The party is off. Yesterday, I got an email from my sister, asking what kind of cake I wanted. I replied chocolate. Today, I got a notice that delivery of the email had failed, so I called my sister on the phone. She wasn’t there, so I left a message saying “If I have to have a cake, chocolate.”
She called back later and said it sounded as if I’d caught the same bug she’d had, and I told her it wasn’t a bug. We finally got into the issue that I didn’t want a party at all. I was crying, and told her some of the things I stated in my OP, how depressed I feel. I reminded her that I’d said I didn’t want a party, but they’d gone ahead anyway. I said all I’d ever wanted was the same New Year’s Eve observance as usual, the five of us, and I mentioned how I’d never had a birthday party of my own anyway, so why now? See, in my extended family each month’s birthdays were celebrated together. I never minded that.
My sister says it sounds as if I need to talk to someone about my depressed attitude, but it wouldn’t do any good. Time can’t be turned back.
So now I’m getting what I wanted to begin with, but they are going to be watching me, walking on eggshells and being over solicitous. It’s still not going to be any fun.
First off, you are not old. 50 is a milestone. You’re healthy, you have family that loves you, and you bake good cakes. Plus, you have the SDMB.
I highly recommend you contact your local chapter of The Red Hat Society. These ladies have a lot of fun. My dad’s girlfriend is a member, and she has a blast at the meetings. As I understand it, they don’t exactly sit around knitting and bitching about their sciatica.
Ah hell, sweetie. I do hope you know that my previous post was an attempt to gently tease you into finding a silver lining, and not a dismissal of your feelings. I’m sorry you’re blue for your birthday.
“You’re just the same, within, as you were fifteen years ago, twenty; does any gentleman want to make it thirty? The only noticeable differences are a tendency to believe that your friends are several years older than they say they are, and a disposition to regard sixty as the age of consent.” --Dorothy Parker
I’m glad your sister finally listened to you. I was having visions of a ‘gee, you’re really old now!’ party complete with black ribbons, “gag” gifts and other things that are usually hilarious to the party-throwers, and painful to the recipient.
Maybe you could show up with a tiny cake - not a birthday cake, maybe just a single-layer carrot cake, certainly no candles - and suffer through a simple singing of ‘Happy Birthday’. Might be an ice-breaker. Not overly festive. Will make up in a tiny way for their desire to fete you, and not be awful for you. Or just say “Hey, I brought a cake for us to share.” And they can think ‘birthday!’ in their head and you can think ‘yum, frosting’ in your head.
Hang in there, Baker. Don’t let a stupid number spook you because that’s all it really is: a number. You’re no more ‘50’, whatever that means, than you are your telephone number. It’s just an artifical, outside thing that doesn’t bear the slightest relation to who or what you are.
So called landmark birthdays annoy me. (Not that I get any birthdays, as my family never particularly observed them; nothing religious, just a quirk of inertia.) Very atypically, I still freaked out over turning 30; was in a real funk for weeks. My real youth was gone, frittered away while I, uh, basically lived. It took a while, and some patient friends, before light dawned that nothing substantive was one whit different than a few months earlier.
You’re just fine exactly the way you are. It’s not a race, and nobody has to be or do anything by arbitrary dates. You’re here and still exploring life. That’s what counts.
Well it took awhile but I finally got my family to stop celebrating my birthday. Wanna know how I did it? I stopped celebrating theirs. It’s remarkable how the “It’s better to give than to receive” philosophy goes south when people ain’t gettin’ any.
I don’t have anything OP-related to add, but just wanted to wish you a happy (low-key, SDMB-style) birthday, Baker, while there’s still a few minutes of it left (ISTR you’re in Kansas, right?).
(Also, unless my reading skills have failed me, Happy Birthday to Twickster, albeit belated due to the time zone difference).
I do not like celebrating birthdays. I think it is a ridiculous practice. I also cannot abide gift exchanges of any kind. I’m even more uncomfortable when all gifts are given to one person, especially if that person is me.
So my family knows that celebrating my birthday is verbotten.
That didn’t stop my mother from throwing me a surpise party for my 40th birthday. The only thing I hate more than a birthday party is a surprise birthday party. I found out about it a couple of weeks before hand. Given the circumstances, I had no real choice but to shut up and take it.
