March 12th, The Day That Could’ve Been
When what we took for granted becomes a fantasy
I wake up to the sun streaming through lace curtains, a warm ball of fur, my cat Emma, scrunched in my armpit. The soothing, soft rumble of your inhale fills the space next to me. I tip toe into the kitchen to make breakfast while you sleep — coffee and a heaping bowl of cereal, half bran flakes, half granola, for you; a green smoothie and lox frittata for me — while you sleep. We eat together, the windows cracked open, it’s surprisingly warm for mid-March. Birds chirp from bare branches freckled with buds eager to bloom.
After three tedious cigarettes paired with three cups of re-heated latte, we venture out into the early afternoon. Your birthday falls too early for the real flowers of Spring, so I take you to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. I’m bored within ten minutes but I let you embrace your inner Pisces; your mind wander to distant places as we sit among the flowers. The signs say no smoking and I hate breaking rules, but just this once I play ignorant and let you fill the fresh air with tobacco.
It’s time for lunch, not because you’re hungry, but because you need to swallow your pills with food. I take you to Olde Brooklyn Bagel Shoppe, they’re known for their bagels but you insist on the bran muffin, your go-to lunch. They even warm it up for you, cut it in two and melt margarine in the middle, just the way you like it. We sit on a bench outside so you can have a smoke, I hold your coffee and we alternate holding your cigarette while you use your one working hand to eat your steaming muffin. I’m embarrassed by the crumbs accumulating in the crevices of your jacket collar. I dust them off and close my eyes, take a deep breath for patience, let the feeling of the warm sun on my face transport me elsewhere. But it’s nice. This mundane moment feels nice.
The last section of Vanderbilt before Grand Army Plaza is steep, so we hail a cab to drive us the short distance to Prospect Park. We spend the rest of the afternoon on a park bench. You ramble off your neuroses, occasionally commenting on a passerby’s wardrobe choice that they inevitably hear because you can’t gauge how loud you’re speaking. My irritability and embarrassment builds, but I keep taking deep breaths to mitigate me snapping — the young adult yelling at the innocent-looking disabled woman in a pastel floral dress isn’t a good look. Plus, it’s your birthday, I’m trying to be a good daughter.
I take you to Miss Ada for dinner, not because you like Israeli food but because they’re accessible. We go early — you can’t stand too long in line and a noisy restaurant would overwhelm your senses. Plus, we have a classical music performance to get to at BAM. I oscillate between dozing off and fuming with anxiety at the way you watch live performances — leaning forward with your elbow resting on your knee; head held in-hand, pensively observing the action on stage, blocking the view of those behind you. But you love classical so I don’t interrupt your concentrated observance.
We end the night at home with slices of cake from the Little Cupcake Bakeshop: banana chocolate chip for me and Brooklyn Blackout for you, because it’s the richest chocolate cake I could find. I sing you Happy Birthday and you put down your cigarette to blow out the lone candle. 62 candles is too many for a single slice. We argue over what to watch: you want Late Night, I want Gilmore Girls. Because I have physical control and I’m a spoiled brat, I win. We messily eat our cake on the couch with Lorelai and Rory, finally freed from the fear of judgment that permeated our day.
To many, March 12th is the day the world shut down. To me, it’s my mom’s birthday. Every year, I do the mental math of calculating how old she would’ve been, which inevitably leads me into a spiral of ‘could’ve been’ scenarios. It feels fitting, then, that this day has come to mean something similar for most people — a day that symbolizes the “what if?”
Now that we’re a year in, everyone’s experienced a pandemic birthday. We’ve settled for soggy takeout and muted celebrations (quite literally, over zoom), and faced the logistical nightmare of planning a distanced park hang without a bathroom. The strategy to relieving birthday blues (and prevailing strategy to surviving quarantine in general) has been to dream; to imagine what you would do if the world didn’t stop turning on March 12th, and perhaps hope that one day you’ll fulfill your COVID birthday wish.
While, in theory, fantasizing is a soothing salve for grief, it doesn’t come so easily for me. I can’t imagine my mom flying out to Brooklyn to celebrate her birthday because her disability prevented her from visiting me in any of the cities I’ve lived in over the years. Her 62nd birthday is unimaginable, not because she’s dead, but because the scope of my imagination is limited by the isolated nature of the life she lived. Every birthday, even in “normal times,” meant making accommodations and settling, because of a physical and cultural society that wasn’t built for her body. I wish, not just that she was alive, but that she had been able to live more when she was alive. Sometimes having the perfect dream only makes waking up to reality more painful.
March 12th has always been a day of grief for me. I feel it’s taken a similar tone for others too. We have lost so much — jobs, people, control, freedom; we are collectively mourning. But we haven’t lost our ability to dream. The fantasy that I indulged in here, didn’t picture mom without a disability or some movie-esque mother-daughter relationship, it was real. Her birthday wouldn’t have been perfect, it would’ve been disappointing, but that dysfunction would’ve been oddly comforting, because it was us. I would’ve taken the broken birthday for granted, just as I under-appreciated every “flawed” part of our life before the pandemic.
Try dreaming. Not of some ideal life, but of real life, the one you were really living before the pandemic. And in that fantasy, maybe you can find some hope, that one day (soon) some of those not-so-perfect parts of your life will resurface, and this time, you’ll embrace them.
Happy could’ve been Birthday Mom.
