Cake and Death

Friday! It’s a miracle!
One
And the twelve year old is officially twelve.

The children, for reasons I don’t quite understand, have focused in on the exact minute of their various births, insisting that until that very minute has gone by they cannot be counted the age for which they have so long been waiting. This is fine for the few of them whose moments of birth I have, like a good mother, held on to in the recesses of my ever failing memory…
E-Saturday 9:04pm
A-umm Wednesday? 2:04pm
R-Wednesday again? 4:30 something pm
G-um, no idea day of the week, 3ish in the afternoon
M-then, let me see, Monday? Oh gosh, no idea, but definitely 10:30pm, or maybe 10:20
E-I have no idea. None

…and can see the problem for the one in particular at the end. I guess she is still a baby, since we can’t remember exactly when she came into the world. I mean, I do remember the whole business of her getting here, that is indelibly marked in my mind forever, but not the exact hour or minute.

Two
Relieved, frankly, for a nice two month long stretch ahead of me with no birthdays. Truly, the whole fact of them makes me tired. If I had one piece of advice for people with new babies, I would say, Think Long And Hard About What The Fallout May Be. The birthday is going to happen every single year. And a lot of the time it’s going to be inconvenient for you. Some years it will creep up and whack you between the eyes like a splintery two by four, the bitterness of your failure wandering around after you for a whole year until you can put it right again. Other times you’ll have your life together and it will be golden, but the kid won’t remember those ones. You’ll be left, five years later, arguing the details with only two very bad memories on hand (yours because you’re getting older, and the child because children just make stuff up) and the sidelong glances of, “well, when he turned five, he had seven people over and a pony.”*

Three
My recommendation for the one year old child is a cupcake, a song, and rubber duck or something. The two year old child might like to have a cake to share (but probably not, I mean, should you even be eating cake? Or maybe you need cake to fend off the darkness? Contemplate standing in front of a cake, the desolation of your life represented by a smattering of crumbs weirdly dyed) but probably would just like a cupcake again, and maybe another kind of toy, but probably just another rubber duck.

In other words, you need to consider yourself bargaining with a ten, a twelve, and a fourteen year old child and what you will have given away with all those wretched birthdays heretofore. The memories cloud and clamor for grand, energy sapping displays of love, affection, and happiness. Keep the bar low. You’ll thank me.

Four
I’ve actually succeeded on this score by failing gently and incrementally over the many accumulated celebrations. For example, I cannot bake a cake to save my life. The last sixteen years is a wasteland of me producing cake wrecks—either it looks terrible and tastes good, or tastes good and looks terrible, or looks terrible and tastes terrible.

Also, cannot remember to get candles. Always I’m plastering tea-lights across vast expanses of grainy icing. Now it’s a family joke. “Oh look, mother failed with the cake again.”

Five
It is a strange moment to have to mark year by year. As Elphine said, upon turning sixteen, “Oh look, I’m another year closer to death.” I deeply appreciate that she’s my child and so aptly puts into words my own feelings about time and the human condition. Death is coming, let’s eat cake. It has to be done, of course, but it’s weird to expect to feel happy about it.

Six
I mean, I am all for celebrating life and people going on another year, and gaining in wisdom and strength and knowledge and understanding and what not. And it’s nice to give and receive presents. I am not at all against a party and a good time. But there is something morbid to me about having to consider the hour of one’s birth while eating cake. One can’t help but think about the bookending hour of death.

Well, maybe not you. But me certainly.

Seven
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*Don’t worry, there’s never been a pony.