A DAD'S LIFE:Celebrations are getting out of hand nowadays
BIRTHDAYS WERE, since we’ve had kids anyway, always a concern. There’s the financial difficulties they can cause if/when they get out of hand. There’s emotional stress on parent and child. There’s sugar everywhere, sugar like powder at a Queen album launch in the 1970s. Sugar to fuel the rampaging masses. And there are battling egos – parent and child, parent and parent, as well as child and the rest of the class and their assorted baggage that you invite through your door on party day.
I’m getting ahead of myself. Party day usually takes place at the end of the birthday week festival. Anyone who can still get away with confining their child’s birthday to only one day of uproar, please send me guidelines. Actually don’t, I know why things get out of hand here – I married the greatest birthday celebrator in Ireland.
It’s hard for her because she’s married to the Grinch. She’s learned not to expect a big deal to be made of my “big” day, she’s learned to tiptoe around it. However, she hasn’t quite learned that I will never morph into Lionel Blair and sing and dance through her day. This still bothers her but she’s coming to terms.
Where our birthday attitudes clash most is around the nippers, where my Grinch invariably sits through an average of 17 Happy Birthdays for each child, scowling from the third one as the missus glows in inverse proportion to my despair.
I scowl because I think one present is enough to give them. I scowl because I don’t understand the policy of giving the other child “something small” so she won’t feel left out. (I can’t even begin to imagine trying to sell that policy to my parents.) I scowl because they don’t really need to be brought for a “family dinner”, then a “family dinner with the grandparents”, then the party, then a “come-down, post-party family tea”.
The missus arrives in with a bag of presents at some point during the week before the party. There will be the one we agreed for the child, followed by “just a couple of small things”. If Grinch had been in charge, one of the small things would have been done up in a bow and presented with a flourish. Job done.
As for the variety of dinners to be attended during birthday festival week, their cost is written off with a shrug and a “they’re just small dinners, and we promised her”. In this case, the “we” is slang for first person singular as I promise nothing. I don’t know what the child is promised behind my back, but I’d like some of that action to come my way. Also, what is a “small” dinner and how does it differ from a regular one?
The most worrying maybe-trend for the future to come out of the birthday festival I’ve just endured is the “birthday trip”. The missus has booked herself and the bairns flights to Rome. Before you think we’re the 21st-century Medicis, she’s staying with her sister and bagged a bargain, but still it was done under the “birthday requirement” umbrella. Where can we go from here? A weekend shopping in Sydney for the younger? A Broadway show for the elder’s tenth?
I think most families operate with a yin and yang policy. One has to hold the reins, the other has to show the reins are there to be let go. It helps if you can alternate who adopts the holding position as holding tight all the time can cause extreme strain.
With birthdays, the missus’s joy at their celebration means a lot to me. Without it I would be teaching the kids that birthdays are no big deal, take what you’re given, smile and be grateful, and never forget that life isn’t meant to be a party. An extension of that philosophy leads to all celebrations being pointless, birthdays meaning nothing, and don’t even get me started on Christmas. It leads to the belief that we should march through time, marking nothing, until finally the days available to us come to an end.
Her enthusiasm may destroy our credit rating, lead us to the brink of ruin even, but without it all we would have is me exhorting everyone to hold on to what they have, straining to grasp the reins with a mad vein popping on my forehead. I can Grinch it up, and that ensures the bills get paid, but without my Birthday Bird no fun would be had at all.