My birthdays as a child were not about me. They were about making sure my younger siblings had a good time. They were about managing my mother's stress about the party. They were about being grateful for what I got and not asking for more. I learned early that my birthday was not a day when I got to be celebrated — it was a day when I had to be the host, the manager, the grateful recipient of whatever was offered. At forty-one, I'm still unlearning that.
If you were parentified — if you were the eldest daughter, the responsible one, the child who made sure everyone else was okay before you even thought about yourself — your birthday might carry a specific kind of grief. It's supposed to be a day about you. But you were trained to believe that days about you were selfish, that wanting attention was greedy, that the best thing you could do on your birthday was make sure nobody else was inconvenienced by it. That training doesn't disappear when you turn eighteen. It sits in your bones. And every year, when the calendar circles back to your birthday, you feel the pull between what the day is supposed to be and what you learned it had to be.
Give Yourself the Birthday You Never Got
You're allowed to want a birthday that's actually about you. You're allowed to ask for what you want — a specific meal, a specific gift, a specific kind of attention — without immediately apologizing for the inconvenience. You're allowed to let someone else plan it. You're allowed to do nothing, if that's what you actually want. The question isn't 'what's the right way to celebrate.' The question is: what would feel like care to the child you were? The one who never got a birthday that was just hers? What would she have wanted? Can you give it to her now?
If Your Birthday Brings Grief
It might. That's okay. The grief is real — grief for the birthdays that were about managing everyone else, grief for the years you didn't get to be the center of attention because you were too busy being the center of operations. Let yourself feel it. And then, when you're ready, do one thing for yourself — something small, something soft, something the child you were would have wanted. Buy yourself the gift nobody thought to get you. Eat the meal you wanted but never asked for. Take the day off from being useful. You've been useful for decades. For one day, you can just be celebrated. Even if you're the one doing the celebrating. Even if it's just you and a cupcake and the permission to not be useful for a few hours. That counts. That's reclamation.
— Delia
About the Author
Delia is the eldest of four in a Nigerian-American family. She was the household manager by twelve and the family's infrastructure for nearly three decades. She's now in the slow, ongoing work of learning to receive — and learning that her birthday is allowed to be about her.
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