1. My birthday has always been eclipsed by an American past time: the Super Bowl. In 1993, four days before I was born, the Dallas Cowboys and the Buffalo Bills were facing off. In my mind, my dad will always be characterized by his delicious cooking, his enthusiasm for sports, and beer. My dad and I don’t speak. All of my questions about him, now that I’m an adult, feel as though I’m talking to a ghost. I wonder if he was anticipating the game that year. Or, was he antsy about the birth of his babies; whose imminent arrival was as apparent as my mom’s swollen ankles. Was my older sister waiting on our mom hand and foot in the final days? Did my mom drive my dad crazy with her incessant cleaning? Her planning? Her need for assurance that his two babies, Bryan and Bryanna, would know, like the answer to an equation, how loved they were.
2. “My father abandoned me and so did my husband,” I said to my therapist. We circled back to that, long after I forgot that I said it. The connection, I suppose, comes from my desire to be taken care of. I know how to hold my own hand. I know that I am my first priority. I wanted a husband to take the place of my father; to tell me that he was proud of me. To care for me. Look after me. To assure that my worries were not mine to bear alone. Both my husband and my father abandoned my expectations. Perhaps I shouldn’t have set them. Maybe they both loved me as best they could.
3. The most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me was around my fifteenth birthday. My boyfriend, at the time, spent his allowance to take me out. There was the gondola ride at the Venetian hotel and burgers and strawberry lemonade at Gran Lux Cafe; pulleys were at the corners of my mouth the entire day. The last time my birthday felt that special was the year my mom got a photo of my twin and I printed on a vanilla sheet cake. That day, making out in a hotel lobby bathroom, felt like dessert.
4. Last February was marked by hardships. God, my mom’s heart attack and my divorce being finalized and my plummeting mental health could only prepare me for March. But there was a moment there, before all of it earlier that month. My coworkers and I were celebrating our birthdays — mine in February and a few others sprinkled throughout January. We had cake and ice cream and shared our intentions for our new year of life and we each spun one other around before we struck the piñata. I missed. Terribly. What I loved most about that day is that I felt so deserving of my happiness. And for the entire year, I tried to inhale that feeling in hopes that it would be cigarette tar to my lungs.
5. Lucille Clifton published The book of light in 1993. It houses one of my favorite poems, “won’t you celebrate with me,” which I read incessantly around my birthday. Here it is, for you to enjoy, too:

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.