Hi, friends.
I hope you are having a good start to the new year.
I am writing this as I sit at the desk that holds my laptop, my baby, milk moustachioed from her breakfast cereal is force-feeding me a dish she has prepared through stirring the pink toy pot she received as part of a cooking set for her birthday last week, with the sieving ladle that came from the same set. Her sister is working on her Chinese spelling, getting ready for her Tuesday test next week on the mattress, lying on her front, feet waving in the air.
We are allowing time to fly by, all doing her own thing, while waiting for dinner time to arrive, and then, bed time.
-image via Google
When I was a child, because I share a birthday with my cousin, we had joint parties and shared everything. Pink balloons and blue ones blown up the night before, tethered with sparkly foil strings on seats laid out for games, amateur clowns whose dark skin emerged atop his sparingly applied white facepaint; a unicorn cake, then a princess cake, then a rectangular one adorned with swirly buttercream flowers, each year low bidding the one before until we got too big for parties, too young for going out, too far apart to celebrate together.
And then my cousin was no longer a cousin, she became a friend, and then that friend and I fell out, and now she is my cousin once more.
Now that we are adults, the parties we had when we were children has become the basis of the stories we tell our own children. We recollect the pieces together; I remember the pink and blue balloons tethered on their sparkly foil strings, she remembers the princess cake, vanilla, with a hint of orange, and we piece them together through a chain of text messages that no longer require a greeting to start with or a talk to you soon, take care, to end.
As mothers, we don’t do parties for our children. A birthday breakfast, a day out to get what they want, wrapped up in sparkly foil wrapping papers, no pink and blue balloons, no clowns, and maybe a slice of cake with one generic pink candle shoved on, accompanied by a whispered birthday song in public. Was it a decision we made due to financial restrictions, a detachment to social standards, or because we know our daughters better than our parents knew us?
We reminisce each year, the horrors of our childhood birthday parties.
Do you remember when the bottom of your skirt got tucked into your underwear and everybody saw, and everybody laughed,
I’d say,
oh what about the time you threw up on the neighbour’s son because you had to finish your cake in time with the music,
she’d say,
and we’d laugh, but it wasn’t real laughter, just a symbolic giggle shared over a chain of text messages that has no start or end. Successions of modern hieroglyphs plastered on the walls of friendship we had had to built since adulthood.
Being an adult is hard work.
But what has been harder is the path it took for us to realise that it is hard work.
What if my child likes the things I didn’t growing up? What if she lied to make me happy, to make me smile? What if all those things that happened to me during my childhood has made me who I am now? Who would I be if I didn’t get the unicorn cake and the blue balloons and the clown whose lack of make-up suggested otherwise? Would I like her?
Empathy.
Not just for other people but for the people we were, and for whom we are and want to become. I think that is what we’re working with, that’s what’s making us see things better, that’s what’s making us try to be better people, better parents.
But where did we learn it from if we were not taught it through our own parents? Something in our collective experiences must have given us this lesson, but which, if at all, or was it everything? If we learnt to be empathetic because we weren’t empathised, then aren’t we inevitably raising children who will end up not being able to be empathetic?
Such is life, a circle that can go either way. It’s exhausting, to do, to think, to be an adult, a mother, a parent, anticipating for the time when a fall out can again be a friend you can call family.
I am currently rereading Heidi Julavits’ The Folded Clock. There is something in her nothingness that is everything. I am learning through her how to write without restrictions.
Thank you for reading Mothering Barely.
I am still trying to decide how to plan a free vs paid publication schedule, and until that happens, I am making all posts henceforth open to everyone.
We are in the midst of collecting funds so we can subscribe to a movie-streaming platform and watch on my phone when we need a treat. If you’d like to help, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or better yet, subscribe to my daughter’s writing here.
I think all our past experiences help to build us Lisha, some we learn from and avoid, others we embrace and passion to our own children. I think your two lovely girls will tell you if they want pink balloons with sparkly ribbons instead of quiet birthdays... have faith in you! ♥️xx