Superhero birthday

[I start this entry with the note that I realize that future birthday parties will be about Noah. But this birthday party, the first, is more about Carl and I, because Noah could not care two beans about it. And neither of us are birthday party people - we tend to hide on our respective birthdays, in fact. But I talked Carl into a party for two reasons. One was to get in the habit of having birthday parties, because Noah will surely want them and we may as well start to deal with that cultural reality. And the second was to have a kids' birthday party for me, to get it out of my system, so that I don't subconsciously then try to hijack every party from here on in. It's a nice theory, anyway; we'll see what happens.] 

Tomorrow instead of the simple and tasteful affair I had originally envisioned (my pick: champagne brunch with trendy cupcakes; Lyria’s pick: carrot cake and tree planting; system kids’ pick – pretty much, just keep reading ), my house will be transformed into a riot of Superman paraphenalia ($45 worth in fact) and I will pick up a grocery store Superman cake – you KNOW the kind, the white sugar icing kind with the red dye around the outside – and each attendee will take home a Superman lunch bag complete with Thermos because they had them on sale at the grocery store. 

And I have rather way too much food and chips and pop and oh! my! god! if the Waldorf school ever catches wind of this we will be blacklisted forever.

And here’s the best. The next weekend we will do it all over again ’cause Carl’s family had to switch weekends.  So it’s TWO sugarspun weekends!

These aren’t even the values I want to instill in Noah, the grocery store theme cake and the plastic banners and the ultra traditional birthday party. At least I don’t think so.

And yet, although this may be blatantly self-justifying, about a year and a half ago when Carl had moved to Ottawa and I was still in the process of trying to move there, we attended the first birthday for his cousin’s son.

It was really hard to be there, because our daughter not. 

And at that party I ended up wandering around with the children rather than hanging with the adults, and I listened at some length while two of the older kids tried to explain over and over to the younger kids what was going to happen: no, NO, NO.  FIRST he has to wear a hat and THEN you sing happy birthday and THEN he blows out the candles and THEN you can have cake. (Said over the – yes- grocery store white cake, which was perilously close to being manhandled by several wandering toddlers). 

And this birthday wisdom of the ages was being passed from child to child with the solemnity you might give to concerns of the eternal soul. 

And I had this Zen moment where I realized that a lot of the bargaining that had been going on in my head - about why I was selected by the universe to experience yet more grief and sorrow and unbearable loss – was based on rules that had just about the same weight as FIRST you sing happy birthday and THEN you eat the cake. (I didn’t smoke, drink, or eat unripened cheeses while pregnant! Surely that counted for something!)

And it wasn’t some revelation that those rules are wrong and that you should let it all go.  

It was the revelation that these children would now be dreadfully sad if they didn’t get their own cakes in their turn, and their sadness would be true sadnesses even if the cake itself is so much petroleum product and trans-fat. And if their parents really did convince them that the vegan zucchini cake with whole wheat flour was really what they wanted, still the other children around them would ask them in that combination of innocence and cruelty why their cake was so weird. Because the birthday is the birthday, in our culture. It just is.

And that I was dreadfully and truly sad that in the modern world of What to Expect When You’re Expecting and so many medical miracles that my daughter died, and that even if thousands and thousands of children die in the world every day I still never expected it to be mine. First you have a full-term pregnancy; then you have a healthy baby.  And that even if I could some day come to terms with that, I would still never be the person I had been before that happened and that the gulf between me and those people who haven’t been through that or something similar would always be there, not as acutely as it was at that particular event, but still. A simple kid’s birthday party would never be the same for me again. (And I have to say that even doing Noah’s party carries a bit of that; as much as I want his birthday to be simply joyful for him, and I hope we can do that in the future, in me it hits that loss, still.)

And that is simply how it is.

And so it is that when I saw the Superman-themed birthday cake in the bakery fridge at Dominion I knew that I had to have it for Noah (although I still held onto the cupcake dream for a while, even while buying Superman plates and napkins and banners). 

Because that really is it in a nutshell isn’t it: the grocery store cake with the invincible bullet-proof man on it.

Tomorrow I will give Noah a piece of that artery clogging obesity promoting sugar and chemical laden cake and pray with all my power and will that he enjoys many, many more birthdays with cakes of ANY kind. 

And there will be MUCH salubrious celebration of the incredible year we have had with him.

And still a sadness that Emily will not be there.

But NO Kryptonite!