Magical Birthday Martyrs
Why curating special occasions for children isn’t a motherly burden- it is a transmission of tradition
My eldest child turned 12 a few days ago. After moving through my annual birthday ritual of curating a special and fitting birthday celebration for my first born child, I have some reflections. Reflections on the oft-discussed question of maternal “mental load” specifically in reference to the work that is required when it comes to birthdays, holidays, tooth-fairy evenings and so forth. A topic that is often discussed with some bitterness in the mouth, resentment on the tongue.
Yes-there is the researching and selecting of presents, the wrapping, the cards and the heartfelt messages that go in them, the decorations, the baking and cooking, the remembering of little things like candles and a gift for the young ones to open too, the party planning, the socializing, the graciousness that has to accompany it all. The moving parts of the upholding of tradition. The parts so many women seem to feel burdened by. I too have felt overwhelmed by the tasks, stretched by the financial aspects of it all, too tired to stay up and wrap presents. Yet, I find these days-not many of them in the year-to be an opportunity, not a chore.
I spent my entire day on my daughter’s birthday making her birthday dinner, a pizza made of homemade focaccia and roasted garlic and sauce made from tomatoes I grew last summer. A vanilla cake from a recipe I will definitely save for the future, with cream cheese frosting and topped with dye-free sprinkles and beeswax birthday candles I made a special trip to the store for the evening prior after working a 13 hour shift. These details may be perceived as weirdly boastful in the way that so many details of the lives of women who choose to share the efforts of their mothering can be, but really these are just the details that make up the hidden moments of our actual lives.
Beyond the homemade birthday meal and cake, there is the birthday banner made of vintage floral hankies I hand stitched letters onto in the evenings after my community college classes in the month before she turned one so long ago. The wooden Waldorf birthday ring I add a new ornament to yearly, horses and flowers and butterflies and dolphins. Little brass candle holders, a peg to put a photo of her as a baby in. The numbers to spell out the new age she is turning the page to. I buy her fresh flowers. The Ostheimer unicorn I put in the middle of the ring, the “birthday unicorn”. I let her stay up late until 11:49 PM, the official time she made her way onto this Earth. We talk over her birth story, the oral history of her beginnings, her “birth-day lore”, just like Lorelei and Rory on Gilmore Girls (iykyk).
These are traditions, and I propose that being the one to make these family traditions is a position of power. It’s not a burden to be the one to choose and make these rituals of living memory. It’s an opportunity to weave your spirit into future memory. Being the one to stuff the stockings, to read the passage from the Advent story, to make the wreath, to light the candles and pick the colors worn for such occasions and choose what to fill the bellies of your beloved with on the most special of days is a grand role indeed.
“A tradition is a belief or behavior (folk custom) passed down within a group or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. Tradition-oriented societies have been characterized as valuing filial piety, harmony and group welfare, stability, and interdependence, while a society exhibiting modernity would value "individualism (with free will and choice), mobility, and progress."
-Simon J. Bronner
Many of us today don’t come from families with a strong cultural tradition history intact. This history and the passing down of the rituals that accompany it was likely ruptured at some point in the midst of the Industrial Revolution or through immigration and poverty and a shifting culture that values individualism over interdependence and consumerism over craft. The spreading-out of people and families mean tradition is fractured and misinterpreted. How do we reclaim the harmony referenced in the quote above?
I think actively shaping and crafting a family culture is the first step, and curating traditions is an integral part of this. Women are the natural stewards of the private realm-not only the home and the hearth, but what books fill that home’s shelves, what objects of honor adorn the mantle, which nourishing kitchen staples are ever-stocked in the pantry, what materials fill the closets and cover the sleeping quarters, which plants grow in the gardens. See a pattern? The foods we eat, what education we have, what we touch and interact with daily-these illustrate the priorities of the family and the beauty and practicality that can be breathed into those various aspects of each priority, and they are chosen most often and most naturally by women. Why? Because we are so adept at noticing. Noticing the needs and wants of ourselves and others, noticing that our choices can make life better for all.
It follows then, that women will extend their talent for noticing to the most special and significant of days and celebrations for our children. It is truly, if we sit and think on it a bit, a real privilege (a word I am often highly annoyed with and which I don’t use lightly or flippantly). Privilege is commonly defined as “a special advantage or right possessed by an individual or group. A privilege is a right or advantage gained by birth, social position, effort, or concession”. What if we re-framed the planning of holidays and birthdays as a right and advantage of women-of mothers-because it positions us as both creator and guardian of the family traditions?
Further, what if we took this right and advantage a bit more seriously? What if, in this re-framing, we built traditions that were not just charming and sweet and beautiful, but also could give our future descendants a true sense of self and of history and heritage. This is something I don’t feel I have yet completely succeeded at, but which I feel is a worthy endeavor. This is not to say the aesthetic is trivial-quite the opposite-it is just to say that those aesthetics sometimes (not all the time-fun is good and we like it here) need some depth and layers.
