It’s Fi’s 11th birthday. As my children age at warp-speed, the milestones pass faster and faster, and faster. I find myself not wanting them me to age. There really is some truth to the pop-psychology theory about how moms resist their babies growing up because we are hanging onto the last threads of our own mortality.
Well. Enough depth.
We had our traditional balloon birthday breakfast this morning. My baby is 11.
11!
11 years ago today, at 9:04 a.m., Dr. Cunningham had given up on using the suckerator to vacuum her out, and was using the forceps, because she wouldn’t come out. She liked it in there. It was warm in there and it came with an endless supply of ice cream. This is why she was three weeks late, and had to be yanked out.
Where. Did. The. Time. Go?
So we had ourselves a little bit of mommy drama last night. There always is, the night before a birthday. I kind of lose my shit. I go nuts, flaffing around like a crazy-assed chicken, usually in and around the kitchen, overwhelmed with some kind of genetically ingrained maternal anxiety that something might go wrong. It’s anxiety. I don’t know – I have anxiety, I guess. Anxious flare-ups happen the night before a birthday, or a big holiday. Last night I had to make these foofy meringue parfaits so Fi could bring them into school. 25 of them. 27 if you include the teacher and the head of school. I had asked her, several times, if I should just go to the store and buy a cake, but she insisted I make these. She believed in my baking abilities despite all evidence to the contrary.
I turned the kitchen into a disaster zone. By the end of it, Fi and I were coated in a thin film of egg white, and my husband wanted to divorce me. (Kidding, but still. I was pretty far-gone. I think it may have been the fact that I had gotten into the Twizzlers.)
We had some fun with it on Facebook – it turns out there are a lot of you out there who do what I do – who freak out over the milestones. Who want to prove to themselves they can do the homemade thing even though they know they’ll mess it up. We don’t exactly do the homemade thing those housewives from the 1950s had to do, except often enough to prove to ourselves that we can do it. Sometimes. And we will, by God. We will.
This was one of my sometimes.
Get the idiot’s recipe for Momalog’s Meringue Parfaits.
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