My Birthday

I hate my birthday. It doesn't help that it happens to be on Christmas Eve.  In my family,as a child, it was challenging to say the least. My parents decided to make a traditional birthday cake for me every year.  I think it is indicative of all of the later issues with my birthday, an quite frankly, of a lot of my issues. Steamed English Plum Pudding.  It usually had this soupy vanilla cream sauce with it, that wasn't really whipped cream, and a few times my parents soaked it in Rum and tried to light it.  

Everyone gets their favorite cake on their birthday, my dad gets German Chocolate.  Somehow I am supposed to keep up the  pretense that I love Plum Duff. 

 Just about the time I admitted that I didn't like Plum Duff, my  parents started a new tradition.   Every birthday morning breakfast, my dad would start in on me. How I have been unfocused in my life, and basically how I've failed. To make it worse, they still made my cake, but then refuse to say "Happy Birthday"  until; the hour I was born, which is right before midnight.   So I would cry all morning then think everyone had forgotten my birthday.  I would lie in bed feeling like a complete failure and then my parents would come in my room with silly hats on and sing happy birthday.  Then I would have to eat Plum Duff and pretend that I liked it. 

To this day, as my birthday approaches, I catalog all of my failures and sink into depression until...midnight.  Then I feel so guilty by the time I get the happy birthday call that I am dumbstruck.  I am willing to eat some crappy British food as my hairshirt and then when they finally wish me a happy birthday, I can't even begin to say what I really want for my birthday because I feel grateful that at least someone remembered on Christmas Eve that it was also my birthday..