Birthday Angst

So my youngest daughter’s birthday is tomorrow: look for a more meaningful post of her awesome [home] birth story soon. In the meanwhile, I sit here stressing about the Triple-Headache-Gripple I have created for myself with the Bringing of the Birthday Cupcakes to The Diva’s class tomorrow, Friday, (1st round of baking); then the Family Party at home that night (featuring Cake #2); THEN the Build-a-Bear party the next day at the sort-of-close-but-not-really mall that is presenting logistical challenges for the invitees; followed by a small hamburger/hotdog cookout in our yard, cake and ice cream, and finally, buh-BYE. Of COURSE I just got a rush-job, last-minuting editing request this afternoon. Of COURSE when I went to knock out the cupcakes while cleaning up after dinner I discovered we have no more light cooking oil (I’ve cooked cupcakes w/olive oil, which I always have plenty of: unfortunately they taste like frosted salad dressing). I will indeed have to dart back out in the thunder storm to get the cooking oil and make the cupcakes; on the bright side, it will give me a chance to smoke a pity-party cigarette. I’m not quite sure why my 3 beloved daughters’ birthdays never fail to inflict such anxiety on me, but I’m pretty sure it has to do with my deeply innate Aversion to Big Fucking Productions that made me insist on an elopement instead of a wedding and has prompted me to miss every single high school and college reunion since graduating from either esteemed institution centuries ago.

Since I’m sure the Build-a-Headache party (and if you check out the link above, it has a tab that says “Party with Us.” Oh I’ll be partying with you all right, my little plush friends) will just be spectacular, but cannot yet imagine the horrors wonders that await, I refer you to a piece I wrote 3 years ago on the occasion of The Free Spirit’s 7th birthday, originally posted to New Jersey Moms Blog. My prediction: same shit, different lieu. Any betting women out there?

Epiphany in Hell

As we pulled into the parking lot of Chuck E. Cheese for my daughter’s birthday party I was suddenly seized by the conviction that I had made a terrible, terrible mistake. My husband and father-in-law’s evil laughter (she made these reservations! well, you know how crazy she is) as we parked and carried in the cake only amplified my anxiety. I could not shake the feeling that we were descending into the Underworld to face the fate of the hapless parents who are too lazy to plan action/adventure theme parties for the children whom they profess to love so dearly. In this world, Cerebus was cleverly disguised as a teenager disinterestedly stamping our hands with invisible ink at the entrance underneath the pointedly large video monitors, which clearly served not only as a warning to would-be kidnappers but also as a rebuke to parents: “Look, we have to provide these security measures because you insist on taking your children into this happy hunting ground for child predators.”
Did I mention I popped a Xanax before we left?

Well I did. But instead of making me relaxed it only made me confused and overwhelmed (perhaps if I had had the foresight to follow it with a chaser of bourbon I would have achieved just the right state of consciousness for the Chuck E. Cheese experience).

As we made our way towards our party table through the gauntlet of flashing and beeping video games, the surrounding swarms of children seemed to buzz with a dangerous energy while, by contrast, parents drifted in their wakes like the mute shades of Hades. My children immediately flew to the small stage where a camera projected their manically leering images onto a large screen playing a music video, while my husband and I proceeded to get into a fight about who would wait out front and direct hapless guests to our table and who would be inside supervising the kids in the claustrophobic indoor carnival section. Xanax girl here was a little slow on the draw and got stuck on sheepherding duty, while father-in-law waited at the table and distributed the game-tokens. My faith in humanity was restored by a few of our friends who took one look at the surrounding chaos and the vein popping out on my forehead and opted to forgo a child-free trip to the temptingly nearby Target to stay and help supervise.

After about 20 minutes of freaking out I realized that the kids seemed to instinctively know what they were doing. No one was bolting, no one was getting trampled, and they were more or less staying together in the same general area. Either each and every one of them had done this before, or the geniuses behind Chuck E. Cheese had somehow tapped into a collective, primal survival instinct akin to a sucking reflex or the ability to create a tool. This impression was reinforced back at the table after the kids had eaten their pizza and our “hostess” informed us that the Chuck E. Cheese would come out and lead the birthday song. I tried to get the kids to sit back in their seats for this upcoming event but once again, the Chuck E. Cheese gene took over and they ignored me, clustering instead around a door near the small stage/video projection area.

An adult dressed in a Chuck E. Cheese costume came bursting out of the door and began dancing around the stage area as the Happy Birthday song blared from the overhead speakers and psychedelic images swirled on the video screens. The giant, polyester mouse began dancing around the room and the kids all fell into a jumping and laughing conga line around him.
It occurred to me that he could keep dancing right out the back door into a van with no license plates and blackened windows, and they would follow him in while all the adults stood slack-jawed and stunned by overstimulation.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more surreal, all of the “hosts” and “hostesses” assembled in the stage area, where they broke into a special Chuck E. Cheese birthday song replete with doo-wop choreography vaguely reminiscent of the Pips or the Four Tops. Deliberately avoiding my husband’s eyes, I looked around for my daughter in the undulating scrum of screaming children and, at that moment, she was hugging the giant polyester mouse with all her might, her face incandescent with joy.

It was then I had my epiphany—the kids were having a great time precisely because of the garishness and overstimulation that were giving me a headache. And furthermore, I was experiencing this Xanax-proof headache because I was a snob. That’s right—despite my loudly professed commitment to public schools and frequent criticism of the ways that many in my liberal town manifest hypocritical assumptions about class and race, my philosophy in mothering has been nothing more than an exercise in elitist masturbation. Because really, besides the physical chaos, what is it that makes Chuck E. Cheese such a wink-wink, nudge-nudge kind of place? Could it be that fact that it plays it straight, aiming for a target audience who may not appreciate concepts such as irony because they never went to private school, college, and grad school? Was my feeling of being out of my comfort zone there due to the fact that I was surrounded by parents who had never breastfed, worn their babies in a sling, or done time in mommy-and-me music/art/gymnastics classes? Was it because I was surely the only parent in the room who had baked a cake from scratch using organic ingredients from Whole Foods? Or was it basically because I was in a place predominantly surrounded by people of color with whom I should feel at least some sort of affiliation, (will try to get a bio pic so you know I’m at least a Racist-of-Indeterminate-Color) but most emphatically did not?

So my journey to the Underworld was worth it after all. Not only did the kids all have a great time, but I actually got the opportunity to open my cynical eyes and acknowledge that even though the official party line is Mom Knows Everything, I need to take a few lessons in life from my children.