Chapter Seven: Today Is My Birthday

A child’s birthday is the central organizing event of his year, often superceding all major holidays, national and religious. By celebrating a child’s birthday each year, parents reaffirm the joy of that child’s advent as well as mark his progress–physical, psychological, social, and intellectual–on the path from babyhood to adulthood. Birthdays also provide untold opportunities for aesthetic experience.

Homemade Paper Flowers and a Pool of Tears

My special love of birthday parties came, not surprisingly, from my mother, who orchestrated superlative celebrations year after year on the occasion of her children’s birthdays. One, in particular, endures in my memory. For my tenth birthday, she took the theme of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which she and I both loved, and created an event of legendary proportions. Although we were living at that time in an apartment with limited space, she managed to transform it into an enchanted realm. The invitations requested that all my friends arrive in costume, and I later found out that my irrepressible mother had actually possessed the temerity (a quality never in short supply where she was concerned) as well as the maternal prescience to telephone each mother to say that the birthday girl and only the birthday girl would come dressed as Alice.
I can still remember my thrill, surprise, and delight as we opened the door and each child entered in masquerade. Some of my friends had been transformed almost beyond recognition. My mother’s invitation had placed a covert demand on the other mothers and children to become inventive, and they truly responded. Although some may ha...