The Last Hurrah

I’m a secret crier at birthdays. Though birthday parties are one of life’s sweetest celebrations, it’s getting harder and harder for me to celebrate one year older, for both me and my kids. When does a mom get to the point where her secret birthday wish is to go back and live and love each birthday one more time? For me, it was this year.

           
I used to make my oldest son’s birthday cakes each year. For his first birthday, I made him an Elmo cake. There was nothing but happy excitement for the day, as I pumped red icing onto a rainbow-cake-Elmo, bringing him to delicious life. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I watched my new baby boy, with a party hat teetering on his head, sitting on his great granddad’s lap, trying to figure out how to blow out a single small candle. My grandfather, now gone, kissed his first great-grandchild on the head and smiled, leaning over with decades of birthday party experience, and perhaps his own secret wish for Seth, before blowing out the candle with my son clapping in celebration. This is one of my best birthday party memories ever.
           
As Seth grew, so did the birthday celebrations with homemade cakes. Year two, it was a Winnie the Pooh Wahoo. Year three, Scooby Doo. For Seth’s fourth birthday, I made him a cake from a magazine that looked like a swimming pool using Chiclets for pool tiles, blue cake decorating gel for the water, a stick of gum for a diving board and icing-clad Teddy Grahams all around. It was the same for Seth’s fifth birthday (an American flag cake, this year with homemade blue and red chocolate shaving curls), and a new little brother to help celebrate.

           
I don’t really remember Seth’s individual birthday cakes after that. Life got really busy. My husband was gone for the majority of the next three years as a pilot for the Blue Angels. The next year he deployed to Iraq with 2^nd Force Recon out of Camp Lejeune. During that time, I became so busy with working full-time, trying to manage every-other-year military moves, and all the challenges of being a mom, wife and good employee, that the boys’ birthdays started sneaking up on me more quickly than I wanted or was prepared for.
           
There were no more homemade cakes each year, but there would still be a special birthday theme: Transformers, Star Wars, Legos, Pokemon, Pirates… and no matter where we were, or how busy life was, or who was or wasn’t there, I would try and make that day an extra special celebration of life and happiness… after which I would go to the bathroom where the tears would come, for all the things I could have done better that year, could have made more special, for all the time that had gotten by me, and for my babies getting older.

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