Happy Ben's Birthday (to Me)

I'm not quite sure how this happened, but tomorrow, our firstborn child, Ben, will turn 35. It sounds like a cliche, but I don't know where the time has gone. It doesn't seem possible that 35 years have passed since I held that baby in my arms.

If you had asked me on this day in 1986 to imagine what my life would be like in 2021, I would have gotten a lot of things wrong. 

I definitely would not have predicted we'd still be living in the same small town in Western New York--we thought for sure we were just passing through--but 35 years later, here we are. I might have guessed I'd be retired, but I could never have known then how much I would love my work or that I'd get to stay in the English department for another 34 years. I would have hoped baby #1 would have siblings, but I could not have come close to imagining the wonder of three becoming five, as we added another son and daughter. Or the joy of watching our kids marry, turning our five into eight. Or the way little number nine would capture our hearts.

I think my 26-year-old self would have guessed my 61-year-old self would feel more settled and more sure of herself than I do. She would have thought I'd have more answers than questions by now, that the ground would feel more stable beneath my feet than it does. She would have guessed that as a grandmother, I'd feel older and wiser than I do. But, at the same time, she could not have known how rich and full life would turn out to be--how much better it's been than anything she could have imagined. 

I think of that girl from time to time. I try to remember who she was and what she hoped for. I am thinking about her today when she was less than 24 hours away from the beginning of one of the greatest adventures of her life: being a mom.

The days my kids were born are three of the happiest, best days of my life. Over the past 35 years, I've baked a lot of birthday cakes and bought a lot of gifts for those three kids. As we celebrated each child, year after year, a little part of me felt as though it was my celebration, too. So even though my kids are all grown up and aren't usually home on their birthdays anymore, I still kick my heels up a little bit and throw some confetti around on November 19th, June 30th, and April 10th. 

This year, my firstborn will spend his birthday, as he so often does, in the high school auditorium. Tomorrow night he will oversee the opening night performance of the first middle school musical since the fall of 2019--just a few months before COVID-19 changed all of our lives. If all goes well, and there are no last-minute quarantines, Ben will have the happiest of birthdays. His heart will be full, and so will mine. If you see him, wish him a happy 35th birthday--and while you're at it, throw a little confetti my way, too!

Birthdays

"This is how it is with your children, she thought. You hold all the versions of them there ever were simultaneously in your heart." --Sue Miller

The weekend before last, all three of our kids were home. The two from out of town arrived by surprise  Friday night. They had come to help us celebrate our birthdays. The surprise visit involved a lot of planning and texting (and lying), but they pulled it off. We were completely unsuspecting and thoroughly surprised. It was the perfect present: we laughed and talked and ate and played games. And what Sue Miller's character says in the above quote was so true. As we sat around the table at the restaurant or in the dining room playing cards, I'd watch these grown-up kids of mine signing credit card slips, giving advice about grad school and teaching, and sharing plans for the end-of-student-teaching gifts, and I would also see an eight-year-old perched on a counter stool making an elaborate cardboard-paper-glitter present, a seven-year-old playing school with his brother and all the stuffed animals, and a six-year-old saving money in a little safe in the corner of his bedroom. It happens all the time--you see a twinkle in an eye, a stubborn look on a face, a familiar habit or gesture, and in that instant, the past telescopes itself and you see all the versions of themselves your children have ever been. Today at 4:33, my oldest child will turn twenty-seven years old, and for the first time, my parenting years will outnumber my non-parenting years. For me, birthdays have always been a time for looking back, for remembering each age and stage, but lately they have also become a time for looking ahead, for imagining all the versions of my kids that are yet to be.

Happy Birthday, Ben!

It's November!

It's November, and that means it's time for turtlenecks and warm socks and flannel sheets, three of my favorite things. In our family, November also means birthdays--three of them. One of the first things Steve and I discovered about each other during my freshman year at Westminster was that we shared a birthday. It was an odd coincidence that maybe helped us together at first. And it was kind of fun when we were dating, but later on it started to feel a little less fun. You know how it is when you're a kid: your birthday is your special day. There's a present on your bedside table when you wake up, you get to take cupcakes to school, there are birthday cards in the mail when you get home, your mom makes your favorite dinner, and then there are more presents and more cake. For that one day in the year, you are celebrated. Granted, some of the birthday hoopla wanes with age, but your birthday is still your own special day every year--except when you share it with your husband. You might think a double birthday would mean double the celebration, but in our case, the two kind of cancelled each other out. Think about it: Who makes the cake? Who hangs balloons and streamers? Who plans a special dinner? It was hard for the kids, too, at least when they were younger--there was no parent to help them get ready for the other parent's birthday. So our joint-birthday always ended up feeling a little more like an anniversary. Fortunately, our first child joined our November birthday club. For a while, we thought he might arrive right on our birthday, but he took his time and claimed his very own special day. So although Steve and I don't usually eat cake on our birthday, we happily share Ben's a few days later. Over the years, I've slowly gotten used to sharing my birthday. In fact, sharing a birthday, especially a November birthday, seems to suit Steve and me. November, with its grays and browns and leftover yellows, is a subdued, understated month--tucked in there between bold, golden October and merry, red-and-green December. Steve and I, with our November-ish personalities, fit right in. I'm not sure how we'll celebrate our birthday this year--something quiet and subdued no doubt--but we'll do it together as we have for more than thirty years. And these days, I wouldn't want it any other way.

