Broken Birthdays

“You’ve ruined the entire day for everyone.”

It was my birthday, and we’d gone to my grandparents’, who had a full-sized snooker table. We were playing pool — the kind with numbers pulled from a bottle. My sister took her shot and missed. I remember hoping she would, because it lined me up perfectly to sink my ball.

“Let her have a do over!” my mother insisted.

I was too excited at the prospect of winning on my own birthday to let the moment pass. I strolled over to the table, took my shot, and sunk the ball. I stood there, my smile still winning, as my mother pulled my sister into a hug and looked at me like I’d stolen Christmas.

---

My role in the family was simple: I was the giver.

The one who spoiled my mother, my father, my siblings. The one who studied them closely and tried to anticipate what would make them light up.

Whatever money I had, I scraped together carefully, studied catalogues, and chose according to what I knew they’d like. This was usually something affordable that felt luxurious rather than functional — the lily of the valley soap bars my mother liked. I wrapped everything in ribbon, with gift tags I made myself.

Her whole face would brighten. She’d marvel at the presentation, go soft over the message I’d carefully written about what a great mother she was, then breathe in the scent of the soaps as I studied her reaction.

But no one studied me back.

I remember one birthday when my sister teased that she’d bought me something from my favourite jewellery store. I spent days looking forward to unwrapping it — a necklace, maybe, at a time when yin-yang symbols and peace signs were all the rage. She’d bought a bandana. The cheapest thing in the store.

I tried to recover, but it must have shown. My mother read me the riot act for being “ungrateful.”

My mother and the golden children were allowed to be disappointed. They could pull faces, roll eyes, be rude about gifts that missed the mark. If I ever felt that way, it meant I needed telling off.

The crime was not that the gift was thoughtless; the crime was that I noticed.

---

To make life easier for myself as I got older, I told my mother she could have cash and a small gift for her birthday, Mother’s Day, and Christmas. I heard via my sister that after a while of this, she was proudly telling everyone how she’d managed to pay off the store cards she’d relied on since I was a child.

This went on for some time — until the year of my health nadir.

Christmas was looming. My failing health crept up so slowly. I knew I was sick, but I didn’t know why. I was alone, trying to ready the house for my brother and his wife, where I would be expected to wine and dine my mother’s only son.

Then the house got fleas.

I tried everything — smoke bombs, diatomaceous earth, special lamps. I moved downstairs and slept on the sofa bed so the infestation wouldn’t reach the guest bedroom upstairs.

Things reached a new low when I started finding fleas in my own hair.

The vet eventually came through with something that helped. But by then I reached out to my mother and asked her for something I never did: help. Help with tempering my brother’s expectations. Maybe a suggestion that he shorten his trip. Anything.

She became defensive. She had to cook too. She had visitors also. To her, my health was inconvenient, more than it was a fact.

I asked her to choose me. She said no. And then she let me watch what “no” meant in practice — a family meeting held behind my back, my brother acting as her enforcer, an ultimatum landing by text: as a half-sister, I wasn’t quite true family. She said nothing to stop it.

So I said fine. If that’s how it is, I’m out.

It might be the greatest gift she has ever given me. She released me from a lifetime of feeling I owed her something for a decision she made on her back. Her pleasure, her hedonism, her teenage recklessness; it all became my debt.

---

I’ve been ill long enough now that most of my friendships have thinned out. People don’t like long illnesses; they stain the air. One of the few friends who remained had an open invitation to visit for my birthday this year. I offered her the air miles to get here.

For a year, she was vague. Then she met a man online, and my phone lit up. She was coming now — not quite for my birthday, but near enough. Would I mind if she saw him while she was here? And some of her other friends too? Maybe they could stay nearby. I was “welcome to join for dinner, of course,” she said, as if I weren’t mostly bedbound and counting my energy by the hour.

I didn’t begrudge her the miles. I told her she was stressing me out and asked her to handle the planning herself. The messages got more manic. More insistent. More “I’m just trying to make this work” — as if the problem were my resistance, and not that the visit had quietly shifted from I’m coming to see you, to I’m using your house as a hub.

I pulled the plug on the visit, and I’m glad I did, but I’m also angry that I let it run so far that walking away was the only option left.

---

It’s now been over three years since I was misdiagnosed.

I’ve been blamed for trusting the doctor who treated me first, and criticised for treating myself when no one else would. Sick either way, wrong either way — a drag to be around, as someone once put it, because I don’t make people comfortable.

There is a particular loneliness in being punished both for needing help and for trying to cope without it.

This year there were fewer people around me. Fewer friends, virtually no family. I bought some of my own gifts, because I couldn’t trust my nearest to get it right.

Cashmere socks. My favourite Neom organic bath milk. Dark chocolate almonds and almond blossom tea, ridiculously priced for what they are. It felt better than wrapping up care and handing it to everyone else to enjoy.

I will probably always flinch a little when someone hands me a present. My birthdays may always be full of broken thoughts I can’t repair.

But this year, I got to decide what I do with them.