Planting Dandelions (23 page)

“Hey,” Patrick said to him, in that overbright tone that adults use with children sometimes. “Do you know what I am?” To make it easier on the kid, I made a sweeping, game show hostess gesture toward my husband's rear end.

The little boy looked at me and then back at Patrick with enormous, solemn brown eyes, and made his best guess.

“An ass?”

Theme parties are a curious custom of the married-with-children set. It's as if we're all lost at sea on a twenty-year cruise, and have to keep our spirits up. Or it could be that they serve an important psychological function, helping us to shed old identities that no longer fit. How else could you appropriately say good-bye to your leather jeans and rollerblades? There are costume parties, dance parties, karaoke parties, bad Santa parties, taco parties, pool parties. Over one Christmas holiday, I attended three separate “tacky sweater” parties. I think I developed an allergy to acrylic yarn that year.

Occasionally, single people are drawn into one of these events: someone's bachelor neighbor, or visiting younger sister, persuaded to come in from the cold world outside and warm themselves in the glow of string lights and thinly suppressed marital tensions. Oddly, they never seem to come back.

For kids, the ultimate theme party is, of course, the birthday party. In the annual scheme of things, it's the big showstopper. The other holidays follow a pretty standard arrangement from year to year. You go to the attic, pull out the appropriately labeled boxes, and take it from there. But every single birthday party starts from scratch. You have to determine the theme, select a venue, compile the guest list, plan the activities, coordinate the decor, and prepare a menu, all out of whole cloth. Smart planning starts before you even get pregnant, by arranging it so that your children are born in May or September, well spaced from other special occasions, and never in the same month as a sibling. Then you won't have to greet every New Year's Day with a scream because you just remembered you have two birthday parties to pull off in the next six days, and no money, time, or energy left with which to do it.

In the carefree, frisky days of spring, mating seems like a swell idea. Birds do it, bees do it, you think blithely as you yield to the primal rutting urge, humming a Cole Porter tune. Forty weeks later, sometime between hosting Thanksgiving dinner and dismantling the holiday decor, you will remember that birds and bees fly away and leave their young, Cole Porter was gay and childless, and that you are the one stuck hosting birthday parties at the worst possible time of the year. When my two older boys, born in the first week of January, two years apart, were very small, the timing of their birthdays wasn't quite so inconvenient. Before they got wise to the calendar, not only was it possible to postpone the party for weeks, I could get away with a joint celebration. But all that changed once the first went off to school and saw that other kids were having birthday parties near, or even on, their actual birthdays, and didn't have to share the billing. The bar was raised, early and high.

With three kids in grade school, the number of birthday party invitations we receive is staggering. There have been weekends when all I seem to do is ferry kids from one party to another, sometimes as many as three in one day, which thrice exceeds the quota established by the Council for Not Losing Your Freaking Mind. The mileage alone is exorbitant. The home birthday party seems to be all but extinct, with celebrations held at the newest inflatables/bowling/gymnastics facility, usually in an industrial park on the outskirts of town. I am sure if I added up the fuel cost times three kids at fourteen years each, I would do just as well to buy a trailer and make our weekend home the parking lot of whatever party spot is this season's must-rent.

Most of those places are pretty horrible, but none so nerveshattering as Chuck E. Cheese, the indoor kiddie arcade/restaurant with the creepy animatronics. Kids love it, parents hate it. I dread seeing Chuck E.'s sneering face turn up in our mailbox. Nothing says clean, safe, and child-friendly like a snaggletooth rat wearing a baseball cap, gang style. The strolling, in-house version of the mascot is terrifying. It looks like it carries plague. “If that rodent comes over here,” I heard one toddler's father whisper to another across a party table, “I'm taking him out.”

To be fair, my kids love to attend those outsourced parties, and from time to time, we've hosted one. But to me they feel antisocial. The activity level doesn't allow the kids to really connect, and the turnstile format doesn't let them practice much in the way of social graces. Instead of getting to play guests and hosts, and focusing on each other, such parties tend to be all about the action. I jumped off that bandwagon early, declaring myself a one-mom society for the preservation and advancement of the simple, homemade party. These have struck some of our guests as so exotic, it feels like it
is
the theme. “What a
neat
idea!” one mother exclaimed, when she dropped off her son and was told we'd be staying put and playing some bingo and musical chairs.

Another time, we had a camping-out party in the backyard. “Is that a
stick
?” shouted one of the little boys, as I explained in my chirpiest camp director voice that we'd be roasting hot dogs and marshmallows. He made gagging noises. “I don't think I can eat food on a
stick
!”

