It's My F---Ing Birthday

Thirty-six Well, it's my fucking birthday again. One year ago today I remember being so sure that this was the year that everything would turn around. I could sense it. I could feel it in the air. But here I am, a full year later, just as screwed up as ever, still making the same mistakes over and over. So I am initiating a new tradition. My plan is to carefully scrutinize my past in the name of not being condemned to repeat it by writing myself an annual report on my birthday. Kind of a personal state of the union to help me chart my profits and losses or at least get a clearer picture of what I am doing right and wrong. I'm not stupid enough to think it's going to keep me from making mistakes ever again but it would be nice if at least I could start making some new ones. Okay. So, still living alone. Still an art teacher and still not minding it too bad. Although I wouldn't have believed it possible when I turned thirty, turning thirty-six doesn't feel like that much of a nightmare. And what more could a thirty-six-year-old girl mired in the quicksand of the one-year anniversary of a painful breakup want on her birthday than a long day of sulking, followed by a chance to go out to dinner with her narcissistic mother and father? Nothing eases the pain of a searing depression like the joy of watching one's elderly parents pick petty fights in upscale restaurants. As always, the fun started the minute we were seated at a table in a pleasant little bistro near the ocean called Kettle'O'Fish (which I ordinarily would have condemned based on the 'O' thing but it was actually pretty nice). My mother took one look at the complimentary tureen of crudites being placed before us, gave the smiling waitress a withering glance, and said, "That's a very meager amount, isn't it?" The waitress stared blankly for a few seconds, picked up the crudite arrangement, and took it back into the kitchen, where probably every member of the staff pissed or spit on it before she brought it back a carrot stick or two heavier. I, of course, sat quietly cringing like I used to do in the seventh grade, only too aware that neither of my two options provided me with any solace: to invoke the wrath of my mother by daring to criticize her or to sit in quiet humiliation, doing a little out-of-body traveling, pretending to enjoy balmy breezes in Bora Bora. "So what if everyone in this restaurant hates my mother?" I could say to myself unconvincingly. "I'm used to that by now. A lifetime of such incidents have enabled me to produce antibodies that process the bodily fluids of restaurant employees into beneficial dietary supplements, like riboflavin or vitamin B12." I could also harbor the tiniest glimmer of hope that the jury was still out, among those who would condemn us, on my father. It was possible that maybe the waiters and waitresses might think I was his child from a previous marriage. However, what my father lacked in active vitriol, he compensated for with sheer arrogance. His tenacious grasp of the obvious had long ago given him the impression that as the bearer of a superior intellect it was both his duty and his burden to patiently explain even the simplest processes of daily living to nearly everyone he met, not just once but every occasion that they met. Which is why my birthday lunch found him lecturing the busboy in excruciating detail on the preferred way to pour water from a pitcher. "Listen to me carefully so I don't have to eat my damn lunch soaking wet," he began. "If you don't hold that pitcher with two hands how the hell do you expect to get any directional stability when you pour?" If I'd ever used that tMarkoe, Merrill is the author of 'It's My F---Ing Birthday' with ISBN 9780375507120 and ISBN 0375507124.