Gracie and I had never had a birthday party with other kids at it. The most we got was Grandma and Grandpa coming over for cake. We wouldn’t have minded, except kids on TV had birthday parties full of other kids all the time, and then I was invited to a huge party at an enormous house in the subdivisions where everything looked showroom-nice and there were games and presents even for the guests! There was a cake with a quarter neatly wrapped in tin foil in each slice. MONEY. IN CAKE.
(The kid informed me sulkily that he HAD to invite his entire class, even kids he hated, like me.)
After this glamorous experience, I decided that we NEEDED an eleventh birthday party, and that we would invite all the kids in our classes. Grace agreed.
Naturally, we had zero parent buy-in.
Grace and I cut paper into squares and wrote out invitations for every kid in my class and every kid in her class. (Due to some inexplicable anti-twin policy, we were never in the same elementary school class. This is why Grace was unjustly snubbed from the Rich Kid Party.) We hand made over sixty invitations.
I felt very cool and popular, walking down the aisles, dropping a square on every desk. The other kids looked anywhere between uncomfortable and horrified.
Cake wasn’t a problem because our mother considered cake mix a staple and there was always some in the house.
I wanted to do a cake with quarters, too. We didn’t have tin foil and we didn’t have quarters. I found a penny and a dime. Grace suggested maybe baking toys into it. We had three small plastic elf dolls that might work. (Snap Crackle and Pop, the Rice Crispy boys, though we called them Oakie, Snokey and Pinoakie.)
We mixed up the cake mix and greased and flowered the pan, but ultimately, we weren’t sure if Oakie, Snokey and Pinoakie could survive the oven or if we should shove them in after baking. We also rather loved them and didn’t want to part. We abandoned Operation Buried Treasure and set the cake to bake.
(Some people may be shocked to learn that we were not only allowed to cook on our own from an age at which we needed to stand on a chair to reach the stove, we were expected to. Asking Mom to heat up a can of soup would be met with, “I’m not your slave!”)
There wasn’t any frosting for the cake, and we worried about that and experimented with mixing sugar and water in the hopes that it would somehow condense into frosting. It did not.
We made a pitcher of Kool-Aid and put some potatoes on to bake, since that was something we had and knew how to do.
We were ten. Cut us some slack.
The time for the party drew near. We shoved piles of clothes and newspapers under and behind furniture to make the living room look neat. We made newspaper chains and hung them. We cleared off the dining room table and covered it with a bed sheet.
Having no birthday candles, we put a half-melted green frog candle on a plate next to the cake.
We discussed games. “There has to be, like, games. A relay race.” At the rich kid party there had been a race of eggs on spoons. We didn’t have eggs, but we had potatoes. I laid out our jumping ropes as start and finish lines.
An hour after the party was supposed to start, our best friend Shannon arrived. An hour later one other kid arrived, with a sleeping bag, because I’d told everyone it was a sleep-over. “I brought this so I wouldn’t look weird, but I’m not sleeping over,” she said. Had she but known there would be no one with a sleeping bag to blend in with!
Potato Race was not the game I’d hope it would be. No one wanted to play. A neighborhood bully came over (uninvited) and stuck a spoon into one of the potatoes, running the course and declaring himself the winner. He left after discovering there were no chips or snacks.
No one wanted Kool-Aide, and the frosting-less cake was was merely stared at.
I remember sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, trying not to cry while the one kid besides Shannon who came stuck a spoon into a potato over and over until her mom came to rescue her. (She asked to call home to be picked up early.) Shannon helped Grace and I eat the cake.
The next day at school I was told that our house smelled funny.
In some ways, I’m still trying to banish the memory of that failed birthday party every time I invite people to my house.
When I told Brian about my failed eleventh birthday, he suggested I throw a Second Eleventh Birthday party when we turned 22. Now that party was AWESOME. We packed our apartment in Little Italy and had a regular cake and an ice cream cake and people brought more snacks and we tried to see how many could fit on my bed and broke it and we all laughed about that and everyone stayed well past the planned end time.
And here I am, 45 and finally forgiving myself for my 11th birthday. It wasn’t that I was a terrible hostess. I was ten. I did the best I knew how to do with the resources I had.
What failure are you still blaming yourself for that wasn’t really your fault? Let it go. You can always have another 11th Birthday Party.
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