March 2004 Issue - Essay # 9
Birthday
Wish
By Wendy
Coblentz
I
remember the plastic high chair by the door.
The cushions have blue and white flowers on them.
My son, Henry, sits there and bangs on the high chair table with
a spoon. The blinds on the
window are pulled down to keep the afternoon glare out.
It’s hot in the kitchen because it’s mid-September and Indian
summer in the Bay Area. Today
is Henry’s first birthday and Julie, the nanny, has baked him a
chocolate cake. He, of
course, doesn’t know it’s his birthday and Julie is making a big
deal of this day. I stand in the doorway and watch the scene but I
can’t go into the room. Arrows
pierce my stomach and I try not to cry.
If I were the perfect mother I would enter the kitchen, sing
“Happy Birthday,” cut the cake, take a few pictures with the camera
and treasure the moment. Instead,
my nanny has taken over and I feel she thinks I am incompetent. Henry
screeches with joy when he sees the cake with the candles.
I turn and run up the stairs in tears. “You are suffering from
postpartum depression,” my psychiatrist, Ira, told me months before
and he prescribed medication. I
hear Ira speaking those words as I close the door to my room, the melody
of “Happy Birthday” echoing behind it. * * * * * “Mom,
I want to have a birthday party and invite eight people,” Henry
announces. He will be
thirteen.
He has had other birthday parties before but it is hard for me to
recall exactly what the themes were. I remember something at a miniature
golf course. Last year, my
husband took three boys to a baseball game. “I
want to invite four boys and four girls,” he says. He
decides he wants to go to a movie, have dinner at a local Mexican
restaurant, then come back to our house afterwards.
The boys will spend the night.
While I am glad he has made all the plans, I don’t know if
I’m up for this. “Don’t
worry,” my husband, Jim, says. “They
don’t want us to hang around them.” The
postpartum depression I suffered after my son’s birth lingered on and
turned into a major depression. It’s
no wonder I don’t remember birthday parties, or much of anything else.
I was often in a fog. I know I’m better now, from many trials of
medication and endless hours of therapy. I can cope.
Yet birthdays, where it all started, bring up painful memories of
pacing the halls at “Mom,”
Henry yells. “Where’s
the movie section? I have to find a PG-13 movie because Charlie’s
mother won’t let him see R-rated movies." Henry
and I look over the movie section and figure out an acceptable movie.
He wants to go to the local variety store to pick out
invitations. As we drive
there I feel like a real mother, someone who is involved with her child,
not the person who hides in her room in tears. I am still haunted by
that image. “What
kind of cake do you want?” I ask. He
says he doesn’t care and I list the options. We settle on chocolate
with vanilla icing. We enter
the store and look at all the cheery invitations. Henry
isn’t interested and grabs the first ones he sees, announcing,
“These are fine.” I
am buying birthday party invitations, I think.
I used to be the one who had fantasies about smothering her own
child with a pillow. I remember the conversation many years earlier with
Ira. “Talk to me about
it,” he says. His gray
eyes practically pierce through me. “I
can’t,” I sob. “I feel like I’m a horrible person.” My
son is eight weeks old. I
had recently started to see Ira. He reassures me what is going on is not
my fault, is hormonal, and reiterates that I need to talk to him. “You
need to understand something,” he says firmly, but gently.
“What you have is a psychotic depression.
It’s very serious.” I
dig my fingernails into the green leather chair I’m sitting in. “It’s the afternoon and Henry’s asleep,” I explain to Ira.
“No one is home and I creep into the room and put a pillow over
his face.” I grab a
handful of Kleenex and wipe the tears off my cheeks. “Does
he stop breathing?” he asks. I
take a deep breath and burst into another round of tears. “I
don’t know,” I gulp. I
go on to explain that at sight of my son at the infant stage my stomach
does somersaults, my head throbs. Sometimes I break into a cold sweat.
Other times I take a look at him in his crib, run to my room and lock
the door, afraid of my own impulses, of what I might do. Jim never knows
about any of this. Although he is very supportive of me and understands
my depression the best he can, I feel this would be too much for him. Ira
asks me if I really think I’d act on any of these impulses. I say,
“no,” stand up and look out the window at the sky. I
remember the open space being comforting. “Mo-om,”
Henry says at the cash register and I jump.
I’m standing in line in a daze and have to pay for the
invitations. We walk outside to the car. * * * * * It’s
the morning of the party and I can’t sit still.
I have already gone to an exercise class, picked up the cake,
vacuumed the house and walked the dog twice, even though it is only 11am. We are
meeting all the kids in the parking lot of the movie theater in the late
afternoon. Once more, I tell
my husband I don’t know if I can handle this and he assures me it will
be fine. I think, what does
‘fine’ mean? When
we arrive, some parents are already there and one mother remarks how
brave we are to have so many kids at a birthday party.
If she only knew, I say to myself.
I watch the kids in the parking lot before the movie starts.
The girls flit around like bees, giggling, holding hands and
pushing into each other, flirting with the boys.
The boys are shoving each other, trying to be cool.
I try to remember what I was like in seventh grade but it draws a
blank. Jim and I lean against a pole.
I am conscious of every muscle in my body. The kids are
completely ignoring us. I
feel more like a camp counselor than a mother as I usher the kids into
the theater. After
the movie we go to the Mexican restaurant where the girls spend most of the
time running to the bathroom, where I find them preening in front of the
mirror. The boys have to be told to stop throwing tortilla chips at each
other. Jim and I sit at a
nearby table. As soon as we get home I get the cake out of the
refrigerator. I stare at the
words in yellow icing on the cake: “Happy Birthday Henry.” I’m
surprised by the warm feeling in my stomach. Henry
runs upstairs and rummages through the recycling.
I ask what he is doing. “Getting
a bottle,” he says. All
the kids are about to go into a room and close the door. I
figure it out. They’re
going to play Spin the Bottle. Jim and I exchange smiles. “Wait,”
I say. “It’s time for
the cake.” I
put the cake on the platter and am reminded of that first birthday
twelve years ago. This time
there’s no nanny holding the cake platter. There’s only me. All
the kids gather downstairs. Jim
lights the leftover Hanukah candles, the only ones in the house.
As we walk downstairs, everyone starts to sing “Happy
Birthday.” To my surprise my voice is the loudest.
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| Author's Biography I
have been published in The Awakenings Review and Other Voices. I live in E-mail Wendy at yoyobeep@sbcglobal.net
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