A 6 Candle

I’m sweeping up a lot of glitter today which is a medium length way of saying that the youngest had her sixth birthday party today.

I thought it would mean a very particular something. Two years ago my oldest turning six did feel that very particular way I thought today would feel. I had sixth birthdays circled in my head because I’m convinced my mom had done a number on me when I was five. And by done a number I mean treated me wrong. Yelled at me. Yelled at me for being fat. Yelled at me for being loud. Yelled at me for existing. Swore at me. Told me she was going to feed me paper towels instead of food to help me lose weight. Told me I was a dumbshit relentlessly. Really swore at me. Not letting a swear slip around me. Not letting a swear slip at me. Swearing directly at me, on purpose, most days.

So I had today circled, if she blows out the number six candle then I did something better. I gave my kids something better than I got. I’d kick me feet up in my miniature triumph. But I don’t know how I’m fucking my kids up. And I must think that my mom didn’t think she was fucking me up. For all I know she was kicking her feet up at my sixth birthday party thinking she was doing something better than her parents did to her. And I’m pretty sure she was.

I can find and celebrate the triumph if I make it miniature and measured. I think my girls feel more at home in their bodies than I did at their age. I think my girls see their parents relate to their own bodies in healthier, more supportive, more welcoming ways than I saw in my house growing up. I can’t with any great confidence open the lens wider than that. We don’t know what pain will stick. We don’t know what joys will stick either.

I had a series of bizarre and truly beautiful conversations with my Dad a handful of years ago. At some point it was sort of just me sharing different emotional bruises I had from my childhood. The ones that stuck, the ones that shaped me, the ones that I had flipped over and over in a therapist’s office across from the St. Paul Cheapo some years before that. What was strange was how masculine the conversation was. The vibe was not dissimilar to when I show someone the weird fatty bump on my right knee from when I feel down hard on a bunch of rocks at Camp Shane in the summer of 1995. But he was also asking after certain emotional bruises he thought would be there. He mentioned a stressful night we had in England when I was a boy. He brought me to a fancy dinner for a work trip he was on but did not realize the fancy club had a strict dress code that involved ties and maybe even certain shoes and a blazer. I was not up to code, nor did I have anything on that continent that would’ve brought me up to code. He didn’t think they’d make a kid wait in the lobby due to a dress code. He was wrong.

I had to wait in the lobby for a handful of hours while he did his dinner. He would come and check on me from time to time and I believe he made some effort to get me food. It was a long time. . .2 plus hours maybe? It was like having your kid wait outside while you had a whole dinner party. I didn’t find this night to be particularly difficult. I thought the rules of this club were insane, I thought that enforcing them on a boy in low double digits was doubly insane. But the night didn’t wear on me cosmically. I was bored out of my brain but that was just the status of being a kid pre-iPad. I remember spending hours tying knots with blades of grass while lying in my backyard. I was comfortable with boredom. My dad shared that he thought that for sure that night at the dinner club in England would be one of the bad ones for me, one of the ones that I’d be stuck sorting out for years. It wasn’t. Life goes on, let’s get a sandwich on the way back to the hotel.

It’s pointless to guess how you are fucking up your kids. You are fucking them up and you are loving them. You are trying your best and you are failing miserably. You are doing a great job and you aren’t. I thought that on this night of the sixth birthday I’d be lifting off of some plateau, I’d feel like I had entered a new level on the video game.

What do I really feel? I feel happy that the party went off just fine. I feel unexplainably exhausted. The party wasn’t that stressful and it was two hours long but I feel like I’ve been up for 21 hours. There is a small amount of glitter everywhere. There are clear ways I haven’t yet fucked up my kids and they aren’t insubstantial. There are Thin Mints in the house, I read an entire new Karl Ove Knausgaard novel and JS Coffee still had the Guji coffee I’ve been into and I bought a pound of it today. We had kids throw lightning bolts onto a homemade Mount Olympus today and I’ll remember sitting inside in my outside camper chair in the kitchen and handing kids a grape as a prize no matter where the lightning bolt hit; my daughter had found the pin the tale on Bandit to be too stressful last year.

There will be ninth birthdays, and seventh birthdays and experiences, good and bad, that I think that my kids will remember forever but they won’t. They’ll be random trips to the doctor, to Hudson and to KidsHair that I’ll forget about as they’re happening but they’ll be burnt into their memories in deeper relief than most of their adult birthdays. Maybe, a generation from now one of them will be writing about being proud to get to their kid's sixth birthday, knowing they had sidestepped some mistake that I had not. May they celebrate their miniature triumph, clean up the glitter, and stay unready for the next disaster, even after it happens.