Me and my birthday girl (2024)
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
On my birthday, I set out to make F’s birthday cake. She was born the day after I was and I choose to believe that this consecutive sequence of celebrations will bind us for the rest of our lives. It makes me happy.
F is turning one, and I wish for her cake to be beautiful and healthy. Making a birthday cake for my children each year is important to me. For my sixth birthday, my mother made a cake for me that I remember with great affection: a magic school bus cake with a jellybean-filled top layer and Oreos for wheels. I think about this cake often; maybe this is why. I love cake; maybe this is why. I cook and bake for my family multiple times a day, an act of care—and therefore, an act of love; maybe this is why. Baking is an art and I want my ability to extend past the written and painted page; maybe this is why. All of these reasons are the reason why and because I’ve taken on the task, it’s something I want to do well. What I really wish for is to surprise myself.
I make a frosting with no sugar, which tastes good but has low viscosity. I worry it won’t support the five layers of this cake, but I’m pressed for time. N and her cousins want to help. They take turns frosting each layer and one by one, I stack them high. The cake leans to the right and refuses to stop. I straighten it repeatedly but instead of a cake, it resembles a sloppy pile of pancakes. My brother-in-law, sitting across from me at the kitchen island, raises his eyebrows at the mess. He makes eye contact but says nothing.
What is that? my dad asks as he walks in and settles himself at the island. It’s F’s birthday cake, I say, obviously frustrated. My dad’s eyes widen and he tries not to laugh. Don’t ask her what that is, he loudly warns each person who walks into the kitchen. It’s supposed to be a cake.
I roll my eyes, but all of the insecurities I’ve grappled with over the past year flood my eyes. I don’t have good instincts; ordinary tasks are difficult for me; I’m not a real artist—it’s just something I work hard at; I don’t know how to be a good mother; I will never measure up. These thoughts are gauzy, shadow-like. Threatening. But I also have another thought: that tomorrow, F will be an entire year old—and everything I didn’t know how to do for her, I eventually figured out.
I start over. I take each layer off, scraping the icing off and back into a bowl. Masi, what happened? my oldest nephew asks, seeing the cake he had just frosted now fully disassembled. I know, I tell him. But I’m gonna figure it out. I add corn starch to the icing and stick it in the fridge. After 20 minutes, I take it out and begin again. I decide the cake needs additional support, and my dad, who has finally stopped laughing at me, neatly saws a chopstick in half.
When the layers are all iced and assembled, it looks like a cake. An adorable, small-and-tall cake, perfect for a one-year-old. My younger nephew sets out all the sprinkles and we call N and Z over. Go wild, we tell them and they do. Z pours all the sprinkles within reach on top and N eats the rest. My nephew and I watch them. We look at each other and smile.
It’s not the rainbow cake I’d wanted for F; it’s something better. My sister baked the layers so I didn’t have to; maybe this is why. My nephews helped me start over; maybe this is why. My dad heckled me and then offered support; maybe this is why. My daughter and my niece listened to themselves, which is the most honest form of creativity—while decorating F’s cake; maybe this is why. I want to be a good mother and I will always try, very hard, to be one; maybe this is why.
All of these reasons are the reason why and because I want to do the work, it’s something I will do well. On my birthday, on the eve of F’s birthday, what I really wished for, I got: I surprised myself.
TUESDAY
“The lens is a black eye, and a camera has an aperture. That’s easy enough; but it’s not easy, because the metaphor has blossomed the camera into the brown poet, into we brown poets (the recipients of the instructions): black-eyed aperture. To be black-eyed, yes, perhaps, to have the eyes of a black person, and we can have a lot of conversations about what that means, but at the very least, it means to see black people. Since her earliest poems, Finney’s model for us has been to see black people. To lay her eyes (and pencil) on her beloveds.
But to be black-eyed also means to have bruised eyes, hurt eyes: eyes that have been hurt by what they’ve seen, and eyes that have been hurt maybe for what they’ve seen. And an aperture, in addition to being a part of a camera, is a hole or an opening through which the light comes. Be a black-eyed opening for the light to come through. Be this. It’s my first final instruction. It’s the best I can say first and last. Let’s start here.”
—Ross Gay on the poetry of Nikky Finney for The Sewanee Review
WEDNESDAY
We finished the black comedy Beef a few weeks ago and I still find myself thinking about it. To me, this short series manages to capture a particular flavor of darkness: the self-loathing and self-destructiveness that blooms inside a first-or-second generation child who realizes they’ll never achieve a level of achievement or happiness that can neutralize the many sacrifices their parents made. Beef digs into this internal grappling, in all its complexity and absurdity, with poignancy and humor.
THURSDAY
I’m reading The Magic Words by Joseph Fasano and helping N write her first poems; I’m listening to Ghibli Sleep, my current writing playlist which doubles as car/calming music for F.
FRIDAY
Never ran this hard through the valley never ate so many stars I was carrying a dead deer tied on to my neck and shoulders deer legs hanging in front of me heavy on my chest People are not wanting to let me in Door in the mountain let me in
—Door in the Mountain by Jean Valentine
xx,
M
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