Birthdays

Rem woke yesterday morning with a sense of purpose and importance, arriving as he did, to the grown up world of three. He presented the rest of the family with an evening of much needed amusement as he exclaimed with joy and appreciation at each dollar item his sisters had chosen for him from the bins at Target. He entertained us by singing one of his Kindermusik favorites, “Bumping Up and Down in my Little Red Wagon” as he relaxed in said wagon sent from Slidell wearing a plush robe and doing his best Hugh Heffner impersonation as each of us took turns taking him from room to room in the house. The cake he fantasized over for weeks met his expectations and he proudly pointed to the worms he made that sat curled in the dirt cake bearing a remarkable resemblance to the dead worms in the driveway that he suggested we use as models for the marzipan.


Rem’s savory birthday moments played alongside my vivid memories of that sunny day in May three years or a moment ago. Passed, unaware from sister to sister and grandmother to grandfather, back to father and again to mother, that little thing, folding in on himself and with a head full of dark hair, sleepily passed the first hours of life in the unabashed glow of a mother’s high. Those early minutes, as full as a Pollack painting and as equally difficult to label, indelibly pressed themselves into the limitless memory of my motherhood.

The more birthdays my children celebrate the more apparent it becomes to me that while parties and presents may be special to the celebrant, birthdays truly belong to parents. Whether carefully planned or surprisingly spontaneous, the consequential moment of birth forever etches into each parent an expression of the best of them together.

We travel from those moments, parents do, quickly, whether we want to or not. We travel in an out of busy schedules, trying parenting moments and the frustrations of unchartered waters. We race through precious family snapshots as we sing at the piano, hover around board games, jump from rocks in the frigid pools of mountain streams, celebrate triumphant bike rides. The quiet embraces as limbs grow longer than can be contained feel as fleeting as when those unwieldy limbs were swaddled in a baby blanket. Mothers, though always amazed at the speed of life, the passing of time, record life meticulously. I remember being awed as women easily recalled the births of their children, an anecdote brought to mind in the presence of a new born. My grandmother, while holding my babies, spoke of the births of her children as though they had just happened. Even friends whose children were older than me, recalled the moments with unusually fresh details. I understand, now, how present those memories are in the fabric of ourselves, wrapped about us no matter how far from those days we venture.

I am at the other end of the birthday reverie in early January of every year. I never can recall the exact time I was born but I know it was in the morning and when the phone rings I smile, knowing that my parents waited until that time, my actual birth moment, to call me. I thank them for having me but only they can relive my introduction to the world. Although I was fourth, they reminisce with alacrity and, if I ask, Mom will tell me which bed jacket she wore, what antics Dad played out to the oblivious baby and who came to see me in the hospital.

Birthdays belong to parents. We can stage dramatic parties to try to reciprocate the unbridled joy our children give to us or as they grow and take control, we happily turn our house over to large gatherings of girls for the night. But as parents, we claim forever, the source of those celebrations.

Three, it's a Magic Number

Yes, I've borrowed a phrase from Blind Melon's version of the School House Rock song that sometimes falls into the play list of lullabies I sing to Rem and used to be a dance number with the girls.  Before Lise came along, Craig and I often eyed each other over the bobbing head of blond curls dancing between us to smile knowingly as we sang, "a man and a woman had a little baby, there were three in the family, and it's a magic number". Later, Craig would walk in the door at the end of a rainy day to find his three girls still in pajamas, dancing and shouting, "Three, six, nine.  Twelve, fifteen eighteen..." And three, again, achieved significance in our family when Rem came along.  Craig attributes the birth of our third child with the fall of our parental empire.

"We knew victory," he explains, "when we battled in man to man combat. But," he laments," now that we have to resort to a zone defense under attack we are consistently defeated."

I do know that our children have shown us that we possess an incredible capacity for love.  They may not come wrapped and bedecked in ribbons but they will be my favorite gifts on Sunday, gifts that keep on giving as they take their place in the world.  Already, I see their magic spreading beyond the boundaries of our home leaving trails of pixie dust in their wake.  Luckily, the children also keep me grounded.

Rem approaches three (that number again) with an abundance of precociousness and dramatic flare. Opinionated (to the extreme) and stubborn (also to the extreme), Rem lives a one-man show as he wrestles in a constant tug-of-war between babyhood and childhood. He doesn't quite fit into his over sized emotions resulting in bouts of hilarity and uncontrollable laughter as well as bouts of anger and inconsolable sobbing. The two preceding personalities of my intimate acquaintance warned me of Rem's impending actions to keep me from romanticizing my role and effectiveness as mother: parental pauses.

Miren, once she first strung more than two words together, never stopped talking.  She continues to hone this skill only now, when she pauses, she sings.  Her toddler days were filled with unceasing questions, comments and stories with an uncanny ability, amidst the unrelenting chatter, to absorb everything around her. Each interaction left her with an intense hunger for more.

