Birthday Cake for Lunch
How a recurring childhood memory shaped my parenting style
My baby girl is 2. A realization that comes to me again and again as I clean up the house after yesterday’s party. It was a small birthday party at home with her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. As I pick up popped balloons pieces strewn all over my living room (popped not by accident, but rather hunted down skillfully by my cat overnight) and find smeared cake in odd places, I am visited by a memory from one of my own childhood birthdays.
For a few years during my childhood, we moved back and forth between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. At the time of my 7th birthday, we were living in Saudi Arabia in a small apartment in Riyadh. My dad had moved there for work and once the schoolyear was over, we followed him. Mind you this was Saudi Arabia in the 90s so it was a lot less progressive than it is today. For example, my mom, who drove constantly in Cairo, couldn’t drive in Riyadh as it was not allowed for women to obtain a driving license. This meant we had to wait till the end of the workday for my dad to come back home and drive us to wherever we needed to go (shopping or otherwise).
It was in this apartment that we celebrated my 7th birthday with friends and family who had also moved from Egypt to Saudi. My mom had prepared all kinds of snacks and desserts for my birthday party. And like any Egyptian kid’s party in the 90s, there were some basic items on the menu. Sandwiches of cold cuts and chicken, salty breadsticks, mini pizzas, strawberry jelly with bananas, Cream caramel (Flan or custard in some cultures), and of course the star of the table, the black forest birthday cake (Vanilla and chocolate with faux cherries).
The day after my 7th birthday was a weekend so there was no school. We were having a lazy afternoon at home when my mom unwittingly said something that would later become a core childhood memory for me. She said: “Why don’t we have yesterday’s desserts for lunch today?”. I was dumbfounded. It was like something had materialized suddenly but had always been right there in plain sight. What? Can we do that? Why haven’t we done this before? Why have we been having rice, chicken, and vegetables all these years when we could have just had ice-cream?! I had my doubts that she would actually follow through with this mad proposal. I mean what else had I taken for granted as is, when it in fact it was very much up for debate? Could we just NOT do any of our homework? Was it in fact meaningless to sleep early for school? The implications were endless. Nah, she wasn’t serious. I didn’t think so. To my utter surprise, however, she came out of the kitchen a bit later with a plate for me full of jelly, leftover custard, and birthday cake! Not only were WE (my sister and I) having desserts for lunch, but so was she.
I had read once that memories associated with strong emotions typically last longer in our minds. I wonder if that’s the reason this particular memory remains vivid in my mind 25 years later. Was I, at the time, so pleasantly surprised that my brain decided to etch this memory in stone?
I recently started my own motherhood journey, and to say it’s been a rollercoaster of emotions would be an understatement. One moment you’re over the moon because your baby finally latched properly and is breastfeeding with ease, the next moment is a deep dive into hysteria when she won’t stop screaming overnight and you can’t, for the life of you, figure out why. I had found myself in a milk-stained wasteland where the lack of sleep had me nearly delusional. Now, that she has thankfully turned 2, a lot of the turmoil is behind me and what rises from the ashes of my social life is a small human. A small human I can talk to, read to, play with, and even on a good day, reason with. A small human I observe up close and from a distance and am amazed by all the time. Now that I am finally on the other side of the tunnel, I have some time to actually think about the kind of mom I want to be.
I understand now, as an adult who just threw a birthday party for my own kid, that my mom was probably just exhausted from preparing the party the day before and too tired to cook lunch. She found herself with an overpacked fridge full of dessert and decided to come up with a creative solution.
It relieves me that kids are easily impressed, but it scares me that I could inadvertently create a life-long memory (good or bad). It isn’t the neatness of the house, the symmetry of the lunch box, or the perfectly scheduled sleep routine that my kid will remember 20 years from now. She will remember the time we ditched a school day to go to the park, the time we sang in the car all the way to beach, the time we painted with crayons on her bedroom wall. She will remember all the memories we haven’t yet created, where her mom threw out the rule book and acted like a kid.
