Six Candles

Oh dear I've been drowning in birthday madness as my Betsy turns 6 in just hours. Six years ago this minute I was trailing amniotic fluid across the lobby of Brigham & Women's Hospital.

Six years later my daughter and I bake cupcakes and trade email tips.

Because it's 11 p.m. and I'm dog tired. I leave you not with words, but with pictures of those toys of childhood - my own childhood - that keep popping into mind every time I watch Betsy unwrap a Webkinz or American Girl Doll accessory.

Come on, toys were better way back when, weren't they? We had our own ovens!

We had dolls of color - who were nurses!



Feel good princesses be damned, we worked out our emotional angst with games dared to be called "Trouble".



And my absolute favorite toy of all time, a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car with wings.

I've got happy birthday signs all around the house - our birthday morning ritual, Bets pads around in her pajamas finding each one - 18 cupcakes for 18 classmates, birthday cards addressed to Bets from the kitty and from Julie and Molly (her American Girl Dolls). I packed a special lunch for Bets, and will be going to school with her in the morning to read a book to the class. Sunday was a whopper party and tomorrow night a big dinner.

All this and I forgot a present.

For crying out loud.

I mean Faith and I ordered something that has not yet arrived. Shouldn't we have had a back-up, something wrapped and tied up in a bow?

Sure there are worse things going on in the world every day. Sure we are all spoiled and over indulgent of our children. But darn.

The good thing about six is it's still young enough to pass off everything that happens as entirely normal and okay: having your present in the mail means you get to have your birthday last even longer.

Come on, it's better than being born in a wagon of a traveling show.

The Ides of February

We are just 10 days away from Betsy turning 6 and it's all so unbelievable, to think I spent most of my life without a child - life before Betsy lasted 40 years - but now I have absolutely no memory of what that life was like, well almost none.

In honor of the occasion I had the strangest dream. I dreamed a giant white bird lie dying in front of me, giant as in bigger than a sea turtle, bigger than the base of a huge snowman (or woman), all feathers and white but when I looked more closely it was my dying mother (of course) and she was struggling and uncomfortable as she had been during the last week of her life. She mouthed something to me I couldn't understand at first but then saw to be "I'm thirsty" or "I want water" so I offered her a drink but she could no longer swallow and so the water dribbled down her mouth and onto her chest making her even more upset. I felt terrible. Look what I'd done.

This scene is in no way foreign. I'd say it happened with both my mother and grandmother in the weeks prior to their death at least once a day - and worse things, harder things, bizarre things. Like when my mother suddenly opened her eyes and said to me "Bye" in what sounded like the rudest of ways.

"It probably took her the whole day to be able to do that," Lucy said by way of comfort when I told her that 5 years later I still wonder if my mother was being sarcastic. "Byeee."

Or when I raced to her side thinking she was bleeding from her mouth, only to find it was strawberry Jell-o.

Oh I've got a million of them. The ambulance ride from NJ to MA with my newly stroked grandmother.

It's my daughter's birthday and I'm all awash in visions of death and dying. But life is all birth and death, birth and death. Sometimes it just hits you hard over the head like the racquetball I inadvertently nailed my lover with on her chin, that we are young and then old over and over again. And when you're middle-aged like myself you get a good view of both sides of life.

And a dog friend of ours just died.

And wouldn't it be nice to have my mother and grandmother (she'd be 102) here to help prepare Betsy's party?

But the sun she is rising outside my window and there is much life to be lived. Not to mention deciding between Barack and Hillary to be done. All in a day's work.