I have a best friend who should be a professor and published author, instead she's a corporate attorney, go figure…In any case this best friend who we shall call Mother Dear is the"Mama" to my favorite 2 year old, who we shall call Goose.
You'll see Mother Dear's post here as often as possible.
She's fabulous, single, and a mother; yep the total package!
So, I have less than 24 hours left to create a birthday . . .
It's funny, when you're a child you just take for
granted that "special days" will come like magic, and you should. You
wait for them anxiously, make those silly paper chains to rip off as
you count down the days. Then the night before, you go to sleep in
your special pajamas and know that when you wake up "it" [christmas,
your birthday, etc] will "be here." Somehow, some way before you will
appear a day that will delight you in every way, meet all your
expectations and match all your memories of traditions from special
days past, and still manage to completely surprise you with something
you never could have even imagined. The anticipation, the excitement,
the satisfaction . . .
Then, one day you become a parent and you realize
that Christmases and second birthdays fall on random Wednesdays with
inclement weather, pressing deadlines, low checking account balances,
and stores that don't actually sell hello kitty cake toppers and no,
they also don't know where you could get one. And now, you're
backstage and somehow you have turn whatever you've got into "it" and
stay up all night making sure "it" "arrives"on time. And you're blown
away by the rawness of it all, how there really isn't any Santa or
fairy to help you through, how it is all impossibly just you. And you
feel the pressure of it, the weight of knowing that you're responsible
for making sure there are no holes in the screen that a little person
could see through and catch a glimpse of the ordinary day that is
behind their special one.
And so you bend and stretch, make lists, make
phone calls, make plans, make shopping trips while they're napping, and
somehow somewhere in all of that you discover that the day that is
coming is not going to be ordinary at all, but downright
extraordinary. And you yourself start to feel the rising
antiticipation and by the night before even the acutely giddy awareness
that when you wake up in the morning it will be here, meeting all your
expectations and matching all your memories of special days past, and
the look on your child's face will probably surprise you in ways you
never could have even imagined. And that feeling is not just you at
all; it is magic.
