Week 6: The Big Deal About Birthdays

My real and fake birthday cakes

I used to approach my birthdays with a lot of ambivalence. Like everyone else, a part of me looked forward to my birthdays with excitement.  Birthdays, after all, are supposed to be a celebration of life and an expression of gratitude for life. Yet, there would be another part of me that dreaded the approach of every birthday, and this was even before the angst of midlife came knocking at my life.  In my 30s, I realised that this hesitation and ambivalence came from fear - fear of getting disappointed that my expectations of a special celebration would not be met. 

As a young child, I'd always hear from my mother  that my birthday was ill-timed, as it fell on the 26th of the month when almost nothing was left of most ordinary rank-and-file employees' salaries.  I had to make do with the simplest celebration possible.  In my early 20s, while scanning my photo album, I even discovered that in one of my birthdays before I turned five, my birthday cake was an empty box decorated with ribbons and figurines by my mother. My initial reaction was self-pity.  Was I so unimportant that I didn't even deserve a real birthday cake?  Really, not even a roll or ensaymada?  It would take a few days of inner work to see things from the perspective of my financially hard-up parents and even appreciate the effort to at least attempt to have a memorabilia through a photo of the fake cake. 

After many years of not having the grand birthday celebration that every little child dreamed of, I had given up and had always tried to make my birthday as uneventful as possible.  My most vivid memory was that of working on a project proposal in the office on my birthday eve. I worked until the wee hours of my birthday morning.  I then headed home and was too exhausted and sleepy that I slept through my birthday, disturbed only by a priest-friend who dropped by the house and insisted on seeing me.  

I became too good at making a big drama out of the ordinariness of my birthday.  One birthday, while attending the holy mass, I found myself moping as the priest announced the saints of the day, Saints Cosmas and Damian.  How could I not have been assigned a more popular saint instead?  This priest went beyond mentioning the names of the saints, as had always been for as long as I could remember going to mass on my birthdays.  He introduced the saints.  I found out that these two saints were twin brothers from Arabia, both physicians, and known as "silverless" because they rendered their services in the healing ministry for free.  As healers, they also worked to bring people closer to God.  Refusing to give up their faith, they were ordered arrested and put through severe torture but somehow miraculously survived so that they were eventually beheaded with a sword. 

Something stirred within me after hearing this story of my birthday saints. I felt a very deep connection with them as, a few years before that, I articulated  my life mission as: "to bring healing wherever I go, in whatever form is necessary." There's a connection after all.  And not only that, they were "silverless" in the same way that I don't see myself as someone who is concerned with what many call the riches of this world.  I look after my son's future but I am not after a life of wealth at all costs.  I am more concerned about responding to my inner stirrings, in constantly looking for that place "where (my) deepest gladness meets the world's deepest hunger."  And have they been looking after me through all the disasters I had survived, including that major typhoon Ondoy that fell exactly on my 41st birthday?  Perhaps. I can only pray they spare me from the sword as well. 

The revelation about my birthday saints changed the way I saw my life and affirmed my sense of mission.  I was not randomly born, even if I grew up hearing I was conceived by accident.  In God's plans, everything and everyone is meant to be and is destined for something.  No one is born by mistake. 

This year, on my 47th, I bought myself a real birthday cake.  

(The suggested topic is Your Best Birthday under the Age of 10.  Evidently, I couldn't recall any, but I've had some great birthday celebrations after 40!)