have an hour to eat, to breathe, to discover that someone put the bag of malted-milk balls in the dishwasher and then turned it to the pots-and-pans cycle.
—The most important thing to remember about the spacing of your children is not contained in any book. It is that the older one should have a birthday before the younger one. Otherwise you will hear the sentence “But when is it
my
birthday?” spoken in a whine for three or four months on end.
—Everything positive you have ever taught your child will evaporate when the gifts are opened. And I’m not talking about when they are opened at his own party, when he will only remove clothing from the box and toss it over his shoulder. All year long you have been talking about sharing, about waiting your turn, and about not going berserk in public, and suddenly, at another person’s birthday party, the child is confronted by an enormous pile of presents, none of which are for him. A chain of ganglia within his little slicked-down head fire off, and he shrieks, “I want them ALL.” He is carried into another room, where he is promised gifts on his own birthday if he calms down. No way.
I would like to blame my mother for not teaching me these things, but she did not know them. When she was raising five children there were no piñatas, no clowns. Birthday parties were easy. If your child’s birthday fell during the school year, you packed two dozen cupcakes in a box and took them to school, where the child was serenaded with the kid version of “Happy Birthday” at recess. “You look like a monkey/And you smell like one too,” everyone sang, breathless with the hilarityof the lyrics; then they ate the icing off the cupcakes and went back to fractions. If your child’s birthday fell during the summer, you had a family barbeque at which the only permissible gifts were underwear, socks, or a new missal. My birthday happens to be in July; I always had a sparkler in my cake instead of candles, which was considered the height of sophistication at that time.
Now those wonderful folks who brought you designer sneakers, baby vegetables, and insider trading are giving children’s birthday parties, and no one gives missals as gifts. One clown told me, his face grim beneath his painted-on happy face, that he had performed at a party at which the children booed his balloon animals. (I hope all such children will someday be tried as adults rather than juveniles, and given life without parole in the fifth grade.) My own children have not gone to enough parties to get uppity over even the most pathetic balloon animals, but the elder one is pushing it. He wants dinosaurs on his cake. “Not brontosauruses,” he says, knowing that I’ll opt for the easy outline. “Styracasauruses.” Last year he wanted helicopters. At midnight my husband found me leaning over an unmarked expanse of white icing with a tube of blue goo in one hand and an old copy of
Newsweek
with a fairly clear helicopter photograph propped up against a mixing bowl. “I think you’re losing it,” he said. What did he know? No one ever told his analyst that his father never made him a birthday cake. All he has to do is beat the piñata into submission.
I’m in charge of the cake. It was chocolate. It had Nestlé’s Quik in it. (There’s a confession for you.) It had buttercream icing. I always make the cake. I feel like it puts me in touch with the elemental aspects of motherhood: that is, I get to lick the bowl. All my childhood, all I ever thought on the day before my birthday was “Someday I will be old enough to make my own cakes and to lick the bowl all by myself.” Of course, what I really meant was “Someday I will be old enough to make myown cakes and eat all the batter instead of pouring it into the pan.” Unfortunately I reckoned without the children. The older child helped me make the cake for the younger one. At one point, in violation of decent human standards, I found myself wrestling
—The most important thing to remember about the spacing of your children is not contained in any book. It is that the older one should have a birthday before the younger one. Otherwise you will hear the sentence “But when is it
my
birthday?” spoken in a whine for three or four months on end.
—Everything positive you have ever taught your child will evaporate when the gifts are opened. And I’m not talking about when they are opened at his own party, when he will only remove clothing from the box and toss it over his shoulder. All year long you have been talking about sharing, about waiting your turn, and about not going berserk in public, and suddenly, at another person’s birthday party, the child is confronted by an enormous pile of presents, none of which are for him. A chain of ganglia within his little slicked-down head fire off, and he shrieks, “I want them ALL.” He is carried into another room, where he is promised gifts on his own birthday if he calms down. No way.
I would like to blame my mother for not teaching me these things, but she did not know them. When she was raising five children there were no piñatas, no clowns. Birthday parties were easy. If your child’s birthday fell during the school year, you packed two dozen cupcakes in a box and took them to school, where the child was serenaded with the kid version of “Happy Birthday” at recess. “You look like a monkey/And you smell like one too,” everyone sang, breathless with the hilarityof the lyrics; then they ate the icing off the cupcakes and went back to fractions. If your child’s birthday fell during the summer, you had a family barbeque at which the only permissible gifts were underwear, socks, or a new missal. My birthday happens to be in July; I always had a sparkler in my cake instead of candles, which was considered the height of sophistication at that time.
Now those wonderful folks who brought you designer sneakers, baby vegetables, and insider trading are giving children’s birthday parties, and no one gives missals as gifts. One clown told me, his face grim beneath his painted-on happy face, that he had performed at a party at which the children booed his balloon animals. (I hope all such children will someday be tried as adults rather than juveniles, and given life without parole in the fifth grade.) My own children have not gone to enough parties to get uppity over even the most pathetic balloon animals, but the elder one is pushing it. He wants dinosaurs on his cake. “Not brontosauruses,” he says, knowing that I’ll opt for the easy outline. “Styracasauruses.” Last year he wanted helicopters. At midnight my husband found me leaning over an unmarked expanse of white icing with a tube of blue goo in one hand and an old copy of
Newsweek
with a fairly clear helicopter photograph propped up against a mixing bowl. “I think you’re losing it,” he said. What did he know? No one ever told his analyst that his father never made him a birthday cake. All he has to do is beat the piñata into submission.
I’m in charge of the cake. It was chocolate. It had Nestlé’s Quik in it. (There’s a confession for you.) It had buttercream icing. I always make the cake. I feel like it puts me in touch with the elemental aspects of motherhood: that is, I get to lick the bowl. All my childhood, all I ever thought on the day before my birthday was “Someday I will be old enough to make my own cakes and to lick the bowl all by myself.” Of course, what I really meant was “Someday I will be old enough to make myown cakes and eat all the batter instead of pouring it into the pan.” Unfortunately I reckoned without the children. The older child helped me make the cake for the younger one. At one point, in violation of decent human standards, I found myself wrestling
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