my birthday

Saturday, September 3rd, is my birthday. I will be 46. My birthday is just another day, or sometimes, worse. I do not get cards in the mail, have not for many years now. None of my family comes over for visits or cake and ice cream or even at the least makes phone calls to me. I do not receive gifts from any one but my son and my parents. Some years, I have not gotten anything from Trevor. Thank his mother for that. I have always made sure that he gets his mother (my ex) a gift and a card for her birthday, Christmas and Mother’s Day. She seldom does the same for me. For the first 10 years or more, she never did it. Unless my mother takes care of it, Trevor never does any of it anyway. I used to think that people wanted to skip there birthdays because they were joking about getting older. It is no joke for me. I do not remember how long ago it has been since anyone came over for cake and stuff. I do not like this feeling! I sure do not like having to struggle with it every year. It should not bother me by now, being so many years. Besides, I never really made much of my birthday before, but the past 10 years or so, I just dread it coming. I do not like fighting with my emotions and trying to be a big boy about it. Such a waste of energy.
In all fairness, though, I only have one grandparent that is still alive. She is my mother’s mother. She disowned me when I got divorced 17 years ago. I have not received any cards at all from her, no matter the holiday. She sends them to Trevor, though, and I am very grateful for that. The irony of this is that she has been married 5 times. The divorce is probably not why she disowned me. When I was married, my ex worked at a bank. Of course, we had our account there. Like an idiot, I let her take care of paying our bills. I just deposited my pay check, keeping beer and gas money, and let her take care of everything. The last year before our divorce, we had purchased a house. In order to get it, we consolidated all of our loans into one. I had 3 credit cards and she had one. We both agreed to not use our cards. Like any couple who thinks they are going to be happily married, I put her name on all of my cards. One day, about 3 weeks after we moved into that house, I came home to brand new curtains over our big sliding back door. I asked her where they came from and what money. She told me she used one of my cards to pay for them. In fact, she maxed it out. Not only that, but she maxed out my other 2 cards on stuff that we did not need, nor could we afford, for the house. As you can imagine, we could not make our bills. We could not make our second house payment. So, we barrowed some money from my grandmother. A year latter, we are divorced. She got the house and I got the payments. Fortunately, she sold it that same month we got divorced. She just got someone to take over the payments. Of course, I had to pay the realtors fee of a $1,000. So, after I moved out and started getting my own mail, I began getting all the bills for my credits cards. Because of the divorce contract, I had to pay all of my own bills, even though it was for her furniture and stuff she had bought and took with her. Same sad story, boo hoo for me, right? Hear it all the time, right? Well, I discovered that she had not paid any of my bills. None of the stuff that was in my name had been paid on for over a year!! That included my grandmother. So, for $1,000, I have been disowned by my grandmother. She is very wealthy. No, not a millionaire, but has not had to work in over 30 years. She has tons of money and she gives the rest of my family a lot more money than that all the time. So what? When she stands before God after her death, she will have to answer why. Not only did I have all of those credit cards, but the consolidation loan payments, my car payment (for my Corvette) and the amount due for Trevor’s birth that my insurance would not cover ($750). Anyway, she was not my favorite grandmother growing-up. My father’s mother was my favorite. I used to spend all of my summers with her. She lived in this very small town named Guernsey (yes, after the cow) that had only 800 people that lived there. I even lived with her for my 10th grade year of high school. I loved that town and her house! My life could be in complete chaos and once I pulled into Guernsey, nothing mattered. All of my troubles and worries just fell off me like water off a duck's back. It was my own little heaven. My Grandmother died about 10 years ago. I sure do miss her! She was the best cook in the World!! We spent all of our holidays at her house. My family would get together at her house, my aunt and uncle and my 5 cousins, and my parents and my sister and brother. At her funeral, my cousins got mad at me because I would not drink with them. That was when they decided I should not be family anymore.
I know a few people that make a huge ordeal out of their birthdays. To them, there is no bigger holiday, no day in life more important than their birthday. Even back when I was a kid, my birthday was not so special as all that. When I was 5, we lived in a small town in Wyoming called Torrington. Torrington did not have Kindergarten. In fact, Kindergarten was not consider part of school and was not an official part of the school district here back then. There was a private Kindergarten, but my parents did not have the money to pay for me to go. Back in the day, school always started the Tuesday after “Labor Day.” My birthday is sometimes on “Labor Day.” My very first day of school, my first day of 1st grade, was on my 6th birthday. I can recall my mother had made cupcakes for the whole class. I remember setting at my school desk eating my chocolate cupcake. It was all down hill from there :) I used to get into lots of trouble in school. Oh, nothing major, just goofing around and showing off. Mostly I got in trouble for day dreaming and not doing my school work. Although I got into my share of fights, I was never suspended for fighting. In my 1st year, I got 2 spankings. Yes, they still did that back then. I spent many recesses indoors doing school work. One day, my 1st grade teacher hit me over the head with the “Weekly Readers” that were all rolled up from the mail. She just walked back into the room and pop! right on the back of my head. Then, she sat down and began yelling at me for something (who knows?) and she got even more upset. She stood up and hit me again on the head with her ink pin. Those two incidents were not the spankings in case you are wondering. On no! I had to stand-up in front of the whole class, bend down, garb my ankles and take a few swats from the wooden pattle. Hey, nice school day memories! Second grade was no better and on and on until graduation.
The bad part for me when I was a kid with my birthday was that I always got school clothes for my gifts. I am grateful to have gotten gifts (and clothes), but it did not seem fair that my sister and brother got new school clothes just because and I had to use up my birthday gifts for them. I would have much rather had stuff like toys. Even back in my drinking days, I did not make much of my birthday. I sure do miss birthday sex though.