Color Me Bad

I don't know if the confusion is because my husband is French or because he is older than I am, but this whole birthday party planning thing has blown his mind.  The lengths we have gone to to celebrate the birth of these people with their peers in a way fit for a new millennium-born hurts the brain.  I honestly cannot say when all this happened because other than roller skating and bowling parties, there was not much else, unless a trip to McDonald's or the local ice cream parlor was your thing, for a child of the 70s to do to celebrate his or her birthday.  The cake was almost always made at home and looked like all the cakes at that time--lopsided, licked, amateurish (except for one friend whose mother was a cake decorator and her cakes looked like heaven).  The gifts were straight from the Mattel catalog and wrapped with little attention or care.  There was pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, 2 liter Cokes, Sprite, and orange or grape soda, and bowls of junk food to choke a horse.  I recall lots of running around and games like Simon Sez, musical chairs, and too much balloon popping, none helium filled.  Basically, birthday parties were chaos, cost was minimal, sugar was plentiful, and fun was guaranteed to be a bit Lord of Flies meets Super Friends.  It didn't really involve the adults who were there just to keep everyone in the ring.

My husband recalls his birthdays celebrated with family.  A favorite meal, a lovely cake or tarte.  If there were others involved, there was lots of outdoor activity, enjoying nature and its beauty.  Kids wore nice clothes and uncomfortable shoes.  They were quiet, elegant affairs.  Yeah, so...the French do everything in a more sophisticated way.  Whatevs.

Our six year old peanut had us choose between a gambling establishment for littles and tweens, silly games and twee rides, jumping parlors and castles, roller skating (She's a novice and my anxiety can't take her and all her friends falling all over the rink.), and this adorable pottery painting place.  With foresight that we could never have known was brilliant until the moment our wee one's toe was crushed, leaving her unable to participate in physical activities, we opted for pottery painting at Color Me Mine.  We invited all the girls from her class and two other pals who do not go to school with her and pre-ordered the Party Animal package.

The Party Animal package offered a choice of five ceramic animals to paint--a unicorn, a dragon, a kitten, a puppy, and a dolphin.  With the party scheduled for just an hour and a 1/2, I figured painting, cupcakes, singing, balloons, done.  Ten minutes after all the girls were given their animals to paint, the first was finished.  Our staff host, not missing a beat, handed out paper bags to color and design.  These bags would be the packaging for the finished products, the carrying cases for the work that we, my husband and I (probably just I), would deliver once the pieces had been fired and collected.

The Party Animal package was also an apt title for our working performance art piece because once these girls were set free from their own parental confines and rules, they let it loose!  No matter that we were in an establishment with other people trying to get their creativity on painting plates and cups and ceramic tchtotchkes that said LOVE or were shaped like Winnie the Pooh, these animals were here to party!  We served carrots and strawberries and pretzels, had juice boxes and water, and at the end of the fete we all sang "happy birthday" to my daughter standing before a line of mini-cupcakes (vanilla with vanilla frosting) decorated with candles that spelled out "happy birthday." (How apropos.)

The goodie bags I'd put together a few days earlier had fun craft stuffs, stickers, sidewalk chalk, and just one piece of candy (I'm not crazy about sending kids off into the world hopped up on sugary BS but I have no problem searching for grape soda if my oldest says she wants to taste it.  Go figure.  Hypocrisies of parenting.)  Our baby said that her special day, celebrated one month after her actual birthday because of our Spring Break travel, was the best day ever.  She has lots of those.  Best days ever.  My work is done.

...and yet.  It sits funny with me this way of celebrating a birthday.  True, it was my choice to have the party outside of my home, to turn it into an event, to pay someone else to do what I was unable or unwilling to do.  I have had many birthday parties in the house and all of them involved projects.  There was a shoe decorating party, tie-dye t-shirt party, princess party with costumes and crown decorating.  It has been incredibly difficult for me to let go of the reins and let someone else take over and not because I am a control freak (or not only because of that), but because I have a hard time giving myself permission to not be everything at all times to my children.  To everyone really.  When I am tired, when I say I am spent, when I say I can't go on, can't do it, I still do.  When I say no about something, I try to find a way to surprise a yes.  Letting someone else run the party, handle the details and the minutia, put out the fires, and clean up the mess means my role has to change.  It means that I cannot hide in the rush of the activity but have to stand stock in the center of it all and just be.

