There’s a widespread saying – little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems. Personally, I prefer having big kids. I could write a whole long series of articles on why. I’ll start with one of the main reasons: Birthdays
Everyone in my family, except me, was born in the middle of July. The older son – on the 12th. The younger one, despite his father’s express prohibition – to be very careful not to give birth smack on his birthday – went and popped out exactly then – on the 16th. As a result, we started celebrating the children’s birthdays together – on the 16th. And their father’s birthday – just as he had feared if I gave birth on his date – never.
That particular year, 2016, all the preparations for the birthdays went to plan at first.
They had been in full swing since January, when the children started drawing up guest lists and updating them every time they fell out and made up with one of their friends. Around April I started sucking up to the mums. After all, if I didn’t step into other families’ summer plans in good time, they would all be at the seaside in mid-July and, God forbid, we’d be left without guests. (A lesson learnt the previous year.)
At the beginning of June, though, only about 40 days before the Big-Event, I changed jobs, and the new one turned out to be pretty stressful. I’d get home in the evening and be asleep by 9, felled by monstrous exhaustion. The birthday was getting closer, and I kept putting off the organising.
Still, I got started. With the easiest bit – ordering the cake. While on one of my computer screens I was in a so-called “call” (an online meeting), handing out little tasks to a team of Indian colleagues that everyone on the call knew would never be done, on the other screen I clicked on some link for cakes. It opened a Facebook page of a bakery with lovely cakes. Among them – a Lego Ninjago cake, the leitmotif of my sons’ lives at that moment.
On Messenger, the woman and I agree that on the day before the party I’ll pick up the Ninjago cake from Troleyna Street, right next to the prison. Precise, short and clear. Can you think of any other detail of the address I should have asked about? Me neither.
I carried on with the calls, the attempts to mute, unmute, share screens, breathe into the microphone to find out in a delicate way whether it was working. On the whole, my attention had moved away from the subject of “cake”, which I had ticked off as successfully done.
In the evening my husband and I plan the event. Although in mid-July Sofia is normally empty, it turns out we’re going to reap the sweet fruits of my tireless work planning other families’ summers. Everyone invited is coming. Even the reserves. Given that the friends of both our children were coming, and they were still at the age when the parents came to the party too…. we were looking at around 60 people.
Emo thinks it would be most fun (in Emo’s vocabulary the words fun and cheap are interchangeable) if we take the guests to celebrate “out on the grass” and order refreshments from the nearby place – a sort of food van from which we could order pizzas and drinks.
The children, in whose vocabulary “fun” is interchangeable with “expensive”, don’t want “out on the grass”. My younger son comes to me threatening that if his birthday is going to be out on the grass, he won’t come. I have so much work at the corporation that I’m tempted to breathe a sigh of relief along the lines of “one fewer, only 59 to go”.
And the weather forecast is shaping up in such a way that the number 59 could really melt down to 0 if the birthday stays outdoors. The whole week before it had been raining, thundering, blowing, and the thick clouds had us switching on the lights at home as early as 7 pm. The café in the business park put mulled wine on special offer and advertised it with the hashtag #julyisthenewnovember
The day before the party, I’m in SOAR. Those of you who have worked at HP/DXC know that this is an online meeting. In it the bosses from England gather and one of us, the employees from Eastern Europe, presents the main parameters of some deal to them in a grovelling voice. Before going into the SOAR, where I am presenting the deal, I’ve written to my husband Emo to pick up the cake I ordered on Facebook.
Emo and I have been locked in fierce battle since the morning over the venue for the birthday. I’m insisting we swap the “grass” for something indoors. The forecast for the day of the birthday is: 12 degrees, feels like 8, heavy rain and gale-force winds.
THEM LOT (whoever they are) never get the forecast right anyway, according to Emo. If only I’d believe him, I’d see that everything would be fine. Why couldn’t I back him up just once, by accepting his opinion without question, like normal women, he rumbled all morning, in unison with the rain lashing down outside.
Judging by what I could see through the window of the office building, Emo’s mysterious “them lot” were getting it right so far (I imagined them in Masks, like Anonymous). I write to him to at least pick up the Lego Ninjago cake from “Troleyna Street, right next to the prison” and join the call.
