(This post is underwritten by the American Cancer Society, official sponsor of birthdays.)

Emilia likes birthday parties. Actually, like is an understatement. Emilia loves birthday parties, with the fiery heat of a thousand wax birthday candles and a few hundred sparklers.

But here’s the thing about Emilia’s love of birthday parties: she’s not particularly fussy about whether those parties are in celebration of her birthday, or, in fact, whether they’re in celebration of any birthday at all. She’s really pretty emphatic that a ‘birthday’ – that is, a day marking someone’s birth – is by no means a necessary condition for a celebration involving cake and balloons and such. After all, if one limited such celebrations to birthdays, one would only have a handful of reasons to throw such a celebration in any given year. So why not declare every occasion a birthday-party-worthy occasion? Can you think of even one reason why you should not?

Emilia can’t, and so Emilia celebrates everything. And I’ve kind of taken that to heart. Because she’s right that we should be celebrating everything, and that when there isn’t anything obvious to celebrate, we should be looking for those things and declaring them celebration-worthy and then lighting candles and eating cake. So it is that we have thrown parties to celebrate potty-training accomplishments, dance recitals, haircuts, rainy days and Saturdays. We celebrate every visit to Grandma’s house with a cake and balloons. We do the same whenever Grandma visits our house. We do the same whenever pretty much anybody visits our house. Because, why not celebrate these things? Who knows how long we’ll have them to celebrate? We’ve faced too many losses; we’re facing too many losses. We lost my dad. My mom had a skin malignancy, and then an aneurysm, and then failed aneurysm surgery. My stepfather battled prostate cancer. Tanner fights his own fight. Every day could bring a loss, or bring us closer to a loss.

But that’s true for everybody. You don’t have to have terminal illnesses and cancer diagnoses embedded within your family narrative in order to face loss. Everybody faces loss, because – here’s the aphorism – life is short. Too short. Too short to not celebrate. Too short to not celebrate every day.

When my father died, we threw a party with a birthday cake and balloons and cucumber sandwiches and salads and chips and pie. We had the party down by the lake that he so loved, and the kids chased balloons on the beach, and it was very much like a birthday party, because that’s what felt right. We couldn’t let that day, the day of his memorial, be one marked by sadness, because we wanted our children to understand that his life – that life in general – was something worth celebrating. So we celebrated.

Emilia refers to it often, The Day That We Threw Party Because Grandpa Went To Heaven, because for her, it stands as confirmation of her belief that every day deserves a party. Not, as it happens, because we threw a birthday-style party on a day that wasn’t a birthday, but because we threw that party too late. As she puts it, ‘it would have been a better party if we had it before Grandpa left.’ She’s right. That is the very best reason to have a party now – because the best party is the party that you throw while everybody’s here. And if that means throwing a party every day, so be it.

So. Go on. Throw that party. Not because life is short – although it is that – but because life is awesome, every part of it, and deserves to be celebrated.

(Remember how I said above that this post was underwritten by the American Cancer Society, official sponsor of birthdays? We might also say that they’re the official sponsor of more everyday parties, every day. In Emilia’s world, anyway.)

To say that we’re all pretty excited about moving to New York would be an understatement. If excitement could be measured on some sort of excitementometer, the levels in our household might cause it burst. Our household thrums with excitement. Even though we’re tripping over cardboard boxes and dealing with epic chaos and wrestling with my increasingly frequent and lengthy absences (I’m more or less resident in NYC now), we’re happy. This is an adventure. This is exciting.

That excitement, however, is not evenly distributed among everyone within the household. I’m super-excited, of course. My husband is ambivalently excited (it’s a thrilling move, but it also involves a lot of changes, and a lot of work, and does he have to give up his car, really?) Jasper is excited but doesn’t quite understand what he’s excited about. The cats are decidedly unexcited, in that decidedly unexcited way that only cats can really effect. Emilia is more excited than anyone. Emilia’s excitement throws off the entire scale of excitement in our house, because she’s excited enough for all of us, including the cats, and then some. We’re moving to the place where the Lady Statue (Statue of Liberty) is! We’re moving to the city of Curious George and Sesame Street and Annie (the movie convinced her, for better or for worse, that New York City is a place where people spontaneously burst into song and dance routines and that orphanages are kind of awesome.) We’re moving to a building with an elevator!

