab legs and chow mein noodles. But it was always the coconut cream pie for dessert that made me happiest.
As I’ve been working on this project that I’ve been calling Wounding/Wanting: an archive, I’ve been haunted by the fact that I truly cannot remember a single birthday party or celebration that took place during my adolescence. As an avid archivist from a young age, I scour shoe boxes with old letters and journals and photographs and find nothing. On July 8, 2000, my 15th birthday, I write about watching Boys Don’t Cry at 1am and how the movie makes me want to reach out to those I love to tell them that I love them.
Did my boyfriends or best friends never give me a present or write me a card? Did I have friends over for a party? I wish I could answer definitely — but the absence of an answer feels like its own answer.
Given my complicated relationship with birthdays, it makes sense that they’re so important to me today. From nineteen onwards — I remember, for sure, a nineteenth celebration, as that is the legal drinking age in the place I grew up — I have made sure to mark this occasion. In my 20s, it was a series of costume themed parties: Mad Hatter and 90s prom. I ushered my 30s in with a party where I asked people to come dressed as their little kid selves.
When the pandemic hit in 2018, celebrations took a different turn. I’d moved to a new city in a new province and gathered what few friends I had at a park for a socially distanced hang until — as it happened for both my 33rd and 34th birthdays — the clouds opened up and we were rained out. For my 38th birthday, I’d just moved to Los Angeles and didn’t have enough friends to feel like a party was warranted.
These years were an opportunity for me to experience disappointment and not be flattened by it. To see that I could still celebrate myself in the absence of my dearest friends, or the community I’d built back in Toronto. While I’m grateful for the opportunity, I grieve for those birthdays lost, like so many others.
There is another void that haunts me with each passing year: the absence of my mother. When I turned 32, I realized that I was now the age that she was when she had me. And each year brings me closer to the age she was when she died: 43.
On top of this haunting is yet another: that it feels like a miracle that I’m still alive, that I made it here. As a drug addicted teenager who grew up poor, I couldn’t imagine my 30s, let alone my almost-now-40s. This teen, who may or may not have celebrated their birthday for so many years, who nearly OD’ed at the age of 18, whose teenage best friend and drug dealer both died from fentanyl a decade after I got sober, becomes another spectral presence.
In the archive, I find an assignment I did for an English lit course in my undergrad. I wrote poems from the perspective of characters in the novels and short stories we read. But I am written all over them. Perhaps the most obvious representation is found here.
Juxtaposed with the image of skeletal soldiers is a picture of my cousin (on the left) and I when we must have been around three years old. It is a joint birthday party and I am struck by the joy of two children opening up presents set alongside an image of war.
I wish I could remember why I made this choice. All I have are speculations. That I was foreshadowing a wounding to come with the words “The happily ever after was for you a grave.” There is an acknowledgment that I would (had) come to know death intimately. That one day, the little child in the photograph, would have a “need for entropy; / To layer pain on top of pain.” Death and childhood are inextricably linked.
This year, my 39th solar return, I am surrounded by friends that I’ve made over the past year in LA. Our neighbor gives us cactus and corn and carne asada tacos. Friends bring props for the photo booth. Later, we move inside for karaoke. This birthday is more celebration than haunting it seems.
Before everyone leaves, I open some presents. There are two gifts, wrapped in paper patterned with strawberries. One, from my partner, who knows that strawberries hold special significance to me. The other is from their co-worker, who tells me that she had no idea that there was a story there. And so I tell her about how, in the months before her death, my mom was supposed to take me strawberry picking.
Too weak from the cancer that was killing her, she asked a neighbor to take me. Weeks after we returned, I sit beside my mother on the couch and she asks me for more strawberries. Eleven years-old, I tell her that we finished the strawberries weeks ago. “Oh, that’s right,” she responds. In my twenties, I get a strawberry tattooed on my wrist.
Birthdays can bring up so many different emotions. We want them to be times of joy and celebration. And I too desire that. At the same time, it feels important to honor the grief and the loss. For me, this both/and takes shape in the strawberry wrapping paper. I feel my mom’s presence, like a wink that tells me “I’m here.”
Perhaps birthdays are also hauntings.
Perhaps it’s okay that they’re both.
<3 Happy Birthday! Today is also my Birthday!
So beautiful. Happy birthday, Margeaux. 🫂🎂