I’m halfway through the presentation with my screen shared, spewing out mountains of abbreviations. At that moment the following creature, the embodiment of Sweetness-Itself, popped up on the shared screen of my computer and brought a little colour into the grey lives of the Englishmen I’m presenting to.
This is Emo’s profile picture on Viber. The bosses from England can’t read Cyrillic and don’t understand how many angry words these fluffy little white wings are capable of writing. If we boil the Viber message down to its essence, it would come to this: that I, the woman who doesn’t support him in anything, not EVEN ABOUT THE WEATHER FORECAST, am a woman who can’t order cakes. The Duckling is now washing its little wings of me. With people like me, it simply can’t organise a birthday.
I’m on a call, stop bothering me – I fling the communication with the feathered one onto the other screen of my computer.
It expresses amazement at how, given my inability to cope with life, I manage to join a “call”. Seeing as I can’t even order one cake, I’m only pretending to be on calls, oh please.
“I’ve told you a hundred times I’ve ordered a cake. Go and do something useful in this life and get yourself off to pick it up. Troleyna Street, right next to the prison, which bit don’t you understand?” – I hammer out nervously. The bosses politely fall silent and mute their microphones.
“Oh, I’ve just got back from the prison,” the Duckling informs me. From these words of his in the chat, an ominous calm wafts over me. The kind of calm with which Don Corleone used to inform someone that it was no problem and they needn’t pay back the loan.
“Just so you know, next to the Sofia prison, where you sent me, there is no Troleyna Street. YOU ORDERED THE CAKE FROM VARNA, NIA!!!”
It’s a big blunder, I admit. And it has its strategic consequences too. If there had been even a small chance of moving the party indoors as I insisted, the wrongly ordered cake seriously weakens my position as Parent-with-Authority.
In the evening I manage to order 2 ordinary cakes with no decoration at all. We’ll pick them up tomorrow.
And tomorrow, Emo promises me, when we wake up, the sun will be shining, the birds will be singing and the world will welcome our party. Never mind that the forecast says otherwise.
8 hours later it’s already tomorrow. The lights at home are still on, even though it’s morning. We have to keep them on, because outside it’s pitch dark, due to the storm that hasn’t stopped raging. The only bird that dares to sing in these conditions is, once again, the Duckling from Emo’s Viber profile picture, which, while picking up the cakes successfully this time, nags me not to move the party indoors.
Wrongly understood male pride and dignity are a strange thing. He is prepared to drown in the flood those of our guests who haven’t been struck by lightning, just so as not to lose face and admit that his wife was right and it’s no weather for a party outside. Nothing can stop the drive of a man establishing once and for all who is the Leader in this family.
Nothing except one thing: the food van on the grass, which was going to deliver the pizzas and juices, rang to ask what date the party was being postponed to. They are adamant that today they will NOT be opening. That gives me the green light to act:
The time is 09:30 – I set up a mums’ group, where I’ll later post an update on the party location.
The time is 09:45 – All the children’s play centres I’ve rung, including one suitable only for children up to 3 (the entertainment there comes down to 4-5 plastic puppies on springs, suitable for riding by 2-year-olds), are fully booked.
The time is 10:00 – I remember A-place-nearby-with bowling and arcade games, but nobody there answers the phone. I shoot off towards it through the wind and rain in leggings, a stained T-shirt, dishevelled and without make-up. The place is packed, you couldn’t squeeze a pin in. It’s full of mums in ironed white shirts and charming dresses, lugging huge bouquets, who moved their children’s parties from outdoors to indoors in good time. I speak to some manager.
“Oh, please,” I wail. “My children’s birthday is today. And for them it’s the most important day of the year. Do you know that they made their guest lists BACK IN JANUARY?”
“And it’s only today that you decide to do something about it????” – in his voice I unmistakably recognise the tone in which every Bulgarian says “have you no shame, what kind of mother are you”.
