7 Pensive Birthday Takes

It is a cold and blustery Friday. Are there any takes? Yes there are.

First
Today is the celebration of the birthday of the baby. Tomorrow is her actual birthday, but some members of the family will not be here, and so we are moving up the ritual birthday luncheon. She ordered peanut sauce (see below), ugali, and some cake or other that she and I will purchase this morning—see archives for cake wrecks and other explanations about why Wegmans is the savior of us all. As I said on instagram earlier in the week, she is going to be eight and I don’t even know how to deal. I am not generally given over to nostalgia, but it does seem like the end of an era—the one where I lug around little kids and basically know what I am doing as a mother.

Second
Do women have midlife crises? Is that what this is? I thought 40 was supposed to be the new 30, but I think I’m discovering that it is actually just 40. The clothes, the haircut, the culture all insist to me that I must be as young as ever, that I can still do anything and be anything, that ‘the best is yet to come’ or something. But the last few years have felt like a terrifying exchange of competence and satisfaction for insecurity and terror. I knew how to do babies…and toddlers…and scrubbing the kitchen floor over and over and over again. That made sense to me. This new era feels like an unmooring, as if I am newly adolescent at the same time as my actual teenagers. Except that they are so calm and grounded whereas I am sailing on a sea of unknowing.

Third
On the other hand, it is preferable for children to grow up. I wouldn’t have wanted to lug this ‘baby’ around for eight whole years. It’s a mercy that she walked and talked and began to organize her own life. Not to mention the lives of others, including me. She was heard on Sunday, upon observing one of our adorable church toddlers being affixed to one of those clever devices that have a tether on the back so that you don’t lose track of them in the post church mayhem, that she “wished she could have a leash like that for her siblings.” That is the force we are all reckoning with. The Genghis Khan of the family.

Fourth
Still, she had the sense to request peanut sauce, so everyone is basically mollified. I have described how to make peanut sauce here before, but I feel I should remind you, because you might have forgotten. If you did it this way, it would feed twenty, or yourself quietly night after night, which is better.
2 large onions, finely diced
Several cloves garlic, minced
1 or 2 inches garlic grated
Sweated together in butter or vegetable oil until translucent.
Add lots and lots of chicken—not breast, if you can help it, but thigh—diced and browned.
2 small cabbages cubed or wedged or however you want to cut them up
1 or 2 cans crushed tomato
2 jars creamy peanut butter with Nothing added
Lots and lots of stock, like as much as it would take to fill up the big pot you are using.
Tomato paste if you want
Hot pepper if you are allowed (I am usually not)
Salt to taste
Cook it all up, really the day before, because it gets much better over night. Devour with a spoon in the kitchen straight out of the pot when no one is looking.

Fifth
And if you need something to listen to while you are chopping and sautéing, this post is replete with the best music. I’ve been listening to all the clips while I binge read about African Traditional Religion, about which you would probably think I know plenty, but you would be wrong. Vague childhood jumbled impressions does not actual knowledge make. All my reading, though, is helping me to get a grip—like I am beginning to understand my own emotional and spiritual furniture better and why it is arranged the way it is. Call it a journey of self discovery and back away slowly if you like.

Sixth
The birthday person just came in and announced that she would ‘unload the dishwasher and uncover the living room furniture but that’s all,’ because of it being the first installment of the birthday. ‘Fine,’ I said, because I am too weakened by the sheer force of her will to argue with her. ‘Then we’ll go buy a cake,’ she said.

Gosh, I hope when I am truly old the rest of the children don’t foist me on her, because she will manage me within an inch of my life. If I don’t figure out who I am and what I want now, I may never circle by this opportunity again.

Seventh
Fortunately, she can’t follow me into my online sanctuary, at least for now. It may be her birthday, but I’m the one that received the coolest present in the cyber world. On Wednesday, as I groped my way to facebook messenger, which is where I can expect to find interesting and terrible blogging fodder curated for me by Matt, who is up for hours it seems, before I ever see the breaking dawn, I discovered the bright shiny thrill that Challies had linked me in his A La Cart for a second time. Once might have been a mistake, but twice? That’s incredible. If you are looking for me any time soon, just look up where I’m still floating around in a cloud of exultation, tethered to earth only by the loud shouting of my child below.

Go check out more takes!