June 10, 2005

Happy birthday to me!
by Liza Sabater

I love birthdays and I am not ashamed to scream to the world that today is my birthday. What is better than a day when you get to eat cake, get presents, be with friends and family and eat cake? I mean, really, CAKE!

This year, though, I am trying to do things a bit differently. Before I would have all manners of opinions as to how I wanted to spend the day. And, resentfully, I would take the day off : "Goddamit it's my party!" This year, I have been so happy busy that I really, sincerely, can't even think of taking the day off. It's good work; the kind that feeds my soul. I'm happy on that front.

It is the first year though in ages that I am giving "gifts" on my birthday. I don't know who started the tradition, as usual I would love to take the credit for it, but I sincerely think that it was my brother who started the custom of giving gifts to our parents on his birthday. Nothing fancy : a silly toy, a poem, flowers, mow the lawn. It was his way of saying, thank you. That's my baby brother with the totally un-pc sense of humor.

I thought it was a cool idea, I guess, because I started to do it too. I used to every year until rage and age made me forget about the tradition. I can be, let's say, more than a bit cold to those whom I believe have hurt me. But as I am approaching the legal definition of an old hag, I have been thinking a lot about my parents, especially my father, who passed away two years ago.

At his funeral I had talked about how my penchant for debates started at home, with my questioning my father about everything from the concept of a divine trinity to the merits of funk. I remember passion in our exchanges. I remember ire. But I also remember fun, especially when he would get stumped after one of our debates. Whenever I would hear, "I'll get back to you on that", I knew I had won that round.

My father and I unfortunately had a falling out after he left my mom (I can't even say divorced because it took them 5 years to actually sign the papers). We could not be in the same room without me getting in a fight with him or getting sick with anger for over 10 years. It was not until he died that it did not hit me that it was a privilege for me to have had those debates and those fights.

My father was a wanderer in the love department and he ended up having eight kids from six different women, but it were only my brother and I who had the "fortune" to have a dysfunctional relationship with him. Some of my other siblings only relationship to him was their blood. So in a weird awful way I was fortunate to have a father to grow to resent and then to forgive. And in a weird way, my anger and resentment were intrinsic to my love for him. I spent so many years angry at the man because I loved him so and the pain of having let me down was too much to bear. It was love, not hate that fueled my anger and it was not until he died that I understood how profound my love for him was.

Then there is my mother. My mother, my mother my mother.

Let's say that the older I get, the more she fascinates me. I mean, c'mon, this is a white woman who married a black man right smack in the middle of the sixties. That takes fucking courage, if you ask me. And she didn't just marry him, she spawned with him as well. That's the clencher for me : she had no qualms of walking around with two brown babies of her own.

My mom was a professional MOM. That is what she did 24/7. I used to joke about her getting a PhD in mothering, because she does it so well. She baked the cookies and the cakes and the brownies. She sewed the Christmas pageant costumes for all the kids in the class. She'd chaperone 5, 10, 15 kids to the movies or the beach or a night out for pizza. She taught me which herbs would settle a stomach ache, how to turn egg whites into meringue, and how to grow not just my own garden but my own fruit and vegetable grove. She showed me how good it is to wake up early in the morning and walk out in the grass, feeling the cold dew beneath my feet evaporate as the tropical sun got higher in the sky. She showed me how not to throw a ball like a girl, how to ride a bike, fly a kite and climb a tree. She even taught me the wonders of dressing in male drag and egging the doors of your enemies on Halloween (hence the "don't you ever throw like a man").

My mom just called me and sang me happy birthday. God I love the woman. I pretend to be an all out amazon here, but deep down inside, I'm my mom and my dad's little girl. I definitely like to be añoñada and her calling me on the phone, even at my age and with this sagging carcass of mine, I still like to think of myself as my mom's baby. I know, it sounds pathetic, but trust me, you've been there too. After my grandmother died, my mom called me : "You know what is so weird. I am almost 60 years old and all of a sudden I have no parents but I cannot call myself an orphan." I dread the day I get to say the same.

I inherited my mom's flights for logical fancy. My sense of humor is intrinsically related to her own natural penchant for silliness. And my lust for oxymorons, solipsisms and hyperbole come directly from her being a natural born drama queen :

"Nena, are you sitting down?"
"What happened? Who died?"
"Prepare yourself, mi'ja, abuela died."
"Mami, I didn't know my abuela was sick!"
"No mi'ja, not your abuela. Mine."
"Oh, but ..."
"She was frail ..."
"Hmm, but ..."
"She was so lonely at the end ..."
"But, but ..."
"She died of a bro-ken heAAAArt!"
"Mami, carajo, stop! She was 100 years old!"
" 104."
"Girl, we would have had to kill her if she didn't die anytime soon."

My mom, more than my dad, taught me about black pride. "Don't you ever let anyone hurt you because you are black", my mami would always say. I cried during Whoopi Goldberg's one-woman show because, that little girl that puts on a white towel over her head to pretend she was a princess with flowing blonde hair, that was me. My mom dyed her hair blonde for many, many years and she also grew it really long. I sooooo wanted to look like mom ... My cousins, her older brother's kids look more like her than her own kids. "Pendejos" was a favorite way to describe the people who'd assume we were her neighbor's brood.

So for here innate and unintentional silliness, her dedication as a mom and her very private, very personal, very unique black power revolution, I salute my mom. As she would say : "I spread those legs open to let you into my life." And for that one act alone, for choosing to give me life, there is no better reason for me to say,

Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday to me
Thank you mami and papi
Happy birthday to me.

Posted by Liza Sabater in Family, Life
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Say it loud, say it proud!