So my birthday is Tuesday.
I realized last week that I'm almost in my mid-thirties which means I need to stop pretending and just admit that my birthday is a really big damn deal to me. For years I've done the stiff-upper-lip I'm-so-low-maintenance-meh-to-birthdays schtick but last week I clued in to my own bullshit when I spent all of Wednesday a puddly mess of tears because my birthday is coming up and there's no one to celebrate with because I'm single and all my family and closest friends are far away.
But hey, at least this birthday won't be last year's. Last year's pretty much has to take the cake (bwa. ha. hardy ha) because my then-boyfriend got me exactly zero presents, zero cards, zero flowers, zero balloons, zero cakes. He did take me out to exactly one dinner at exactly one lame restaurant that he liked, wished me exactly one happy birthday, and was miffed when I expressed a wistful desire for something more, brushing off my request for even a belated present with "birthdays aren't a big deal in my family, we just go out to dinner." The icing on the cake (HARHARHAR) came a month later when he bought his best (female) friend a birthday present and responded to my pointed "so you got her a present and not me?" with "that's just what we do." (Never mind that the previous year for my birthday he had three dozen gorgeous roses delivered to me at work.)
So last week after mopping up my face and then dripping everywhere with tears all over again in a repeat cycle that lasted for hours, I set about determining what I could do to mitigate the harsh misery of a birthday alone (but slightly less harsh and miserable than a birthday spent alone while actually dating someone). It's less that I'm having a birthday without a boyfriend -- after all, I've only had a handful of birthdays WITH a boyfriend, and they weren't that fabulous -- than that I'm having a birthday really really alone -- since in some ways I might as well have just moved here, and am still building a life and a social network, I don't have any close local friends yet who can participate truly naturally in a birthday bash. But it doesn't have to be totally solitary for all that. So I'm having dinner with a couple of friends tonight, and going out to dinner with a friend on my actual birthday, and going out for lunch with some work friends on my birthday too; I just up and asked and told them why, and, people being nice, they were more than happy to accommodate me.
And today I made myself a cake.
That's the crux of birthdayness, in my mind. Birthdays in my family constituted a Very Big Deal. We didn't have much money, so no one received a shower of presents; but Mom hung a homemade banner on the outside of the house displaying the name and birth year of the celebrant, and on our birthdays we got to pick exactly what we wanted her to make for dinner, and exactly what kind of cake we wanted her to make (white cake with white frosting for me; spice cake with white frosting for Dad; yellow cake with chocolate frosting for my sister), and we got cards from everyone, and a few little presents, and a wonderful warm feeling that your birth and existence were meaningful and special and this was your day. (Especially important in a household where kids typically didn't have much say in day to day life and preferences.)
In the short-hand forced on by the busy life of adulthood, birthdays boil down to cake. I didn't get one last year, and I might be alone and putting together a makeshift birthday, and who knows, I might spend it partly in tears (although I'm feeling better today, so maybe not) but by god, I will eat some fucking cake, and it will be iced with my mother's homemade frosting that could bring kingdoms to their knees. And since adulthood means I spend most of my waking weekday hours tired, that means I'm baking a cake today.
I am not a baker. I'm not a butcher or candlestick maker either, but I'm especially not a baker of desserts. Bread, yes. I love baking bread. (And I love eating bread so much that I don't bake it very often.) I tend more toward the savory than the sweet, in my mouth palette as in other areas. So baking a cake is sort of a dicey, slapdash prospect. I bought a cake mix from Aldi; mostly cake is a vehicle for frosting, in my book, so I don't care if it's not the best cake in the world.
Which, judging by the appearance of the thing I just removed from the oven, is a good outlook. I haven't baked much in this apartment because I've spent the year that I've lived here too harried and harrassed to undertake anything artisanal like my usual cooking, so I had no idea how very unlevel the oven is. The cake looks like a topography map of the Appalachian foothills. The slopes aren't even uniform. If I had any hand at decorating I'd figure out a way to put Frodo and Sam and the rest of the Fellowship somewhere toiling up one of the ridges.
But instead I'll just slather the whole thing with Mom's divine frosting. Maybe I'll even use the frosting to make it look level and feed the cake-ier portions to my roommate.
At least it all smells wonderful.
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