As a Bulgarian woman, I suffer from eternal guilt syndrome, and perhaps this manager has been trained to sniff out the guilt in a Bulgarian mother and wife and monetise it. Well, he softens his tone, from 1 to 5 pm the restaurant is empty. He can set up two tables of 30 people each, but all he has left, of course – I never doubted it for a moment – is the most luxurious menu. The one with the seafood platter. Never in my life have I been so happy at the chance to buy, at ungodly prices, breaded onion rings frozen 2 years ago, presented to us as “Greek-style calamari”, and mussels softened to mush after defrosting. That’s for the adults. Pizzas for the children.
The time is 13:05 – we arrive combed, groomed and perfumed at the Place. We are far from the first guests at our own birthday party. Half the seats at two long tables, laid out as if for a village wedding, are already taken by parents trying to swallow the mushy mussels.
The time is 13:10 – the rain stops and, just as Emo promised me, the sun comes out and the birds outside start chirping. We, however, are already inside.
Emo clearly hasn’t got as stressed as me, because with a cheerful cry of “HEEEEEY, if this is as bad as it gets, we’re doing fine!” he sits down at a table with the dads from the nursery, who know each other, and the toasts with beers begin. Their conversations carry on along the lines of: “I bought tyres from such-and-such garage.” – “Ooooooh, you’re no fool, you, you’re no fool at aaaaall, cheers then.”
I feel torn between entertaining those parents who don’t know each other and are sitting there with glum faces, pushing the onion rings, pardon me, the calamari, around their plates, and entertaining my younger son’s little guests.
At least my older son has inherited my Fun-Generator gene. With a confident gesture he leads his friends off somewhere. I’ve given him 100 leva for game tokens, stressing that they’re for all the children – both his guests and his brother’s. Amid the din I hear him calling out to some barman that something should be put on “his tab”. But I have no time to think about it, as I have people to entertain. I head over to the parents, and for the next hour they listen to how I gave birth twice without anaesthetic, with me making sure the story matched the timing of the actual births:
15:00 – “Is it 3 o’clock now… ooooh, at this moment 9 years ago my contractions hadn’t even started”….
16:00 – “Is it 4 o’clock now……. at this moment 9 years ago they were already giving me an enema”…..
16:30 – The cakes arrive, the candles are blown out, and those parents who aren’t fans of horror stories from Bulgarian maternity wards now have an excuse to collect their children and go home.
17:00 – “Is it 5 o’clock now…… ooooh, at this moment they put me on the oxytocin…. oh my Goooood…. my eyes popped out of their sockets when that blessed hormone kicked in… And I screamed and screamed for an epidural, but I didn’t get one…”
….Clearly fate has decreed that every year on exactly this day, at exactly 5 pm, my eyeballs should pop out. Sometimes because of giving birth without anaesthetic, sometimes because of the freshly received bill for the birthday of the ones you gave birth to without anaesthetic. In 2016 it was the second.
That the bill would be high because of the seafood delicacies – obviously. But I hadn’t expected that our older son, who is normally a conscientious and good child, had somehow missed my instructions that tokens worth 100 leva would have to stretch to all the children at the birthday. Apparently he had told the children that every time they needed a token “for anything at all”, they should go to the bar and put it on “his” tab.
The child looks at us with an expression in his eyes that reads: “Mum, Dad – you only turn 9 once!”
A substantial chunk of the family savings went out of the window. But at least the birthday was over, and it ended happily. Now all that was left was to figure out where to put the sacks of presents which – I knew from experience – would never be used. Or worse still – would be used once, just to rip the box open, spilling out every kind of counter, pawn, dice and card, to be stuffed behind corners and under sofas, and then all of it would gather dust for ever and ever.
But never mind – the important thing is that it’s all over and won’t happen again for a whole year.
At home I pour myself a well-deserved glass of wine. I sip it with great pleasure. Emo arrives and wants me to pour him one too. He puts his arm round my shoulders, teasing me:
“The time is 21:00. My mother’s contractions have already started.”
Oh my Goooooooood, I had completely forgotten it was his birthday today too!!!
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P.S. 6 years later, the children are turning 15 and 11. They say they’d rather we gave them money than organised parties for them. And that is the end of organising their birthdays. Now, at last, Emo can celebrate his own birthday to his heart’s content.
