The American Birthday Dream

and my insecurities about turning seven

My oldest son recently turned seven. As a mother to Jacob I’ve found myself in a wild surf of insecurities. He’s well into the developmental leap that many agree happens at age six, and to Mommy, to me, it’s unsettling that his deepening internal life seems so often out of reach. When it comes to Jacob, caring for him, making decisions for him, I am as tossed by waves of emotion as the earliest days of motherhood. When he was my first. My only.

The reality I’m facing, I think, is that of a young mother. If Jacob is only seven, then as a mom I’m also seven. I’m just like him: unable to control urges and desires, full of errant energy with nowhere to devote it, shouldering that nagging fear of failure and not being liked, with a patience level of zero. This is the surf though, so think peaks and valleys. For both of us.

Jacob is a great kid. We have chosen, probably more than a lot parents, to value our kids as workers. For Jacob, this addresses his inner respect and honor reservoir. While he doesn’t realize it’s there, it gets a lot of filling because he works. He does a lot to keep our house running, our garden producing, and any child smaller than him safe. We train him, and then we get to encourage and reward him.          

When his birthday came, it was this truth about Jacob and me, this coming-into-our-own as mother and son, that drove me into an uncertain wave. I wanted, more than anything, for it to be an opportunity to honor him. He’s a worker in our house. He’s worthy of being celebrated, and all the time. But I also felt this pull from the outside. What did he think about his birthday and how he should be celebrated? He didn’t have a lot of expectations, at least not that he could or did communicate, and I found myself fearful of coming up short in his eyes. I wanted to show him how much value he brings to our family without giving in to what I would call consumerist birthday traditions. I wanted to avoid perpetuating the idea that birthdays are an opportunity to imbibe the me-monster zeitgeist, a century-old tradition that came up with the middle class.

Birthdays, once quiet and quaint and often forgotten, became a consumer opportunity for the middle class to show off their single-family homes and all their purchased-on-credit stuff. None of us is above this vanity, even if it doesn’t look like a Betty Crocker add. Maybe it looks like some of my most epic birthdays at prix-fixe restaurants or riding bikes from one boutique space to another. Or maybe like the years I wanted to forget it altogether. I was afraid that Jacob would have an idea or expectation to be fêted in some way I couldn’t know, and miss the desire I believed was deeper, to honor him, to show him how loved he is.  

The night before the big day we were lying down together, and my husband told Jacob’s birth story. We laughed together about how Daddy had been awake for twenty hours when my water broke and was falling asleep driving to the birth center. Then, the look of disdain on the nurse’s face when he fell asleep in the afterbirth bed while I nearly bled out. There was no talk of the next day’s festivities. I didn’t feel badly about this, and Jacob didn’t seem to either. We didn’t have a plan.

Jacob and I were the first ones up on the big day. I wanted to drive him to pick up bagels as a surprise for everyone. He wanted to stay home with Dad so, trying not to feel hurt, I took my daughter instead. We ate together and the morning filled with garden work and a surprise trip to the indoor playground at the mall. He’d been asking to go for a few years. A grandparent sponsored our household of six kids for the trip, which wasn’t otherwise in our budget.

It was a Sunday. Every party room was full of pizza and cake-eating kiddos and their parents. Jacob noticed this and even while his five-year-old cousin started to complain about wanting his next birthday there, he showed no sign of coveting it for himself. He ran, he jumped, he slid, he carried one-year-old Theo all over the place.

A quaint party plan began to materilize. We sat around the table together and rolled one hundred gyoza dumplings, Jacob’s favorite. He opened a few presents from the grandparents. Some family and friends showed up for a water balloon fight and dinner. The water balloons were Jacob’s only birthday party request. For a group of three-to-ten-year-olds, this water fight was epic, full of delightful explosions, hilarious duds, and only a few tears.

After fifteen minutes of chaos, the kids walked the yard and picked up every rubber shred they could find, then stuffed their faces with dumplings, rice, rotini and who knows how much ice cream and cookies. We never sang happy birthday. We didn’t gather around and do presents. All the bellies were full. The grownups had a few drinks. We chilled. Jacob planned a time for his friends to come over the next day and build his new Lego sets. He had a great time. He seemed genuinely grateful.

That night my sister praised us for raising our kids with reasonable birthday expectations. I hadn’t given this much reasoned thought, only the sporadic anxieties I’d entertained throughout the day. How had we managed it? How was it that, even on his birthday, he could go to a place where parents were dropping hundreds of dollars to throw their kids a party and he was happy with water balloons and cookies and ice cream?

I asked him what he thought about it a few days later, if he felt anything seeing those other parties. All he had to say was, “I thought, I want some pizza.” I laughed out loud. He looked at me, his head cocked to one side, searching.

“I’m not ready to go to bed yet,” he said as he lay, tucked in and sleepy-eyed and tempting me again to insecurity. He was out in five minutes, exhausted from his day of fun, and I knew there had been a small success. While I was between floating and sinking all day, I found peace in the evening, seeing all the growth we’ve sowed to, and the fruit we’ve reaped. I can’t formulate a concise prescription for resisting the societal pressure to become extravagant birthday consumers. I’m only seven after all. I have my own lessons to learn, to un-learn. But I know that, at the end of the day, the fear of failing Jacob was replaced with thankfulness for the way he handled his day. It was a harvest for the Sheas.