The Seasonal Injustice of Birthdays

The Seasonal Injustice of Birthdays

By Matthew Dicks  /  Illustrated By Sean Wang 

I trudge through slush in my winter boots. I’m walking across the parking lot to the AMC Theater. My wife is trudging to my left. My kids are trudging to my right. We’re going to watch some middling comedy that will appease my entire family, which is to say, not me.

Compromise is awful.

It’s especially awful on this day, because today should not be about compromise, but I have no choice. It’s February 15. The dead of the New England winter. Choices are limited unless you enjoy riding a swing to the top of a mountain and flinging yourself off the edge with fiberglass strapped to your feet. No, thank you.

I was once told by an avid skier to never try skiing. He said, “It’s like cocaine. It’s addictive, expensive, and you will eventually get hurt. Sounds about right. Also, it looks like a nightmare to me. Far away, frigid, and skiers who keep all their ski tags on their coats like braggy little badges of honor make me think the skiing community is not my kind of people.

There are other winter sports, of course. Ice skating. Hockey. Curling. No, thank you. Also cold and dumb. Fun to watch. Awful to play. Winter sports are not my bag.

So instead, I make my way across this parking lot to this so-so movie to celebrate this day. My day. It doesn’t feel like my day at all. 

Almost four months from now, on May 30, everything will be different. The world will be my son’s oyster, and he will take full advantage of it. The grass and trees will be green. T-shirts and shorts will replace mittens and long underwear. Maybe we’ll attend a minor league baseball game or play golf or go railfanning, where we sit on a train platform as he records and photographs trains. It’s his latest thing. It’s awful. 

Or we might go fishing or spend the day at the beach. Maybe we’ll go to the park for a hike or rent an enormous, inflatable water slide for the backyard—the kind you see in county fairs. 

Why the disparity between choices? It’s simple. I have a middle-of-February birthday, and Charlie has a late May, almost summer birthday. What a jerk.

The rest of my family also suffers with winter birthdays. My wife and daughter both have January birthdays, which are as poorly placed as mine, except that my birthday often gets swamped by Valentine’s Day and Presidents’ Day, too; it makes party planning precarious. Half of my friends go away for the long weekend, and the other half have Valentine’s Day plans.

But Charlie? May 30? Nothing is happening on May 30 except warm weather, bright sunshine and a million options. It’s a birthday that wants and needs to be celebrated. It deserves to be celebrated. No winter coats. No boots. No staring at gray skies and ice-covered driveways. Charlie is not limited to compromised movie selections, sad trips to the bowling alley or dinner on an evening when it’s already getting dark at 4:00 in the afternoon.  

I’m so jealous. He can play minigolf and eat ice cream and still have hours more to celebrate. 

February 15 has about 10.5 hours of daylight. May 30 has more than 15. Charlie gets almost five additional hours of sunlight on his birthday than I do. Such a jerk.

Summer birthday people are the worst. Warm-weather birthday people of any kind are terrible people. They have no idea how good their lives are. 

I have a friend whose birthday is December 26, which I suspect is worse than mine. Valentine’s Day and Presidents’ Day are minor holidays. Christmas is a monster. If your birthday is within shouting distance of Christmas, you should petition to have your birthday moved to a different day. I can begin to imagine celebrating my birthday alongside a Christmas tree, stockings and post-Christmas bliss. No worse day exists for a birthday. 

My father-in-law’s birthday is December 31, which is also a terrible time weather-wise, and he has the unique position of spoiling New Year’s Eve parties by insisting that we celebrate on his actual birthday. Thankfully, he has never made that request. He probably knows that winter birthdays are terrible already. Why make everyone else miserable? Still, it must be lousy to share your birthday with the birth of a new year.

The only slightly enjoyable winter birthday is February 29 as a leap year baby. It’s still cold, dark and sad, but you get to at least choose your birthday every three years: February 28 or March 1. And you can make all those jokes wherein you divide your age by four and claim to be far younger than you really are. It’s not much—almost nothing—but in the winter, a little bit can be a lot. 

So once again, I celebrate my birthday with my beloved family indoors, doing something that is only fine if I’m lucky. We’ll eat some ice cream cake—my favorite food—but the below-freezing temperature outside will sap even some of that joy from the perfection of ice cream layered with chocolate crunchies and that unknowable frozen glaze on top. 

I’ll eat it, of course. Maybe two or three pieces. And I’ll like it, too, because it’s an ice cream cake. But I know in my heart and mind that I’d like it even more in May, when my son celebrates his own birthday, probably with all-weather cupcakes, a stupid sponge cake or maybe even a pie. He’s the worst. 

Matthew Dicks is an elementary school teacher, bestselling novelist and a record 55-time Moth Story SLAM champion. His latest books are Twenty-one Truths About Love and The Other Mother.

Sean Wang, an MIT architecture graduate, is author of the sci-fi graphic novel series, Runners. Learn more at seanwang.com.