The below essay "My Most Transformative Birthday" is published in the current issue (October 2025) of THE VILLAGE VIEW.
- Nancy Kelton
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
My Most Transformative Birthday
By Nancy Davidoff Kelton
Author Nancy Kelton as a little girl with curly hair. Photo courtesy of Nancy Kelton.
I celebrated my birthday in September. Several friends and family members took me to dinner. I received cards, flowers, emails, and hugs. I had lunch with a longtime friend, whose birthday is the same week as mine. It was the first time we’ve gotten together since her husband of 44 years died four months earlier. We discussed him and her loss. We discussed my five close friends, my age and younger, who died in the last eight years. I talk to their photos on my walls about our shared memories and about my current most private happenings. I am grateful for the truths and love I have had in my treasured relationships.
My most memorable and transformative birthday was my seventh–71 years ago. When my mother picked me up at school to buy my party invitations, she said, “They should not have the word ‘birthday’ on them.”
“But it is my birthday,” I said. I did not want to get out of the car at the card store.
“It’s not nice to make people think they should bring presents,” she told me.
Of course they should bring presents. That was what birthday parties were for. I choked up in the store, moving away from her to another aisle, far from her so her meanness wouldn’t rub off. Her request was a first for the saleswoman whom I followed around. My mother and I went from store to store until she finally found what she wanted. I refused to speak.
The next day after school I hid under my bed. My parents thought I ran away and called the police. When I emerged, my mother threatened to punish me by canceling the party. My father said that would be too severe. When my friends R.S.V.P.’d, I reminded them I’d be turning seven and couldn’t wait to open their gifts.
My mother struggled with mental illness. That contributed to her lack of empathy for me. After being in an institution for two months where she got electroshock therapy, she returned home less anxious, but the distance with me remained.
My older sister, Susan said, “I learned to deal with Mommy.”
I learned to get around her.
When our neighbors, the Golds, were about to move to Florida they had to find a home for their cocker spaniel, Tammy. Knowing my mother did not like dogs, they did not ask us to take her. I told my mother that not only did the Golds want Tammy to live with us, but so did Daddy. Mom said that would be fine. Then I told my father that Mommy wanted us to take Tammy, and he said if she thought it was a good idea, we should.
That was how I got my dog. And many other things afterwards.
Nancy with a long-time friend whom she met the first day of first grade. Photo by Jonathan Zich
The night before a professional photographer would be coming to take school pictures, my mother came at me with a bag of rollers and bobby pins to set my hair so it would be curly the next day and frame my face. She claimed it looked straggly when it was not set and emphasized my long nose. I hadn’t known I had straggly hair or a long nose until Mom pointed that out.
“First graders aren’t supposed to look like ladies who go to Cecilia’s Salon,” I told her.
“Everyone should have set hair,” she said.
I let her set it because she sat very close to me and we had physical contact. Otherwise, she rarely got near me. The next time she came at me with her bobby pin bag, I moved away and locked myself in the bathroom.
“Set hair looks better,” she called.
“That’s for your opinion,” I shot back, refusing to emerge until she put her bobby pin bag away. “That’s for your opinion!” became my standard response to her and to other people with whom I disagreed.
I opened up to my father when we played cards and Ping-Pong, painted by numbers at night or did errands together. Long before the women’s movement came into being when I was in third grade, I told him I thought Mommy had little to contribute to the dinner conversation because her days were boring. He said, “Find work you love when you grow up. You do it every day.” I love being a writer and a teacher.
In college, when I worried that I might fail Chemistry 101 and called my father crying, he wrote me the following letter:
Dear Nancy,
I am upset you spent ten minutes of expensive long-distance time crying and getting worked up over a chemistry exam. Just because some finky professor didn’t ask questions on material you studied doesn’t make you a failure. Hopefully, the person who teaches you Chemistry 101 next semester will ask better questions. No two people come out the same from college. Some get A’s, some get B’s, some get F’s, some get Phi Beta Kappa keys, some get mono, some get knocked up, and some get thrown out. I don’t expect a child of mine to be a science whiz, but I do expect her to maintain her sense of humor about school, the world, her parents, everything. We love you no matter how it comes out.”
And I love my parents and learned to laugh at what they said and did no matter how it came out. Mom’s behavior and remarks were funny. Some of what our relationship was about, while extreme, is common to parents and children. At age 60, when I met the man who’d become my second husband and told my mother how good the relationship was, she said, “That’s because your hair finally falls nicely into place.”
Yes, finally.
Nancy Davidoff Kelton has written seven books and numerous essays. She adapted her memoir for the stage. It won Long Beach (CA) Playhouse's New Works Festival in 2023 where it had a staged reading and talkback.
