It's my party and I'll cry if I want to

Today we had a birthday party for my almost two-year old and he cried pretty much the entire time. It was just family but that didn’t seem to matter. I have this one sad picture from my mother-in-law, taken during a brief respite from the crying. My arm is sore from holding him. It’s 8 PM and it feels like 3 AM.




The weird (or not weird? Because what is normal?) thing about my child is that he is totally fine with adults but freaks out around kids. He didn’t use to do this, but it’s obviously upsetting and makes me, at times, spiral into the parenting black hole of “OH MY GOD WHAT DID I DO WRONG?”.  We go to playgrounds. We go to stores. We went to a toddler art class for pete’s sake. He’s SMART. He speaks in complete sentences and his word du jour is “parallelogram.” 


So what is going on?


Is my child a super introvert? I’d say it’s likely. He’s got the genes of two introverted parents and doesn’t like loud kids. I’ve already began explaining to him that some kids are loud, and some kids are quiet, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Is it just a phase? Does he need some sort of ear plugs? Does he already know he’s doomed as an introvert in an extrovert’s world? 


Note that this is all rhetorical and I don’t want your advice.


When it’s your party and you spend it crying, well, it’s hard. Or it’s hard for mama, since he won’t remember any of this anyway.


The icing on the proverbial cake is that we never sang “Happy Birthday.” We thought he was just too upset, he finally calmed down, and we didn’t want to chance it. Once everyone left, he was so distraught he couldn’t settle down for a much-needed nap. 


These days are hard, friends. I dealt with it in my healthy way of eating the jilted ice cream cake straight from the freezer like a starving hobo. 


But fear not: this isn’t the end of the story:


For once, I caught and then stopped myself in this awful “coping” mechanism, forged in the depths of an introverted childhood where I felt like I didn’t belong. Then I did what any reasonable person would do: I posted the cake, complete with Happy Birthday icing, on my Buy Nothing group on Facebook . I just handed it off to two teenage boys who were overjoyed, according to their mother, for such a surprise treat. She told me that her kids were digging into the cake after singing happy birthday to George. So G did get his happy birthday song after all.


As I handed the cake to the kid, I thought of my students and how silly and fun they could be. I realized that one day George will be 15, and hopefully fun and silly and ridiculous in that way that many teenagers, esp. boys, are. I can tell him the story of the time he cried through his low-key birthday, and another family got to enjoy his cake. I hope we laugh. Over cake, of course. 

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