There are only two things that temper her excitement somewhat. One is the mild anxiety over the fact that she does not know who her friends will be. This is a very mild anxiety, however, and we’ve been been addressing it by discussing every night before she goes to sleep the amazing and exciting fact that there is a whole big city full of new friends to meet. The other is a slightly more pronounced anxiety over where is all of her stuff going to go? What will her room look like? Where will she put her favorite things? She will need to unpack her suitcase, you know (her suitcase, by the way, has been packed for about two months.) Where is Jasper’s train table going to go? Where will Toady and Teddy hang out? She has questions, and these questions and the heretofore unsatisfying answers to these questions (we’ll figure it out when we get there, sweetie) are causing her concern. But we’ve been addressing this concern. We’ve been addressing this concern with the help of IKEA.

We’ve been addressing this concern by involving her in the planning of her new room, and we’ve done this with the help of the IKEA catalogue, the IKEA Share Space, a visit to IKEA and a meal of Swedish meatballs with lingonberry sauce. She looks at pictures and I print out or tear out the ones that she likes, and then we talk about how the various things would go together and then we consult with Toady and Teddy – it will be their room too, you know – and then we do not consult with Jasper – it will also be his room, but ‘he just likes what I like, Mommy, and also his trains‘ – and then we go – we went, just the other week – to IKEA, which is, like, the mothership for kids who are designing their own rooms and playspaces and who also and not incidentally like Swedish meatballs.

And here’s what we came up with:

It’s a loft bed, because we’re moving to a loft. I’m not actually sure that it will fit in their bedroom space – height-wise, it’s fine, but it lacks a sleep space for Jasper, which means that we’d have to add a single bed somewhere, and where that somewhere is, I don’t know – so we may go with the NORDDAL bunkbed, which Emilia also approves.

Bins for clothes and toys, especially the TROFAST ones. Because bins are cooler than drawers. Drawers are for boring people, according to Emilia, who has insight into the human spirit that far exceeds her five years.

Play structures as furniture. IKEA understands children almost inconveniently well. Why have a chair in your room when you can have a slide? Seriously. (I’m undecided about the slide. Isn’t the whole city of New York a playground? Do we need a playground in the house? Emilia insists that, yes, we do, ‘because the funnest rooms are the ones that you can play in, Mommy,’ which, fair enough, but still. We’ll have to see on this one.

Emilia’s anxieties about the move have diminished somewhat, now that she has some idea of where she will put her stuff and where she will sleep and whether she will, in fact, live in a playground. So the balance of excitement/anxiety has shifted, such that the excitement level has been boosted by a factor of eleventy thousand. Which is to say, she’s bouncing off the walls. She can’t wait.

Neither can I.

(The next chapter: translating her choices into our new space, a loft in Brooklyn. Stay tuned!)

(Emilia’s new bedroom design has been sponsored by IKEA Share Space, which is a space made by and for people like you, and also Emilia. You don’t have to be an interior designer – or a five year old with strong opinions about slides as furniture – just a lover of design. As IKEA says, ‘it’s a place where you can admire rooms you like and save them. You can even select IKEA products to save to your wishlist. Get started by adding your own home, or just take a look through others. So come back as often as you’d like to inspire and be inspired!’

And then come back here and see how Emilia’s room turns out. And what our new place is like, and whether we do end up getting that slide.)

My daughter is something of a storyteller. It’s not that she lies; on the contrary, she is almost unbearably devoted to the truth, such that every single utterance made by anybody within earshot of her is deconstructed by her for the purposes of establishing the exact parameters of its bases in fact. But she does have a colorful imagination, and her fanaticism about truth doesn’t perfectly overlap with the (in her mind, perceived) divisions between reality and fantasy. Which is to say, her attachment to truth extends only so far as her imagination. You’re welcome to try to parse the contradictions there. I have tried, and failed.

She believes, for example, in fairies and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, in part because she believes that there is some evidence for their existence (lost teeth being mysteriously retrieved from beneath children’s pillows, presents left under coniferous trees in wintertime, chocolate eggs left scattered around the backyard in spring, that kind of thing.) She does not believe in unicorns, because, as she says, she’s ever seen one ‘live and in person’; I’ve countered that she’s also never seen a shark ‘live and in person,’ and yet she doesn’t doubt those, and she replied that, fine, maybe she didn’t believe in sharks, and perhaps that meant that I should take her to Sea World. Is there such a thing as a juvenile opportunistic truther? (I know, I know – is there any other kind?)

