Of Four-Year-Olds and Ninety-Four-Year-Olds

My girl is now all of four years old. For less than fifty months she has existed outside my body; in less than fifty months she has certainly made her mark on this family. So small in some ways, in other ways so grown up, possessed of such assurance and self-belief. I marvel at her bravery in standing up to the world, in frequently taking on both me and her Father, hands on tiny hips, blue eyes glaring. She fell over, on the morning of her birthday, grazing her knees and bruising her dignity. A few hundred miles to the north, her great-grandmother, for whom she’s named, and with whom she shares a feisty nature and an intense appetite for life, has also fallen. She is 94, and my calculator tells me that she has lived for 1,128 months. She is shaken too, and her dignity is also bruised, and her fragile bones are hurting. They talk on the phone, commiserating over their stumbles, and my daughter’s tones become confiding and conspiratorial. Extreme youth, mired in the frustration of waiting for it all to begin, allied to extreme old age, terrified that it’s all about to end.

I don’t know who’s more exhausted by the birthday celebrations, me or my girl. I’m not quite sure when last year’s calm and sunny tea-party in the garden, with little three year olds in floaty dresses, got replaced by this year’s hiring of the village hall, complete with bouncy castle and seemingly half the local pre-school in attendance. But I am probably weird amongst mothers in that I actually enjoy my children’s parties. Don’t get me wrong, I do my fair share of whingeing during the build up. Whining at the cost, at my own inability to be the Mum who stops the ridiculous party-bags charade – what was wrong with a slice of cake and a balloon, for heaven’s sake? I am ashamed of my equally ridiculous charade of chopping up endless carrot and cucumber sticks for the tea – rarely eaten, of course, but presented as an apologetic sop to other Mums – yes, I know its all jammie dodgers and chocolate fingers, but we do really know about healthy eating, don’t we? I groan at the sea of plastic Disney –themed tat that features high on the wish-list of presents, and tell my children, with a grim face and stern voice, my grandmother’s tales of a doll made from a wooden spoon that had to double as a Christmas and birthday present. They don’t listen, of course. On the day, the noise gets to me, as does the spilled juice and the sticky faces and the invariable tears from some little soul. And yet, and yet … I get lost in the moment. The building excitement, the memories of party frocks (long, in my day, though not quite the Victorian pinafores that my son thinks I must have worn) and patent party shoes. Maybe it’s because I know there’s an end in sight to the tears and mayhem – my son has graduated to civilised trips to the cinema, or pizza and bowling.

I think what I love most about birthdays is the sense of anticipation. That feeling that I get from the house, when, dead on my feet with fatigue, I sit up late wrapping presents, and the air tingles with suppressed excitement. The ether seems to thicken, as it does on Christmas Eve, with the memories of other birthdays, other Christmases, and the family ghosts crowd silently around the stairwell, stiff with expectation. And what I always forget, and then always remember on the day, is that it’s not the presents, or the party, or the food that really counts. It’s the ritual; the fact that my daughter, even though she can hold no real memory of previous years, knows with absolute certainty that it is her brother who must wake her on her birthday morning and bring her into our bedroom. It’s the family tradition of that naughty slice of birthday cake in bed, and the knowledge that the presents will be piled high in the dining room – the poky, cold room that is ignored all year, and is, for some reason, chosen by both my children as their venue of choice for the present opening. These are the things that make a birthday, and that I treasure along with their shiny, excited faces, and it is these things, I trust, that she will take with her through her years – until she reaches the stage that I’m at, when she stops asking, with longing, when she’ll be another year older.

One last thing; a picture of a present that truly stood out, placed up at the top right corner of this blog, because I am too dumb to work out how to get it into the main text. A present that was hand-made, with care and attention, by a fellow blogger, and represents true value for money. A present that arrived with beautiful finishing touches - its own night bag, with identifying initial, and exquisitely wrapped. Made by talented Jane of Snapdragon: see http://snapdragongarden.co.uk If you see this, Jane, thanks again, she loved it.