Four Birthdays and a Funeral
Joy, Death, Love, Grief and other human things
My daughters’ birthdays are just a few days apart from each other: Ottilie just turned five, and Ariadne is about to turn seven. When people realised Ottilie was due pretty much on Ariadne’s birthday, I was slightly mortified.
“People will think we only have sex once a year,” I said to James.
“Once every two years,” he corrected, helpfully.
Ottilie was a lockdown baby. Other than my sister, who had moved into our house to form a bubble with us in the last few weeks before her lockdown wedding1, she didn’t meet any of the family, and we had her full moon celebration over Zoom. It was all very different from when Ariadne was born two years prior; my siblings and my mum came to visit us in hospital, and then our church family brought us homemade meals every day for weeks, my mother oversaw a month of confinement and then made an absolute feast to celebrate with my side of the family, and James’s family all came down from York to see her too, with handmade blankets and clothes and gifts…
I’d like to think that lockdown was the reason we didn’t go to such lengths for Ottilie, rather than just her being the second child. (We also have a third, Theo, who I haven’t mentioned at all so far, so I guess you can draw your own conclusions.) Two years ago, Ariadne’s fifth birthday party was around the same time as King Charles’ coronation, and during the two a.m. wakeups to add something to the birthday party timetable, shopping list or to-do list, I remember thinking that whoever was in charge of the catering, logistics, and ceremonial elements of the coronation could not have been more stressed than I was about Ariadne’s birthday party.
To be fair, it was her first birthday at school, and we were still finding our place in the school community, so it was for our sakes as well as hers that we wanted to make an effort. We hadn’t really thrown birthday parties for either of them whilst they were at nursery, although we did have a Christmas party for her nursery class at our house when Ariadne was three. The children weren’t that interested in making paper robins to hang on the Christmas tree, playing pass the parcel, Christmas storytime or singing carols together, but they did make their own amusements and as we all left the house to go to our church for the family carol service, I remember turning to James and saying, “Well, that’s it. We’ll have to move.”
For Ariadne’s fifth birthday, we hired the local scout hall, set up craft tables for the children to decorate their own mugs and tote bags and stations for face painting and nail painting, ran ball games and wrote and performed a show about a musical Easter egg hunt: I dressed up in a sheep onesie and played the ukulele, a dance teacher friend taught them all a routine to “Can’t Stop the Feeling” so that they could challenge my brother and my cousin and her husband to a dance-off (they were dressed as Nefarious Pandas and learned the Gangnam-Style dance especially). We had eight friends and family members help with setting up, running the activities, preparing lunch for fifty children and their parents, and having a after-party with giant bubbles and extra Easter eggs in the park afterwards. It was all a bit much, really.
For Ottilie’s birthday, we also invited all sixty children in Reception…but it’s the Easter holidays, and so three-quarters of the year couldn’t make it. We fully outsourced the entertainment by making it a soft play party at the legitimately excellent new active play area at our local leisure centre, followed by a picnic lunch at Ottilie’s favourite playground which is just next door to it. We ordered all the food from the giant supermarket round the corner, including the rainbow cake Ottilie chose, crisps, lots of drinks, pre-made fancy sandwiches and even pre-cut fruit platters of watermelon, mango, pineapple, melon, apples and grapes. I never knew such a thing existed! We were tediously peeling and slicing fruit and vegetables into rainbow platters back when Meghan Markle was a working member of the Royal Family, and now you can just order them from Click and Collect and cart them down the road to the playground and that’s it, that’s the birthday party!
I think Ottilie actually had a great time, and we certainly did. It happened to be amazing weather, and we had the playground pretty much to ourselves, because it’s kind of a hidden gem, even though it has an unusually good set of apparatus to play on. Ottilie’s something of a monkey bars specialist (definitely not an area where she takes after me) and there’s a particularly high up set which she launches herself across with absolutely no fear, or rational assessment of risks. “Wow,” her friend’s mum said, sounding impressed. “She’s like a determined koala.”
(Last week, a different set of monkey bars, same total disregard for safety)
This post is about to take a turn, so here’s a trigger warning if you choose to read on: bereavement, death, grief)
It wasn’t just second-child syndrome that led us to take a different approach to birthday season this year. Along with both our girls, both of James’ parents have their birthdays this week as well. His father, Peter, passed away a few months ago (I wrote about his funeral here), and today would have been his eighty-sixth birthday. Six years ago we celebrated his eightieth, my mother-in-law’s seventieth, and Ariadne’s first birthday all together. Neither of them wanted a party, but we wanted to do something special for them, and I had the idea of getting Andrew, James’s oldest brother, to come and spend the weekend with us in York. He agreed, and it was the first time we were all together since Ariadne was born. Then COVID happened, and James’s parents were shielding, so Ottilie was over a year old before she met her grandparents. We managed to have two Christmases all together after Theo was born, and then last year Peter died, and then just over a month ago, Andrew died suddenly as well.
James organised the humanist memorial service, which ended up being two days before Ottilie’s birthday party, and we were grateful for the chance to celebrate Andrew’s life with his friends and family.
It’s been an unusually sunny few weeks, and a wonderful year for blossom. The trees are drifts of pink and white, and now the new leaves are starting to emerge. It’s a season of renewal, life forcing itself through the cracks, last year’s buried peonies and rhubarb returning just like last year, but slightly bigger than before. My phone shows me memories of the girls on their birthdays, a year ago, two years, five and seven years ago when they were newborns, and I think about the years before they were born, and next year and all the years still to come. Out of all the years there will ever be, we only had two as a complete family on James’s side, after all the years trying for babies and adding them one by one, before we lost Peter, and now Andrew. This year, for the first time, I realise that April contains endings as well as beginnings: joy and grief and some things being new and others being lost forever, but still a sense of hope.
Because April goes on, and as well as everything else, this week it’s Easter. For us, that means love and new life in Jesus through his resurrection after his death on the cross. It means church family coming over for roast lamb on Easter Sunday (we issued an open invitation, and are currently at twenty-two guests and counting…) and a Christian version of a Passover meal on Good Friday, where we’ll have roast lamb and flatbreads and vegetables and see if we can get Theo (2) to ask the question:
"Why is this night different from all other nights?"
Because we are mourning. Because we are giving thanks. Because we remember.
She and her now-husband are Christians, and so similarly to how James and I risked being eaten by bears rather than risk having sex before marriage, they had just got engaged when lockdown happened, and they chose to not see each other at all rather than cohabit, until weddings were legal again. Their engagement took place entirely online and over a matter of weeks, and as soon as thirty person gatherings were allowed, we met at the church for a socially distanced (and livestreamed) ceremony, and it was one of the most gorgeous weddings I’ve ever been to.