She also believes, apparently, that her Mommy and Daddy take baths together every week. (Continue reading this post at Bad Mother Confidential…)

It seems impossible that I have cause to write the words back to school in reference to my own children. Up until a few years ago, back to school meant me going back to school. Back to grad school, back to teaching, back to ivy-clogged campuses clutching old copies of Rousseau’s Emile and stacks of lecture notes. But I no longer go to school, in any capacity other than the figurative – the school of life, people! the greatest school of all! – whereas the eldest of my children does.

And Emilia is not only going to school this year, she is going back to school. She is in first grade. She is a grade schooler. There is no more playschool, preschool, kindergarten, whatever. This is the full school deal, y’all, and it is weirding me out.

How did we get from here…

… to here?

I ask you. With panging and thrumming in my heart, I ask you. How did we get here?

(Related: when did she get knobby knees? When did she GROW? SHE IS SO VERY VERY BIG. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?)

Last week, I flew across Canada to visit my mom, who’s been sick. I brought Emilia with me, because I figured – morbid creature that I am – that if anything happened to my mom, I wanted her last memories to be of her hellion granddaughter demanding more cake. I’m joking, of course. I wanted to bring Emilia because if there’s one thing that can boost my mother’s will to live, it’s watching Emilia run me into the ground. There’s a whole future of me getting a nice Emilia-sized dose of the medicine that I, as a girl, dished out to my own mother, and my own mother, quite understandably, wants to stick around to laugh at that.

Anyway.

So we flew across Canada to see my mom. Emilia likes flying across the country – she likes flying, generally – because she likes, as she says, ‘seeing what the world looks like to the moon.’ We usually keep the satellite map open on the little video screen, so that we can talk about what we’re flying over and what we just flew over and what we’re going to fly over next. It makes for interesting conversation. It makes for especially interesting conversation when Mommy’s ears haven’t popped and she’s partially deaf in one ear.

Conversation like this one, that we had on the way home… (read the rest of this post at Bad Mother Confidential. It’s totally worth it. It involves the word VAGINA.)

Once upon a time, before I had children, I expected that when I did have children, they would be smart children, and that they would excel in everything that they did, and that this is what I would want for them – to be excellent – and this is what would make me happy, as a parent. I expected a lot of things, before I had children, about what it would be like when I did have children. Some of these things were reasonable. Some were not.

Now, of course, I do have children, and they are smart children, very smart children – too smart, maybe; be careful what you wish for – and they do excel, but it is not, as it turns out, their cleverness that makes me happy, and I no longer wish that they excel in the conventional sense of doing better than their peers in all those things that matter on college admission forms. I wish, instead, that they be excellent in the ancient Greek sense of arete, ἀρετή, which is, broadly speaking, to be excellent in the fulfillment of one’s human purpose, that is, to be the very best you that you can be. It’s sometimes translated as virtue, which captures something of the spirit of the word: arete is excellence in living humanly, humanely; using, to the very best of our abilities, the things that make us human: our reason, our spirit, our heart. Bill and Ted were onto something, in other words, when they said, be excellent to each other. The best kind of excellence is the kind that is rooted in our humanity. The best kind of excellence is the kind that makes us good people.

All of which is a very pedantic way of saying: I know, now, that I want my children to be good people. And when Emilia brought home her kindergarten report card the other day, and it was filled with words like empathy, consideration, respect, kindness, and is willing to consider other opinions and alternative points of view, my heart burst with pride.

She is excelling. And I am proud.

I can still remember, vividly, the day that my father taught me to ride a bicycle. We lived at the end of a quiet suburban street lined with cherry and dogwood trees, our house set back from the cul-de-sac by what seemed to me, at age 5, to be a very long and very wide drive, perfect for small bicycles, and my dad and I spent hours there together as I circled that drive, round and round and round, on my little bike with the big training wheels. On the day that the wheels came off, we left the security of that smooth-paved drive and went out onto the street.

Dad kept his hand on my back as I pedaled down the street, and he kept it there as I pedaled back up the street, and he kept there as I pedaled down again and up again and with every pass the pressure of his hand became lighter and lighter and lighter until suddenly I couldn’t feel it there anymore, and I was flying, all on my own, and I remember that moment, I remember it keenly, that moment of sudden, terrifying, exhilarating realization that I was on my own, that I was doing it on my own, that I could do it all on my own, and I turned my head to see where he was, and he was there, of course, just some distance back, smiling as wide as I would ever see him smile, thrilled, proud, because this was something we’d done together, this thing, this getting me to be able to do this all on my own, and he was prouder of me than I was of myself, and the cherry trees and the dogwood trees flashed by me as I sped along, not looking where I was going, and it was wonderful, wonderful. And then I crashed into the bushes on someone’s lawn, and I cried.