We not only are creators but as stated above, we are guardians. There is a reason that the figure that represents Tradition in Olin Levi Warner‘s sculpture of the same name, which sits on the Thomas Jefferson building of the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center (and which the story behind is fascinating-I encourage you to click the link under the photo above to learn more), is a woman. It is the often woman who ensures the preservation of heritage and the traditions and stories that make it. Who wrote the family cookbook and the recipes in it? Who makes Gran’s Springerle cookies every year at Christmas? Who tends to the old photo albums? Who keeps the family Bible or the letters your great-grandparents wrote one another during the war? Who holds the key to the immigrant chest or the marriage chest? Often, if not always, women.
These things don’t have to be expensive or time consuming or elaborate. Lighting a candle at certain meals or singing special songs together can be equally as impactful as hand-sewn stockings or giant feasts. The act of keeping alive something which shifts the energy of the day, that reminds you of the magic of being alive in those moments, that connects you to the people before you who did the same things for the same reasons in another time and place-this is what will give your children and theirs a sense of belonging and reverence.
I am writing this because there is a pattern emerging in public discourse surrounding the planning that goes into celebrations and special moments for others and how stressful and annoying it is, how it is a part of the “mental load”-AKA the hefty burden of tasks and the planning that precedes them that mothers and women in general must bear. Frankly, I find this discourse more annoying than I have ever found planning my children’s birthdays. Making special days special for children isn’t a terrible encumbrance, and if it feels that way, it is because it is being over-complicated and overdone and then, in the case of moms making reels about it on Instagram, it is being used to gain Motherhood Martyrdom™ points.
This discourse can be applied to any sort of event planning but I find it particularly grating when directed at the celebrating of children. Yes, baking beautiful cakes and wrapping thoughtfully chosen presents and decorating your dining table with tiny dinosaurs or ballerinas or whatever thing your kid is currently into is work in the sense that it is laborious-it requires effort and time. Just the same as other tasks of the home and family are. The issue isn’t the time and effort-the issue is the growing popularity of framing the normal work of life and living as bad and unfair.
If throwing an elaborate birthday party or making a fancy Advent calendar feels annoying-don’t do it. Do something equally as lively and beautiful in a more simple way-your child likely will not notice or care. This is why perceiving the work of celebration as an opportunity to build and pass on traditions is so important. Women possess both the capability and creativity to tap into what actually matters to our children and focus on this. The way things are done today-say birthday parties for 25 kids that cost 400-500 bucks, filled with food dye laden frosting and cheap plastic crap in goody bags-are often not in alignment with the actual honoring of the child. They are in alignment with adhering to a consumerist society’s expectations.
Something I have noticed is that when I feel apathetic about what feels like obligatory tasks-something like bringing the cheap craft supplies to the class party or whatever-it is because it feels meaningless to me, and when that task gets in the way of the things that truly matter, the apathy transforms into resentment. I think this is the feeling that is being captured by the women complaining about how they have to plan Christmas while their husbands just show up. The resentment is placed on the husband (and sometimes the kids), when really is is born of an apathetic attitude about the nonsense of societal expectations, expectations they feel obliged to fulfill out of fear or competitiveness. The solution is rejecting those expectations and funneling our time and effort into simpler, yet more beautiful, ways of celebrating.
Tradition is ultimately about storytelling. In the aforementioned piece, “Tradition”, the namesake of the artwork is a storyteller. She is swanked by two more panels- again, both women- “Imagination” and “Memory”. What is tradition if not imagination captured and transmuted into various rituals that are instilled into memory-both present and future? When we are tasked with the work of celebrating significant markers of time and place, especially for our children, it would do us good to perceive of this work as an honor. An honor because it is an opportunity to instill our most imaginative, creative selves into the future memory of our children and their own, way on down our respective lines of heritage. Let us remember that being an author of heritage may not be a light task, but it is a noble one.
I am obsessed with this. My sons birthday is coming up Monday! I am also tired of the discourse surrounding 'planning'. What a privilege (yes the real definition not the overused one) it is to see your children grow year after year and plan a celebration for it! It's not a burden! Same w the Christmas planning. My son and I just constructed a homemade advent calendar filled with cute treats and trinkets that will bring them joy the whole month. It required me to go to the store, buy thoughtful pieces for it, construct it and let my son's clumsy fingers help put it together. But if I shared it it would certainly be ridiculed as 'something else for moms to do!!!!' I did it because it brings me joy. Your traditions are beautiful!!
I love this piece Emily! I think you really clarified why some of the things we do as mothers cause us resentment- it’s because we’re not in alignment with what’s truly important to our families. It was good to be reminded that the traditions I choose to incorporate into our lives are perfect exactly as they are and we don’t need to compete with each other or feel bad if what we do is different. Especially as we go into the holidays (and 2 of my daughter’s birthdays)! This also gives me a lot of great food for thought about incorporating ancestral rituals into my children’s lives and remembering my role as the one who passes on tradition. My mother died when I was young and I wasn’t raised around a lot of family or even with a strong sense of family, so I’ve been creating traditions and rituals that connect us since I became a mother 11 years ago. But I think being intentional about connecting my daughters to their ancestral heritage more is a beautiful idea too. For example, 2 of my daughters have Scandinavian ancestry on their biological dad’s side and we started celebrating Saint Lucia day last year. They both LOVE it and it’s such an important link for them. Anyway, I’d love to hear more of your thoughts surrounding motherhood/folklore/ritual.