My son’s third birthday began more cagily than we expected. That morning he’d been reluctant to get out of bed. After weeks of being told to remember that his birthday was coming up, he now seemed hesitant and sullen. This was strange for several reasons. For one thing, we were never really sure the whole birthday message was getting through to him. Last week, we’d been telling him his birthday was ‘next week’, but since his grasp on the Earth’s movement round the sun is quite sketchy, he was still saying it was ‘next week’ the night before, as if ‘next week’ was its own, immovable point on an infinite horizon. Which it is, I guess, but there are some aspects to the gnawing infinity of spacetime I felt ill equipped to saddle him with at the time, what with all the party bags we had to organise.
But his caginess was also odd because he’s mad about birthdays, foremost his own. Like that friend of a friend who wears a white dress to your wedding, he makes it all about him any time a cake is presented. He has not yet sung happy birthday to any of his cousins without insisting that famous last line bears his own name. It’s become an in-joke in our family that each of our birthdays is also his, which is a cutesy way of accommodating his megalomaniacal urge for attention. And yet there he was, nuzzling into my chest and insisting on one more episode of Paw Patrol in bed before going downstairs for the cards and balloons he somehow intuits are about to kick everything off.
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