Traditions

Traditions

Lisa’s birthday is tomorrow and I can’t stop thinking about the night she came into our world. I’ve told the story so many times to her and Mariel, to friends, acquaintances, and readers that it has settled into our family history with its rough edges smoothed out and details softened. It’s become our tradition to tell our daughters the story of their births on their birthdays. This year I look forward to regaling Lisa’s boyfriend, Matt and perhaps even pulling out the video we have of our days-old baby girl cooing on her changing table. It’s a mother’s duty to embarrass her children. We do it as naturally as breathing.

I suppose this birthday-telling is as close to the ancient bards that we’ll ever get. It’s a song we’ve memorized. We have no pictures, no videos of the birth, just memories. Steve and I had no family in the area, no doting grandparents, anxious sisters or brothers, or waiting-in-the-wings aunts and uncles. We were alone on that December 26th evening not even knowing that Lisa would make her appearance the next morning, one week early. Since it was my first birth I didn’t understand that I was having contractions until they got stronger as evening approached.

It didn’t feel real. How could we possibly be having a baby when we still felt like babies ourselves? But Lisa didn’t care if we were ready, she was. We raced to Mt. Auburn hospital at 11:00 that cold, cold night and spent the rest of the night waiting for her highness to make her appearance. I’ll never forget my doctor, Mitch Levine, settling in on the window seat of my room prepared to spend the night until Lisa was ready.

She finally came at 8:00 in the morning, eyes so wide that Mitch asked, “What are you looking at Bright Eyes?” Our little Bright Eyes had finally arrived to wreak havoc in our world. But though the first months weren’t easy and there were too many times when I felt overwhelmed, scared, and confused, our lives adapted to her rhythms and before we could even blink a year had gone by. That’s when I began the tradition of decorating her, and later Mariel’s, room the night before their big days so that they would wake up to a birthday world.

Lisa and Matt will be coming over tonight to celebrate and since I could no longer decorate her room, I had decided to decorate the house. I took down yet another attic box and started digging. There were things that I remembered, balloons and banners, but when I unearthed the candles and games I sat back on my heels. You see another tradition we had was buying number candles for the birthday cakes. I had developed some sort of superstition about reusing the candles so between the two girls I had 47 years of candles stored away. I decided that next year we would begin recycling the numbers in the interest of saving money and the earth.

But it was the games that stopped me. Over the years we had held some ingenious parties for our girls. We were really boring in the early years, taking them and their friends to various gyms or restaurants, but as they grew so did our sense of adventure. One year we took Mariel’s friends to the Blue Hills for a nature hike and animal adventure. The educational director asked Mariel to choose a bird or animal in their zoo to be part of the presentation. Mariel chose a raccoon. Unfortunately the raccoon died before the party and we had to make up a story to tell her so that she could choose something else. Quilla the porcupine made a great understudy.

The best parties were the ones at our house. One that I had discovered in the box was our Game-Girl blowout. I sat there looking at a long list of planned games, a complete Jeopardy board, and a flow chart (could you tell that Steve was a computer programmer?) outlining the steps to a game that we had invented.

But our piece de résistance was the, “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” mystery adventure. We had recreated the popular PBS children’s geography show in our house. Steve played the host and I was the chief, decked out in a trench coat and a fedora. We gave the kids magnifying glasses, notepads, clues and almanacs to use as references. With the Rockapella CD blaring in the background, we set our detectives on a world journey to catch Interpol’s notorious thieves. It was a blast.

I sat there on the kitchen floor holding the clues in my hand aching for a time machine. But then I decided that instead of wallowing in tradition-nostalgia I would begin some new ones.

The funny thing is we had already begun without knowing it. The other day Lisa told me that she had introduced Matt to our sacred Sunday night Chinese dinner followed by the NPR show, “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.” I laughed to myself. It was truly a tradition to cherish.

This year we’re starting a new one for Lisa’s birthday—a sushi dinner at home in front of the fireplace. And for the first time, instead of racing out to order a cake, I’m baking one myself. But we’ll keep the pink roses and the Champagne. Certain traditions are worth holding onto.