Miren's constant conversation proved a nice diversion that helped pass the time on long rides without other adults.  We wandered from subject to subject as we drove along familiar roads to visit family while Lise slept as long as the car stayed in motion. One trip to Atlanta found us talking about the story of Moses. I continued past the story of the baby in the reeds and into the story of the exodus.  Miren stopped me in mid-sentence, demanding an explanation of slavery. Carefully, I supplied her with the basics that I thought appropriate for a three year-old: forcing people to do work without pay and without choice, telling people where they could live, what they could eat, etc.

"Wow," Miren sighed, soaking it all in.  I think I felt proud of myself and of her in that brief sigh until she announced that she was a slave.  After a long parental pause I responded.

"No," I emphasized deflated. "You are not a slave."

"You make me do things I don't want to do. You make me work. You tell me what I can eat."

"What you do has nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with being part of a family. Everyone in a family works to keep the family running.  You're lucky to be able to be a part of a family."

Miren didn't answer.  The car slowed in Atlanta traffic and I put in a CD for Lise.
"I'm a slave," Miren snapped just loud enough for me to hear before singing happily along to the music.

Lise, a realist from birth developed the art of dead pan delivery by age two. We sat in our Kindermusik circle and watched Anne demonstrate how to turn the socks we brought from home for the activity into ducks. Soon, little quacking ducks joined Anne's but Lise refused to slip her hand into her sock.

"It's not a duck," she said when I asked her to try to make a quacking motion with her hands. "I don't want a sock on my hand." I slipped my hand into the sock and quacked along with the others.

When the activity ended Lise looked at the group.  "Those weren't ducks," she admonished. "You just had socks on your hands."

I also belonged to a playgroup in those days where mothers gathered on park benches for some essential adult contact while toddlers swarmed around the playground equipment and babies bounced from lap to lap. Lise, her face flushed from running, leaned against me between two other mothers and drank from a water bottle.  One of the women bemoaned the laborious job of mothering, the constant work that she struggled to get through each day that ended only to begin all over again.  The other woman concurred, wishing that she could have two minutes to herself on any given day. Lise looked up at both of the women and licked the water droplets that dribbled on her lips. "How hard can it be?" she asked, handing me the water bottle.  "All you do is sit around reading books all day."  I avoided the eyes of the two women as another of my long parental pauses ensued and watched Lise run across the playground to join her friends.

Rem is not as direct.  He uses a backdoor approach to cast his critical eye on my parenting abilities. He bides his time carefully and then pounces. The occasional quiet evening at home, our own pleasant, tranquil domestic scene, evokes a contentedness that outlasts the brevity of the moment. Smug in this rare, relaxed moment of togetherness that actually matches the image of family life I keep in my head, I sit savoring the sweet picture the children make in the warm glow of the living room.

Rem pushes a dump truck amid a pile of wooden blocks on the living room floor to simulate a demolition site. He looks thoughtfully my way and I move towards him to participate in his play. He decides to disrupt the happy mood with yet another reference to his other, more colorful family. He invites me to visit him at his black house where he realizes he'd rather be. He misses his blue mom. He loves her so much that he might just have to go back to his black house to live.

I smile with inappropriate jealousy and thank him. We’ve already been subjected to a host of adventures that Rem shares with his other, more colorful family. Rem interrupted stories of soccer and school at the dinner table to share his own stories of camping with his blue mom, black dad and green brother. Rem failed to remember any of the various activities he and I participated in together and instead, spun tall tales of adventures and devotion to the apparently more deserving relatives.

Over spaghetti, Rem spoke with relish of an airplane trip that ended with his green brother saving the day (he loves the term, “saved the day”) and safely landing his family in the driveway. “My brother loves to fly,” he announced, beaming with pride for his green brother, Poddah.  Rem’s colorful family is constantly being thrown in our faces. They are more perfect than we can imagine and involved in everything that we have done only in better, more successful, more exciting ways.


“I guess my black house is too far away to go now,” Rem laments as I later lead him to bed in the house that he shares with us. He pauses in the doorway to his bedroom, disappointment filling his face.

“Mommy will read books,” I offer cheerily.

“My blue mom has the best books,” Rem answers, reconciled to a lesser bedtime routine due to the inadequate selection of books. I hoped it would end there but it was not to be so. My endearing son sighed heavily when I began to sing our ritual songs. It seems that Poddah sings all of the songs I know better than I can and has a repertoire that far surpasses mine. The evening ended with Rem wishing again that he was at his black house sleeping in his red bunk bed with Poddah.  My parental pause lingered while I listened to the heavy breathing of a sleeping child beside me.

"Pack your bags," I shamelessly told him (and shamefully now recall) after a long tale about the swimming  pool at his other house that has made swimming lessons at the pool in our park unnecessary this summer. I didn't wait for the end of the story about the special kid-sized diving board that Poddah used to teach him to dive but told him to pack his bags and I'd take him to his other house.

"No," he answered, wide-eyed and speculative.  "I like living here. I think I'll stay with this family."  Long parental smile.