Dear friend
In a poetry class I attended last week, the guest writer shared unabashedly that February was his favorite month. Dressed in a sweater with a pink Hello Kitty graphic on the front, his mustache curled even wider as he smiled. “February’s my birthday month and it’s Valentine’s day — my favorite holiday,” he said.
From hundreds of miles away, behind my laptop screen, I felt a warm feeling flood my chest.
Growing up, I also held a special place in my heart for the shortest month of the year. It was Black History month and as a Black person born in that month, I always felt like I could be could one day be deemed worthy of admission into the Black History canon; that my birthday would bookmark this month like those of my idols - Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison and more. As I’ve grown older, I have less of a desire to be included into an exclusive Black excellence club. Instead I’m recognizing that I’ve already been born into a radical Black legacy — One that’s both spiritual, literary and despite all the odds, deeply loving.
When my grandma was growing up, birthdays weren’t usually tracked or celebrated. The same was true of wedding anniversaries and non-religious holidays. As Crystal Wilkinson writers in her essay, The Importance of Birthdays in the Black Community —
“Black people where we’re from didn’t celebrate birthdays much. We weren’t a time-conscious people back then. We kept time by the sun and the moon and when work needed doing.”
I often think about how many of my ancestors were forced to position themselves first and foremost as laborers where birthdays were just another day to push through and scrape by, no different than any other.
In the height of hard times as a child, my grandma retells the story of how her father would save up rations of flour and sugar so her family could have a cake for their end of year Christmas celebration. I imagine my great-grandfather in a small farm house in Mississippi during the Great Depression taking what little was left of the month’s flour and sugar supply and adding it to a growing mound of powdery white. I think about five little ones shuffling around the house, daydreaming of Christmas day when a perfect sliver of cake will disappear too quickly into the cave of their mouths.
I have never had to wait for cake. Or if I did, that wait was from the grocery store bakery to the kitchen table while I impatiently anticipated thick, sweet slices shared amongst my family and friends.
When we celebrate my grandma’s birthday now, it feels strange to think that for so long she didn’t know her real birth date or have a birth certificate until the 70s. It’s only through my mom’s genealogy research that we learned she was delivered by her grandmother in late December 19261, just a few days before Christmas. I wonder about that day — if her father and two other older siblings stepped into the bedroom where her mother and grandmother tended to her small body and smiled with wonder. If they thought of her in some way as a Christmas baby; an end of year blessing. I’d like to think that amidst the endless demands of everyday life, there was unbridled pride and joy at her arrival in the world. I wonder if, years later, she subconsciously felt like that Christmas cake was just a little bit more for her than anyone else.
For a decade or so, my birthday season felt like a weighty, complicated time of year. Often, the start of February would evoke insecurities about my own desirability and lovability. My birthday, much like Valentine’s Day, seemed to be the ultimate test of (or testimonial to) my worth. It felt embarrassing to ask people to come together on the grayest, coldest day of year to celebrate me. I would often feel overwhelmed with anxiety trying to figure out what to do that might be impressive, entertaining and enjoyable for other people. How could I make it worth their while? How I could I make sure my birthday wasn’t a failure — wasn’t proof of the existential aloneness I often felt?
It’s only in the last two or three years that I’ve started to see my birthday not as a day to prove I’m lovable but as a day to celebrate all the undeniable love that’s shepherded me through another year. My friend Helen often says that life is love. That another year, day, or second of life is simply an opportunity to feel, give and be enveloped by love. It’s taken my some time to understand the wisdom in her words . . .
Back in 1995, my mother’s doctor gave her a February 14th due date but as Valentine’s day came and went the following year, I stayed tucked inside her, content and warm. I think I knew even then that love was not something that could be quantified in flowers and chocolates. Love was the legacy of care that had made me, that would birth me and that would raise me up.
In a meeting the other day, someone introduced me to this phrase: retention of the spirit. He was commenting on the ways that the concept of “retention” is often used in reference to employees or knowledge acquisition but that our spirits are what are truly at risk of escaping us.
I keep thinking about my great-grandpa, saving small portions of ingredients to one day bake a cake. That belief that he/they/I was deserving of something sweet and indulgent. I’d like to think that his steadiness — his faithfulness — was a way of tending to our collective hope; our familial joy. My grandma watched his small defiance of the ever oppressive demands for utility and pragmatism. She learned something . . . maybe about beauty or pleasure or kindness. What she retained she passed on, even if at times sparingly, to her children. To my mother and to me.
I think about all the times I’ve felt that sense of separation from my self. How each time it was the small generosity, tenderness and beauty of others’ (living and spirit, earth and animal) that helped me retrieved myself — in little and big ways celebrating my existence. Reminding me that I/we have always been and will always be, beloved.
With love,
Jas
When this was originally sent it said my grandma was down in 1923. While I’m already wishing her into a century of life, she’s currently on 97 — her correct birth year in 1926.
Awwwww tiny Jas!! <3 <3 <3 What a blessing of love and life YOU are to all of us
Such a beautiful piece. I love you more every year. You give your audience, even me, so much to think about.