Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays because a long, long time ago, a drunk, horny King Herod dumped his wife, shacked up with his sister-in-law, requested his stepdaughter Salome do a creepy little shimmy for his birthday, then told her she could have anything she wanted. Apparently, the sadistic little shit and her mother ordered John the Baptist’s head on a party tray. So, considering the astronomical rate of beheadings that occur at birthday parties nowadays, Jehovah’s Witnesses naturally want to distance themselves from such revelry.
My parents secretly celebrated my birthday for years. On the morning of September twenty-first, my bedroom door would crack open, my mother’s grin peeking through the doorframe like Jack Nicholson’s stunt double: “Guess who’s one year older today?” For the record, I appreciate the effort. I knew birthdays were against the rules, and they were trying to find a way to celebrate their daughter in a way that still let them sleep at night. They came up with a clever solution: on my seventeenth birthday, my mother pulled an ice cream cake out of the freezer with the following words swirled across the top in cursive frosting: Happy Beth Day!
Yes, we acknowledged the absurdity of pretending we weren’t being rebellious—or, maybe we weren’t? It didn’t say “Happy Birthday” we reasoned, blue frosting smeared on our red hands. I find this even more humorous since my birthday fell on a Sunday that year; we had just returned from the meeting, Jehovah’s Witnesses’ version of church services. We spent two hours denouncing anything associated with mainstream society, then we went home and stuffed our faces with Baskin Robbins.
Coincidentally, my twenty-fourth birthday also fell on a meeting night. Afterwards, I made the mistake of mentioning it was my birthday to my brother’s then-girlfriend who was not a Jehovah’s Witness and was dumbfounded that I wasn’t out getting wasted. She promptly whisked me away to a dive bar where I was given a birthday girl shout-out and handed a flight of Buttery Nipples. It was awkward—but so is convincing yourself (and trying to convince others) that you’re not in a cult. If I was going to hang out with the heathens and consume three to six ounces of a smutty beverage, why bother with the whole religious act? Why walk the line? And why did my parents, two grown people, need to commit culinary subterfuge to celebrate the birth of their own child?
A lot of my Jehovah’s Witness peers never had the chance to celebrate their birthday growing up. Their parents gave them chili-bowl haircuts and beat the shit out of them. You had it good, they say. Your parents were awesome. Whether it was sneaking me a cake, a trip to the movies, or a wink-wink on my special day, my parents were awesome for pushing back—so far as I was willing to not turn them in.