It bothers me that I still can’t remember my mom’s birthdate. I don’t have any childhood memories of her birthdays. What I remember from my childhood was that Daddy’s birthday was magically the day after mine. I was born on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1942 – growing up I was forever teased: “the day that shall live in infamy” – and Daddy’s birthday was December 8, although I didn’t learn until years later that it was the Buddha’s Enlightenment Day. Did we share a cake? Did I get to blow the candles out?
The only birthday party I remember was my 13th, probably because it hurt so much. It was my consolation party: No bar mitzvah. My parents’ friends filled our first floor. My friends and I – three of us – played basketball all afternoon in the driveway. My parents’ friends each gave me thirteen silver dollars. That was more money then. I wrote thank you notes to everyone. It turned out that Gladys and Tippi had shown up without a present. My thank you shamed them, and they got me a new basketball. That was the best present.
I don’t remember celebrating my parents’ birthdays, except one. There was a big party for Dad on his 60th. I was an adult by then and nervous, but I did manage to make a little speech. There’s a picture of me somewhere, standing in the middle of a living room, making that speech, wearing my social work suit.
I don’t remember any of Mom’s birthdays. I don’t remember any birthday cards. Not storebought cards. My father painted graduation cards: I still have some of them. After he passed, Mom took up painting birthday cards: “50 years young” may have been the first. Some years, she recycled, painting a line through the “50” in another color, painting “51.”
More vividly than my birthdays, I remember my classmates’ birthdays, the bar mitzvahs and the sweet sixteens that I was not invited to.
I don’t remember my parents giving each other presents. I don’t remember them taking me to buy presents for each other. It wasn’t that I didn’t get presents, but the presents that I remember were the Christmas presents, waking early, waking my parents. We always had a tree – I used to help Mom decorate it on Christmas Eve – and it was always surrounded with presents in the morning. There must have been presents for my parents too. Why don’t I remember their presents? I remember so much else. Mom always made the Christmas dinner, the same turkey dinner that she made for Thanksgiving – those were the two days in the year when the extended family gathered – Uncle Nat, Mom’s brother and his wife and my cousins, Jonny and Stevie, occasionally Mom’s sister, who was married to a strange guy, a dentist, and their girls, and usually my father’s New York sister and her husband, the magician. It was festive. I don’t remember ever buying or wrapping presents for my cousins.
Why was Mom not celebrated? Where was she? Eating breakfast at the small, round, yellow formica breakfast table in the corner of our tiny kitchen where we moved at the end of the 7th grade, Dad and I talked baseball while Mom bustled. Did I try to include her in the conversation? Did Dad? “No, you and Kenneth talk.” She always said that. Did she think she wasn’t smart enough to join the conversation? Did I? According to our family mythology, Dad was the genius, the artist, the creator.
Mom didn’t start painting until after Dad died. She wouldn’t compete with him for attention. After he passed, when Mom sold the Great Neck house, she came to live with me in Brooklyn. She was there when that marriage ended and that wife moved out. Alone together in the brownstone, I got to know my mother in a new way. She had helped me study Latin and science vocabulary in junior high school. She had watched TV with me – my cowboys: Wyatt Earp was my favorite – but I don’t remember talking. Not really. Now we talked.
I was appreciating what a daughter of the suffragettes she was. She moved out of her parents’ house unmarried. Unheard of. She joined the teacher’s union. She walked the picket lines. Mom was a juicer before her time, a proponent of high-dose vitamin C since Linus Pauling touted it. In the Brooklyn brownstone, Mom made me juice every morning in her industrial-grade juicer – carrots, celery, beets, apples – and she made sure I took my vitamin C. We talked. Drinking my vegetable juice, I tried to convince Mom that my life would have been better if she and Dad had joined a temple, any one of the Great Neck temples. Maybe then I would have been invited to the parties. She helped me through a difficult time.
Mom moved with me to Staten Island. I took her food shopping. We went out to dinner alone at least once a week – she had a favorite Staten Island restaurant – and after the wedding, Dee and I her took her out to dinner with Dee’s parents every Sunday. For the first time in my memory, we celebrated Mom’s birthday. She learned to navigate the express buses to Manhattan even as the Alzheimer’s was encroaching. Was I still trying to convince her to join a temple in Great Neck? Dee at least knew her birth date.
You might think from what I’m saying that my parents didn’t teach me anything about giving. Not true. My parents were inspirational models of giving. They were always giving to their peace and justice causes, more than they could afford. They spent on me – my mother always found the money for my summer camps and for college, but they didn’t travel to Mexico or Europe until I was an adult – and on bettering the world.
When I finally got to Zen practice in my mid-life crisis, giving was still an emotional tangle. I had a lot to learn about giving and not just about giving, about asking for and accepting what’s needed too. I’ve gotten better at birthday cards and cards for other occasions. I’ve gotten better at gift giving, but my go-to response when asked what I want for Christmas (or birthday) is, “I don’t need anything.” There’s deep conditioning there: If I don’t need anything, I can’t be disappointed; I can’t be hurt. I can manage fine without your sweet sixteen party.
Comments