There are so many parties, birthday and other celebrations that have so much fanfare.  I recall fabulous birthday parties for the classmates of my girls in Barbados where there was swimming and grilling and clowns and music and open bar and balloons and face painting and jumping castles and costume changes and the presentation of the celebrated as king or queen for a day.  It was like a circus or carnival.  And now back in the States, there are trips to all sorts of places set up for kids' enjoyment--skating and jumping and driving and water sports and painting, creating, dressing up.  Parents spare no expense in honoring the arrival of their little ones to the world.  But I miss the chaos of a 70s birthday party, the accidentally marvelous moments as opposed to the orchestrated, manufactured fun.  I miss the innocence and the surprise of celebration, the wonder of it all.

All the girl babies from the party will have a little something to remind them of their time celebrating Virginie's birthday, at least for as long as their parents choose to keep it.  Our girls will add them to the rows of other memorabilia from their childhood thus far and they will rest with the satisfaction that we showed them how much we love them by feting them so marvelously.  But really, the part I like best about the girls' birthdays is when I can recount for them the days they were born.  They love to hear the small details, a super hot day with melting pavement and hours wrapped in blankets in the cold room for Lily and a rainy afternoon when I stared out the picture window of my hospital room knowing she was soon to arrive for Virginie.  They know these parties with so many celebrants will not last much longer.  They have been told that age 10 is our cut off and that we prefer smaller events with just special friends to massive, all out galas.

I'm not crazy about celebrating like that, fearful that using money and gifts and grand events to show how I love them diminishes the greater truth.  I want them to feel honored by how we love one another, to know it no matter what I have to give or don't. I want the truth to be that we love each other, celebrate each other, honor each other, care for each other, and will show it with our feelings, our hearts, and our actions.  I don't want to buy their happiness or let them think they are owed such extravagance at every milestone, achievement, or event.  It can't be about the money.  It's purpose and it's value already threatens our daily existence.  It's about the love.  I can dole that out and sprinkle it everywhere, everyday.  And sometimes it has to be enough even on the special days.  

The painted dolphin and dragon sit on the book shelf in the girls' room.  They love them and had a great time at the party.  Right before bed, Virginie said in the sleepiest voice, "I know you and Papa and Lily love me because you tell me every day.  But also thank you for letting me have this party.  It was the best day ever."  And then I don't feel so bad.


(c)  Copyright 2015.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.

Winter birthday wishes

January 2nd usually marked the return to normalcy or a soft landing like the movie stuntmen made onto that huge pillow at the end of the holiday circus.  Rather the celebration of the Christ child and  the baby new year than me.  While I didn't want to be forgotten completely, I was happy to get back to life as we knew it with a tiny secret tucked behind my ear, kissed there by the aliens who, in the dead of night, have always given me promises of a good future, not just resolutions but truths to which I was completely committed.  I still believe in the probability of great achievement even in the face of total chaos and seemingly impossible obstacles.  Though I have never been good at the holidays, what with all the celebrating and wide opened hearts on display, the arrival of the girls brought a chance for me to live them with different eyes, a more gracious heart, and a sense of wonder and hope.

Every year since I can remember, the arrival of the "winter holidays" has brought a little bit of tension, a little bit of the blues, and an eerie calm like the dead quiet of the first inches of a massive Nor'easter falling heavily on whichever sleeping town or block I was living.  It feels somewhere between a whisper and the ringing in the air after a scream.  I can hear my breathing.  Sometimes I can see my breath.  Always I am aware that I am alive even if I can't move from the cold or the fear, and am fully aware of my surroundings even if I want to run.  Always I feel awkwardly alone even when surrounded by crowds of family and friends.  Alone but not quite lonely.  Here, but not quite here.  I can't be lonely with the two people standing on my neck, whispering in my ear, chatterbugging to my face.  Maybe that's why they came to me.  To connect me to place, pry open my wintered heart.