He could, and did, and loved it. My kids were in private school at the time, with the help of scholarship funds made possible by wealthy families like the one that boy belonged to. It was a very good, very expensive school, and we felt lucky to be there. But after that night, I began to think the benefits flowed both ways, that some of those kids were lucky to have us, too.

The key to a homemade party is to keep it simple, or you may as well hire it out. As a Google of do-it-yourself birthday party ideas will swiftly demonstrate, it can be all too easy to get carried away. I recommend not even looking at the websites. You'll be stenciling monograms onto hand-sewn favor bags and airbrushing fondant. The handmade movement is supposed to be an alternative to conspicuous consumption, but sometimes I think it's just a sneakier way of showing off.

Who are we knocking ourselves out trying to impress, anyway? The birthday kid? Mine would love a three-ring circus in the backyard, but they don't really care what the theme or venue is, as long as they can get together with their friends, eat cake, and open presents. The party guests? I've yet to meet a child who wasn't perfectly delighted with a few rounds of stick-the-tail on something and a helium balloon to take home. For sure, we're not doing it to impress the dads (“What—is it someone's birthday?”). The applause of other moms is what we're after. A birthday party is an exhibition for us as much as it is an amusement for the kids. We use it to communicate how affluent or frugal we are, how offbeat or mainstream, how socially or environmentally conscious, how creative and capable. It has become a statement; our float in the parade.

We
should
applaud each other. Not for best in show, or showing off, but just for showing up. With heart-shaped sandwiches and store-bought cookies. With shamrocks made of twist ties to ward off pinches when all the green clothes are dirty. With dozens upon dozens of plastic eggs filled in the wee hours, whether with jelly beans or nuts and raisins. With our hands full of pumpkin guts. With our minds full of dollars and cents as we help write letters to Santa. With nothing to say for ourselves when we remember what we were supposed to bring to class that day, and forgot. With a candle for every blessed year, and the wish that we could grant every single wish.

We should all hold hands, and take a bow. There's no business like it.

I
'm in the bathroom at the Prada store in New York City having a bit of a moment. I thought it would be a good place to sit in private and get some perspective. And it might be, except all four walls are mirrored from floor to ceiling. Now, in addition to hyperventilating over the fact that I am wearing more than a thousand dollars' worth of designer clothes, I'm a little freaked out by having to watch myself reflected into infinity. I've fallen into an alternative universe.

I'm a soccer mom. A den mom. I clip coupons. How did I get here?

I was reading a magazine article, and the next thing I knew, I was in it.

A few weeks prior to my Prada moment, a magazine in the checkout lane tempted me with the suggestion that life could be simpler and easier—so I tossed it in the cart with my preschooler and the load of groceries that
might
get our family of five through the next two days. It was a week or two later before I managed to barricade myself in the bathroom, sink into a bubble bath, and flip through the issue.

“Wardrobe Staples” caught my eye. I am a mother of three. Getting out the door without peanut-butter smears on my yoga pants is an achievement. Looking pulled together on a daily basis is the mythical holy grail. I eagerly turned to the article.

Classic pumps: $495 . . . Classic diamond studs: $5,000 . . . Classic trench coat: $1,395. I could afford the $24 classic tank top, but it would have to wait until my husband got paid again.

I added up the list. Ten grand. More than twice our monthly income.

Remember the scene in
The Devil Wears Prada
where Anne Hathaway, playing the ingenue intern at a high-fashion magazine, smirks over an intense editorial discussion about couture? That's not me. I am not above fashion. I recognize that real artistry goes into the design and manufacture of fine clothing, and that there is a market for it. But it mystifies me when it is marketed to moms like me. If the editors of these lists were to leave Manhattan and come to Little Rock, Arkansas, to stand behind me in the supermarket line, coupon book in hand, would they tap me on the shoulder and tell me that a $2,000 designer handbag was an “essential”?

I've read the arguments. That bag, those shoes, that dress, will last a lifetime if properly cared for. They will never go out of style. They are an investment.

Really?
Really?

I honestly wondered. I thought about my gray cashmere sweater, a gift from my mother. At $100, it's one of the most expensive garments I've ever owned. Putting it on always makes me feel like a million bucks. I had to admit, that was a pretty good return. Would slipping into a pair of $500 Manolo Blahniks make me feel so confident, so sexy, so put-together that it would be worth going without cable TV for a year? I didn't know. But I sure wished I could find out.

The kids were clamoring at the bathroom door. I let the magazine fall to the floor. My wish should have popped with the last soap bubble, but the next day I e-mailed an editor at
Good Housekeeping
with a challenge: Let an average mom test-drive some of these “must-have” clothes in real life and decide just how essential they are. As my nine-year-old son would say, I double-dog-dared them.