Heavenly Hash Cake

Although we only spent a couple of years in Muncie, Indiana, we picked up a lot of things in that little community that we've carried with us ever since. It was there I learned to knit. There I fell in love with Little Kiddles. There we learned about candy strings. And it was there my mom acquired her recipe for heavenly hash cake.  For those of you who have never had it, heavenly hash is a fudgy chocolate cake topped with a layer of marshmallow cream and then with creamy chocolate frosting. It quickly became a family favorite. It was almost always my sister's choice for her "good report card" treat. My mom made it for church picnics, for family reunions, and for the fancy coffee hours my dad used to host for his university students. When there was a pan of heavenly hash cake in our house, all was well. The heavenly hash cake recipe is one of the oldest in my recipe box, and I used to make it fairly often. But then, for some reason, I stopped making it. In fact, until this past week, the last time I made it may well have been for my middle child's 7th birthday. That same dear child just celebrated his 24th birthday. He came home for a visit a few days after his birthday, and the day before he arrived, I found myself pulling out the old recipe to make a belated birthday/4th of July heavenly hash cake.  As I was spreading the thick chocolately batter into the pan, the comforting, familiar smell sent me hurtling back through time and space to the kitchens of my childhood. The next day when the cake was finished and my boy was home, I took my first heavenly bite, and once again, all was well.

Growing Up

Seventeen years ago we were in Florida for spring break, and our youngest child was about to turn four.  But instead of getting ready for a sunny Florida birthday, we found ourselves in the midst of an emotional storm. The problem? Em didn't want to celebrate her birthday. She didn't want a cake, she didn't want presents, and most of all, she didn't want to be four.  One of the books she liked at the time was I Like to Be Little by Charlotte Zolotow, which begins,

"Once there was a little girl.
"What do you want to be when you grow up? her mother asked.
"I just want to stay little right now," she said.
"Why?" said her mother. "It's nice to be grown up. Why do you want to be little?"
"Because I am," said the little girl, "and because when you are little you can do things you can't when you grow up."

In the rest of the book the little girl describes things she can do because she's little that grown-ups don't do (skipping when she's glad, making a house under the dining room table, going barefoot in summertime, eating snow when it first falls). Em had taken all that to heart and had decided she didn't want to get any older.  Another one of her favorite books at the time was The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister, and what finally calmed the storm and eased Em through the transition from three to four was the promise of a rainbow fish birthday cake. Before long she discovered being older meant she could do more tricks on the playground and keep up better with her brothers, and she sailed through the rest of being four, and five, and six . . . and really all the way through being nineteen. Last year around this time, there were echoes of that long ago birthday. Whenever I started to mention her upcoming birthday, she stopped me and said, "I don't want to talk about it."  Once again she was struggling with getting older; she wasn't one bit excited about turning twenty and leaving her teen years behind.  There were no tears or tantrums this time, but there was a bit of sadness in her eyes as her birthday approached.  So now here we are on the eve of her twenty-first birthday; tomorrow my daughter will officially be an adult, a grown-up. I don't really know how she's feeling about it; she's been through a tough week, so her mind has been on other things. But I've been watching her over the past year, and I can see that she's ready. What the little girl in the book didn't yet know is that there are a lot of great things waiting for you when you grow up that you can't do when you're little. And I think that even though Em liked being little, she's going to love being grown up.  Happy 21st birthday, Em!

Daylilies and Brown Cake

When my son Darton turned two, his birthday party featured trucks and "brown" cake--two of his favorite things at the time.  For the centerpiece I piled bright orange daylilies into an orange dump truck that had belonged to my brothers when they were young.  And now, every single year when I see daylilies, I know Darton's birthday is just around the corner.  Since he was born in summer, he was always home on his birthday, even during his college years.  But this year, for the first time ever, he won't be here.  So all week I've been thinking of birthdays past which included lots of breakfasts in bed, chocolate cakes, treasure hunts, egg drops, sports equipment, and parties in the backyard.  This year, instead of baking a cake and hanging crepe paper streamers, I'm putting a card in the mail with a check tucked inside for some new work clothes and a steak dinner.  And I'm counting the days until his next visit home.