Somehow over the years, all these traditions just showed up and took residence in our house. Birthday traditions. Christmas ones. Easter ones. Some came from G’s family, some from mine. Some I made up myself. I don’t know what I was thinking.
All you have to do is do something once. One time. Almost accidentally. And suddenly, the children will tell you that “we’ve always done that.” (Read: we have to do that. No. Correction. Read: youHAVE to keep doing that—this year, next year, forever.)
When the kids were little, every time there was a birthday, we had a visit from the Birthday Cow (G’s fam). The Birthday Cow sneaks into your house in the middle of the night and colors the milk. The color is arbitrary – sometimes red, sometimes green. Yellow milk could make you suspicious; I don’t ever remember finding yellow milk that we actually drank it.
Actually, the house got pretty busy during the night before a birthday. The Balloon Fairy also somehow gets inside and fills the birthday kid’s entire bedroom with balloons. This is also an invention of G’s family. Now I’m wondering if Q and Gigi still get these visits the way we have – every single year. Do you have any idea how long a room full of non-helium balloons can last in a house?
There was the putting up of the paper garlands, and the hanging of the honeycomb birds. And birthday crowns made of paper. The eating out, birthday kid’s choice. The party or family activity, birthday kid’s choice. It was a flipping big deal. (Except for the year when I made Chaz and Cam have their birthday on the same day – I think I was pregnant with Murphy, and didn’t have the courage to face two big deals in ten days.)
And then there were the signs. The signs were not made by mystical creatures with duplicates of our house keys. The signs were made by us. The parents. The very best signs were made by the father, who has hidden inside his record producer soul a graphic artist waiting to get out. He used to be able to do a pretty credible Rat Fink, actually. Lots of surfer art. And he still does great birthday signs – huge funky letters with embellishment. We still have some of them. Somewhere. Or maybe I made the kids take them when they moved out.
My signs were smaller and more simple. Well, G and I both did the little signs. We used the scrap typing/copy paper and we wrote slogans – Gin is GREAT!! Cam is SO COOL!!! Char is DA BOMB (no, we never really wrote that), Murphy is NINE!!!!!! We made dozens of them and stuck them all over the house – they hung from lamps and covered the fridge and flapped over the TV screen.
There were two I always did, always the same. One was the Virtues Sign that always got stuck to the glass window on the dining room hutch – it had a border of vines and leaves, sometimes flowers, sometimes pumpkins – and it was just a list of all the great adjectives appropriate to that kid, each one in a different color.
The other was a design very old for me, something I used to draw in college all the time: a smiling sun, rising over the mountains. The signs were done quickly. The mountains were brown, studded with pine trees and other things. The plain used to be covered with running deer that in later years became horses. And always on the bottom of it, the words: Good Morning (fill in the blank) year old. This sign was always taped to the kids’ bathroom door, so they’d see it first thing.
So here we are now – one more sign, no longer taped to the bathroom door, but plastered all over my computer screen as a surprise for my beloved 26 year old. A new way of delivering a very old and traditional love.
Happy birthday, baby. The passage of the years mystifies me, but you just keep getting better and better and more and more beautiful. It was a great day when you came to us, even though you weren’t a boy after-all. I didn’t even begin to know myself until I began to discover you guys. What a baptism by fire. What a deep thing is love.
A million kisses.
Mom
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