Birthmark

Y'know what sucks? Birthdays. All birthdays, really, but kid birthdays in particular. Especially when it's your kid. Not because you're not thrilled, overjoyed, and theoretically even a bit moved - you know, on an emotional level. Because you have emotions, right? - by the realization that this tiny mammal which burst forth in true Alien style from your wife has oh so suddenly grown into something wild and strange and wonderful: a legitimate human being in miniature. No, of course not. You are a man, not an animal. You take pride and pleasure in the thrivability (possibly not a word) of the fruit(s) of your loins.

No, you hate birthdays because you know that when a kid has a birthday, it can only mean one thing:

A birthday party.

Birthday parties are, at best, a legitimate pain in the ass. True, I've read stories on the interwebs about parents who've successfully reimagined their little one's anniversaire as an event that magically and successfully intertwines cocktails with pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Events that please child and adult alike, filling the young ones with cake and ice cream even as their progenitors saturate with limoncellos, margaritas and other colorful, liqueur-enriched grown-up Kool Aid substitutes.

As far as I can tell, these parties are unicorns: intriguing but ultimately fictive beasts whose promised existence is little more than a tease, a taunt, a fanciful, wishful wisp of ether promising eternal life and bacchanalian good times. Fuck you, drunken unicorns. You are of no help to me.

The grim reality is that birthday parties are an exercise in expense, time, energy, frustration, logistics, heartbreak and - ultimately - futility. And you cannot avoid them, because not only do your demonic offspring demand a birthday party (my girls, for example, have been talking about who is and isn't coming to their birthday party next month since... um... last July) but there is societal pressure as well. As TheWife so aptly put it: the toddler birthday circuit (which subsequently evolves into the kid birthday circuit, much in the same way that single-celled organisms evolved over time into fish, birds and chupacabras) can and will break you. As a circuit, it is a vicious cycle (a circuiting, circling cycle, at that) wherein each party becomes a test of wills and strategy, as each parent devolves into the role of host — and to be entirely clear, the term "host" applies in its true parasitic sense here: a larger, once-thriving organism that becomes overrun by a throbbing, squealing, endlessly needy horde of childflesh that feasts upon its strength and vitality until little is left but an empty husk. And all under the careful, watching eyes of other parents.

Parents who are studying the event from an anthropological vantage point, comparing and contrasting all of its intrinsic elements - cost, location, fun (subjective), innovation (subjective), parental effort/involvement, etc. - in preparation for that inevitable time when it will be their day in the barrel; when their own little monster comes up on his or her own celebration of solar circumnavigation and thus balloons and goody bags and funfunfun must be arranged and procured and planned and produced. And cake! Let them eat cake! Sheet cake - granted, the lowest form of cake; the paramecium of cake evolution - but cake nonetheless.

And thus the snake feeds on its own tail. The circuit completes and begins again. The cycle begets the cycle begets the cycle. One party fades away, only to have another rise from its ashes; a sheet cake, balloon-eyed phoenix to be hammered with bats wielded by tiny arms, shattered into shards of sweet, candied, fleeting memory and child-sized ambitions of what will be done to top it next year.

My girls turn four in June. Pray for me.