China Doll’s birthday is coming up and I am honoring my pledge to always make my kids’ birthday cakes. Obviously, the day will come when their request will be more than my skill level can handle, but until then I’ll do my damndest. So far, I’ve made a Tow Mater cake, a Ninja Turtle cake, a Superman cake, a flowery #1 the size of Indiana and a Barney cake (with the help of edible images). None of them would win an award, well maybe the Tow Mater- that was pretty damn cool if I do say so myself, but that is not the point. The point is through all the confectioners sugar, the cussing, and the self doubt, I am showing my kids that I love them by getting off my ass and creating something from my heart (with the help of a little wine). So what if it gets so muggy that the plastic Superman slides off the awesome Earth I crafted. He was there. I was there. As a mom, I showed up.

Will they ever appreciate it? Yes, but not until they have kids. I appreciate that my mom made our cakes until we reached middle school. Of course, she had to because we lived in a tiny town in Kansas with two even tinier grocery stores. But when she started working full time, she decided to outsource the cake making to a woman who lived five miles out of town in a small ranch house on a hill. I’ve never been inside that house; I just remember staring at it from the passenger seat while she went inside to make the transaction. The irony is that during the day, my mom ran a kitchen that fed the elderly of the county.  Her job required her to make massive sheet cakes. I try to give her the gynecologist’s out: after looking at them all day, the last thing you want is to see one at home. However, I would have to say that as soon as she stopped making our cakes, progressively stopped showing up, especially for birthdays.

I remember one January my college break coincided with my sister’s birthday and she was going to come home. I was astonished that my mom had done nothing for this magical alignment of the stars. Unbeknownst to my sister, I scrambled to put together a cake and small party to create the façade that my mother (and father, he should be held accountable for that bullshit as well) cared. My sister got off lucky; it only happened once. In the course of my life, my parents have forgotten my birthday at least three times. One time their excuse was that it fell on the same weekend as graduation and my dad was a college president. Note: my father was a college president for thirty years and calendars have been around for several hundred. Another time, my mother purposely ignored it because she was protesting my upcoming move to New York. A third time was because they were just being mindless idiots. I can say that because I was born Mother’s Day Eve.

What an extraordinary coincidence for a woman; to be blessed with giving birth on the eve of Mother’s Day! A feat like that should be honored. And I did, every year with at least a card, which makes it even richer that during that hectic graduation weekend, my mom took the time to read my card:

Big surprise, I am no longer a fan of my birthday. I am especially confused by those who treat their birthday like the second coming or those who celebrate their “half birthday” with great zeal. But now that I am a parent and my birthday is coupled with Mother’s Day, there has been a slight change. When the holidays coincided last year, part of me thought I should be treated like a spoiled celebrity. The other part of me just wanted some quiet time at a Starbucks. The spoiled celebrity part shows progress.

I do have great enthusiasm for my kids’ birthdays and some may say that the Gucci baggage I carry with me about my birthday has created my fixation with making my kids’ cakes. To those people I say, “Did that C in Intro to Psych affect your GPA that much?” The real reason I want to make my kids’ birthdays special is because unlike my own parents, I realize it’s their birth…day!  Their birthday is a yearly celebration that Hubby and I wanted them here on this earth and they came… to tolerate our parental blunders and eat what we say is good for them and go to bed when it’s this thing called 8:00. The least we can do is make a four tower princess castle cake with real plastic Disney princesses on top. The least I can do is show up.