When I was growing up, birthdays were rare breaks from my very strict norm. It was the one day (read that again: ONE DAY) of the year when I was allowed to choose what we had for dinner as a family, and what kind of cake would be served as dessert. As I got older (say, around 7 or 8 years old), birthdays became trading opportunities for my brothers to petition me with (ahem, more like, try to strong arm me into), by giving up my birthday dinner for money. If I switched out my usual spaghetti and meatball dinner with something more palatable to them, ("So boring! You pick the same thing every year!"), something they preferred, like spare ribs, they'd give me an extra $10 or $20 bucks for my birthday, which was really money for the Christmas gifts I'd spend for them, and they knew it, because it came up quickly on the heels of December 17th. Everything in our household was up for negotiation: my birthday, my gifts, my privacy, my body, even the food I waited all year to have free from strife, or so I thought.
We were desperate for these few scant "outs" from our daily lives, which my parents could not tolerate as well, because they bartered between each other over just about everything, like a couple of spoiled and highly deprived children. It was excruciating to endure and bear witness to, and so, birthdays lost their luster eventually, too, just like everything else in that house did, quickly becoming another day to me, and a very abusive one that was rife with potential conflict at that. In short, I grew up, even when the people around me couldn't or wouldn't, stuck on just one speed or another. You want my cake that badly? Sure, take it, I guess. I mean, what the fuck?! It's readily available food! What gives? They became greedy, grasping, rabid animals in the face of this one freedom we had among the crushing grinding reality of our day-to-day life that my parents so hated. So, as I matured, it went: first, it was my simple chocolate cake with whipped cream and canned peaches that my grandmother had perfected over the years, next it was my humble pasta dinner so that I could have money to buy the few things I wanted, needed or liked. In short, I became a mother, as the people around me began pushing and pulling against one another after I caved into their stronger desires.
At the end of the day, it was just a spaghetti and meatball dinner, covered with tomato sauce and coated with grated cheese on top. Shit, I could make that any time I wanted to, with some advanced planning. I was already a master chef by age ten, absorbing and inhaling my mom's few scant cookbooks in the pantry, because she considered cooking a plebeian chore for lesser minds, far beneath her "advance degrees in science" kind of mind, a skewed and warped view of her "feminism" loudly pronounced through a wedding gift titled "The 'I Hate to Cook' Cookbook" that sat on the pantry shelf in accusation. It spoke to her desperation for some kind of legitimacy, one that she would never really be able to achieve on her own, given the problems inherent with her brain chemistry. She wasn't bashing against oppression. She came up against her own inequities, and creative cooking was just another one of her shortcomings that she cleverly hid, saying that baking was more precise and to her liking, because the measurements were like her lab concoctions at work, which were so much more important than us and our dinnertime.
And so it went throughout the years, as I watched these days ripped away from me one by one in a type of silent horror show, like the throwaway milestones they had become to my family. First, it was the food I liked, then my gifts were traded for money given grudgingly, shoved at me from across the kitchen table, or thrust hastily into my hand as we passed each other by in the hallway, on my way to my childhood bedroom. My supposedly big adult years became birthday bashes they could use to manipulate one another with, and also use against me to dominate me with their far more pressingly petty needs. I knew it went haywire one year, when I found myself eating grossly over-sweetened cake that I did not like nor want, in my grandmother's overheated apartment, that I grew sick over with a painful food headache from yet another forced ingestion that had to take place in front of my very sick godmother, to placate her mental illnesses through her viciously depraved sweet tooth that she angrily substituted over actual medication, in tribute to her before I was finally allowed to reach my intended destination of a Sushi dinner my sick mother paid for with her birthday coupon, which she promptly screwed up by falling down on a slight sidewalk incline to the restaurant the moment I was distracted by opening the door for her in the bitter cold night.
Whenever I folded in family, they ruined it gleefully and spitefully, right in front of my face. My brothers took away my 40th from me cruelly as well, co-opting the play I wanted to see with one of their selections instead, picking the restaurant and meeting place, booking a hotel for their families' comfort and enjoyment by pushing me into a forced engagement that I hated every minute of, culminating in my nephew taking and eating the birthday cake right off my plate in front of them without bothering to ask anyone about, that they pretended to ignore. In families with rampantly untreated mental illnesses, I was simply another pawn they tried to pass around abusively, as a covert excuse to hide their real intentions. Such was force of their hatred against me.
The next morning after that 40th birthday debacle, I found myself sick and throwing up into a tote-bag that I had bought from a breast cancer charity in honor of my cousin's successful battle against Stage Four Lymphoma (I bought her one for Christmas, too): on the subway, and in full view of fellow passengers, because I no longer drank as much alcohol as my family did anymore (I was well into MMA training at the time), stumbling through a full-blown snowstorm, stopping to heave in big gulps of cold air so as to not get sick again in public, desiring only to climb four flights up a rundown Brooklyn townhouse to an apartment I could barely afford but made due with through my salary by finding a rare rent stabilized place in a good, safe neighborhood.
I knew something had to give, and that something was me, because they would kill me if I allowed this to go on. Certainly, they had bankrupted me until I had nothing left except myself to give. And so it went on: over these preceding next few years, I fought battle after battle with everyone in my family, as they deliberately turned their backs on me one by one, during my time of greatest economic need (which had never happened of such duration and acuteness before), to finally, in this year, achieve the real success my family has always needed. How did I do it? By allowing them to bash me bloody, body and soul, pushing my body and brain to its' limits, to achieve the actualized success of a self-sustaining kind, the type my people have always needed, by becoming a leader who is a force to be reckoned with, and on to the destiny I have always been fated to be, recounted here as a Queens' true life tale about the real Game of Thrones.
This year I will order food that I want, off the menu of a female warrior who runs her very own kitchen, cooking her very own type of food, in this town we call home, paid through blood, sweat, and tears covertly disguised as a paltry birthday lunch on my mother's dime, long overdue and sorely lacking. Finally on this day, our day has come. And so as my birthday approaches, so does our day together. As a united people, we will move forward through the power of a forceful realization felt in my body and soul, a queen to be linked and joined to her destiny at long at last. Enjoy this 17th day in winter in remembrance of me and on the house, to be always paid by me through The House of Doucette. Long may we reign, in peace and in victory. Amen to you, my children, from your ever-loving Mother in Christ, who is also Marie the Beautiful, Marie the Strong, Marie the Brave, and Marie the Brilliant, the very words you spoke near me to invoke the spirit that will be here forevermore. We have won. The fruits of my success will be yours to savor eternally ever after, on this 45th birthday of mine in the year of Our Lord 2014, the 17th day of December will forever and always be known as my true Mother's Day because it is for you, my people.
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| My 39th birthday at my grandmothers' house, December 17th, 2008. I made a minor typo in the photo caption when I posted it on Facebook back in 2008, which was immediately pointed out to me in typical "clever" hipster fashion as an error, unsolicited as it was by a older and supposedly more powerful man from my employed publishing past. |
