Please enjoy this guest post by a dear friend, Second Fiddle.
You have to understand it isn't easy to have a birthday just two days before the biggest holiday of the year--tax day. Ever since I was a child my birthday was totally eclipsed by April 15. No friends were ever available for a party because their parents were busy getting their taxes done. Presents--if there were any--were always wrapped in Forms 1040, 1040 EZ and my personal favorite, 8915. So I have issues about my birthday.
But I've grown out of most them. I've learned to love the excitement of tax day in such a way that I'm so looking forward to it and the gifts I love to give to the IRS that sometimes I even forget it's my birthday.
However, old issues have given way to a new one. A bigger and even better issue. And it has to do with my mother. Once I left home my mom started to invite me to lunch occasionally on my birthday. I obliged when invited and it was fine. But then there were a couple of years when she didn't invite me in a timely manner and I got other offers first. (Yes, I had friends!) So I did the politely correct thing and accepted the invitation of whomever asked first. I mean, I didn't want to sit around on my special day waiting for the phone to ring, you know?
One year one of them even hosted a party for me--which was really something given how busy people are that time of year (you know, with their taxes and all and celebrating the all-powerful IRS). But I am blessed by good friends and they tore themselves away from their W-2s and their mortgage interest statements and showed up to a lunch held in my honor. You'd have thought my mother would be happy for me, right?
But the very next year for my birthday my mother sent me tickets to the queen mother of all guilt trips. "Well it was tradition for me to take you to lunch on your birthday, but then you preferred to go with your girlfriends..."
So I caved. I told my friends I couldn't make plans on that day. I realized that although the right thing to to do if my birthday was really about me would be to invite me for a time that was convenient for me, that was going to be just little too much to ask.
Oddly enough, in that sweet way mothers have, the tickets to the guilt trip kept coming years after I mended my sorry ways and reserved the day for her. Years.
Enter my sister. The favored child (I could tell you stories). Turns out she was coming to visit for tax day this year and she would be arriving on my birthday. Secretly I wondered, would this change the rules of the game?
So about a week before the big event I called my mother to invite her to do something with my family on that day, careful to let her know I wasn't sure what time my sister and her family would arrive but that we would try to go early so she could be home before their arrival.
The conversation continued and then the unexpected happened. My mother invited me to dinner for the night before my birthday. That way, she explained, if she got too far behind getting things ready for my sister she would have it out of the way. (OK, she didn't really say those exact words, but you know...)
Oh. I see how it's done. That was pretty subtle, actually. Especially coming from a person who thinks being subtle is hitting someone over the head.
Fortunately I've gotten used to the game over the years and I have come to find humor in the situation and am able to respond with laughter instead of tears.
So much for tradition!
Need a safe place to gripe? Use my blog for a shoulder to cry on!
5 comments:
Wait theres something new going on over here?!!!? Nobody told me about it? It's not a party without Elastic. Maybe my special party invitation with the Backstreet Boys got lost in the mail.
I came here to get the link to whore up your John Travolta post. :)
(I'm going to hell for saying this):
Sometimes I don't feel really bad about being an orphan.....I'm just sayin'
Awwww, that made me want to wrap Second Fiddle up in my big green lettuce leaves of love.
It's a couple days before Christmas. I haven't seen my dad since May or talked to him since August. We live in the same town.
Ah yes, the second fiddle. I know it well. Why, just the other day I was talking to my mother and my brother beeped in.
"Can I call you back? It's ____."
She never called me back.
Then on Tax morning she calls me to tell me that two sisters went in together and got her an IPOD, and the other sister got her multiple gifts from Red Envelope.
What did I get her?
A lotion gift set. For her hands on Tax day. She didn't mention it.
I will never be the favorite.
The prodigal daughter will.
Oh wait. This was your story. HOpe your Tax Day is nice. Or was nice. ;)
You know what would've been even worse? If you were planning on doing something on your special day. Something you were really looking forward to. And then the rest of your family decided to do that thing on another day. Like maybe just the day before tax day when you would be too busy to go. And then they acted like you should go with them instead of doing it on your day even though you'd been planning it for months.
That would really stink even more, don't you think?
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