2013 was hardly different from previous years--family ups and downs, community involvement, extracurriculars, doctors' visits, health checks and scares and reassurances, travel, work, parenting, craziness.  I don't think I have counted my "best or worst" years since I was a child when the best or the worst was defined by gifts I received or didn't, skills I acquired or didn't, loves found or lost.  Now, every year starts off full of promise, more than 1/2 full with the days firmly on one side, ahead of me.  Every year I know that I will peel back the onion to find some other truth about myself, my soul's journey, my desire, and my fulfillment.  I make no promises other than to try to remain open to whatever comes, to avoid (or try not to bring it all the way to insane clown posse meltdown) the panicked shut down when the world delivers what I expected but for which I had somehow been poorly prepared.  At the beginning of every year I have promised myself, "This is the year for me.  This is the year I will find the path, stay on it, actualize."  I say this every year.  I believe it every time.  I don't write the directions, don't set the map in stone and quickly wander from the path...or perhaps discover the one worn in the ground, not paved.

I followed the breadcrumbs back to a language I'd almost forgotten I spoke.  Many speak it more eloquently, some with grace and agility, others flexibility, but when I speak to them too, they understand.  In 2013 I returned to dance. When I was a girl who hated her voice and was sure no one cared what I might have to say, there was dance.  When I needed to free myself from the torment of the bad years and celebrate the joys of the good, there was dance.  When I had a secret to keep, something that I needed to protect, I could dance around it, seal it in.  And then I stopped, quit moving altogether, froze, and then allowed myself to believe that another form of exercise, maybe the machines at the gym, maybe an abs class, could suffice.  They couldn't.  Not yoga, even with all the breath and meditating and connection to the divine, warmed my soul.  It was dance that first connected me to my own life force.  Reclaiming it was so helpful to everything in my life. 

When I was a little girl, my mother asked for the same things for her birthday, Christmas, and Mother's Day.  Peace and quiet and for everyone to get along.  We thought that was the craziest request on earth.  "That's all she wanted?" I'd wonder.  What a waste of a rub of the lamp.  You can have anything three little cherubs and a workaholic husband can offer!  I get it now.  As I reanimate the creative back into my life, each day becomes mine to do with it what I will.  I can ease myself out of the tepid pool of suburban monotony and feel passion burning me up again.  I want that more than I want anything else.

I have, and have admitted, struggling with the daily expectations of raising children and running a household.  I want to do them both well.  Hell, I want to do everything well, but I believe that I bring more to everything in my life with the creative spirit and energy weaving throughout.  At the start of every year, I remind myself of this.  Somewhere along the way the priorities shift and I find myself making excuses, putting off making art, writing, dancing, and allow the minutiae of parenting and being married to be more important.  I'm going to do better this year.  At least I am going to try.

My husband was gone for Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years and my birthday.  He has been for nearly every one of these holidays since we've been together.  I have stopped allowing myself to suffer this and surely cannot let his absence during these days define the entire year.  Or me.  Or my life.  I don't want to be defined by absence or by a "lack of."  But when he returns and asks what I want for all the holidays I missed, it's not a necklace, a scarf, socks, or new boots that I am after.  It is some of that quiet, some of that peace, some of the space where I can create or believe myself able again.  It is solitude and my own communion with the end of the year and the start of my new one.


My birthday starts up the music, begins the lightly playing song that guides me through the year.  It is wintry and quiet and moody and grey and cloudy followed by bursts of sun in a cerulean blue sky, cold as hell frozen over, that thaws into a promising spring.  I've bundled up into it and survived the shortest day of the year and the longest parade of holiday celebrations.  And on this day, I danced and wrote and drew a little sketch.  Running head first, out the window, to the stunt man's pillow down below.  To the new year.  Mine.



(c) Copyright 2014.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.