It hadn’t occurred to me until this morning, watching my husband teach Emilia how to ride her bike all on her own, that my own bike-riding lesson with my own father summarized our relationship perfectly, that it did, in fact, summarize parenthood perfectly, if one could overlook the banality of the trope of lifting parental hands from the shoulders of the child, inasmuch as that moment – the banal lifting of one’s hand, figurative or otherwise – is in some ways the moment, the moment that stays with us, parent and child, as the moment during which everything changes and yet becomes – in the very same moment – ever fixed. I can still feel my father’s hand on my back, I can still hear his footsteps running alongside me as I pedal harder and faster, harder and faster, speeding along, speeding away. And I can still sense him there, behind me, smiling, proud, watching me go.

This is what a father gives to his daughter, what a parent gives to a child; this what I saw my husband give to our girl this morning, this encouragement to fly, this promise to always keep his hand ready to catch her, this covenant of letting go and holding on, this pact of saying goodbye and never parting. This lived promise that is family, that is love.

I can still feel my father there, I said, and that’s true. I can no longer see his smile, because he’s gone, but I know that it’s there. I can still feel his hand on my back.

Today I saw my daughter’s father put his hand on hers. This is how life goes on.

———

(If you have HBO, you need to watch or DVR this film today and share it with the dad in your life. It’s a wonderful, heart-lifting and heart-yanking meditation on fatherhood and parenthood and the love that we feel for our kids and as I said last week at the film’s HBO premiere, it’s the kind of film that reminds you of things that you didn’t think you needed reminding about. Like telling your kids that you love them. Your parents, too.

It’ll be out on video next month. I’ll remind you about it then. You’ll thank me.

Now, go hug the dad in your life.)

Here’s the kind of conversation that my husband and daughter have, apparently, while I’m away:

Emilia: “Daddy, I thought of a good name.”

Kyle: “What’s that?”

Emilia: “Mrs Poopy McFucky Pants.”

According to the email that Kyle sent me relating this story – and believe me, that is a wonderful email to get when you’re hundreds of miles away from your kids, eating room service quesadillas in a New York hotel room and worrying about whether your frequent traveling is having an adverse effect on their upbringing – there was a very long moment of silence. And then another one.

Then he asked her how she thought up that name.

“Oh, I made it up from the voice in my head that says bad things.”

There’s a part of me that wishes that she’d have answered in such a way as to indicate that she didn’t mean to say exactly what she said, that she’d actually just fumbled the pronunciation of ‘McFussy Pants.’ But then there’s the other part of me that is grateful to know for sure that, yes, she did mean to say that and that it did indeed come from ‘the voice in her head that says bad things’ (which voice I also have in my own head, so she comes by it honestly), the better to know that that she understands that the name ‘McFucky Pants’ involves some terminology that is not appropriate for use in polite company, and that that terminology retains its rhetorical force even when integrated into a proper name. And it’s also worth noting that her incorporation of the word ‘fuck’ into a proper name demonstrates, arguably, that she internalized her lessons from last year about the proper and improper uses of that word (and that there are proper uses of that word, I should remind you all, is a lesson that she taught me), and that she is able to properly apply those lessons in casual conversation, while still understanding that her views on the proper uses of the word ‘fuck’ are entirely subjective and should be flagged as such. These, I think, are things to be proud of.

And then, of course, there’s this: ‘Mrs McFucky Pants’ is kind of an awesome name.

I really kind of inclined to say that this is all win. Am I bad mother for thinking so?

There’s nothing like being away from home and getting a text from your spouse that says call me as soon as you can.

It’s about Emilia, he says when I call.

What about Emilia? I don’t know what the right words are to express, here, how shrill my voice was. ‘Shrill’ works decently well, I suppose. My voice was shrill.

She came home from school with a note. It said that she hit Madeleine, and that L and C were involved, and…

At which point I tuned out, a little, because I needed to take a moment to exhale. Everything’s okay, nothing happened to her, everything’s okay, she just hit another child. And then I had to take another moment, because wait, what? My child hit another child.

Oh god, is she a bully?

The story, as it turned out, was not at all simple. Emilia, when asked, insisted that her (older and bigger) friends had hit poor Madeleine first, and that they’d insisted that it was ‘play hitting’ and that she had to do it too or they wouldn’t be her friend anymore. And she said that she hadn’t wanted to do it, and that she’d been confused about what to do, and that she’d felt really bad about what she did, and that she said sorry to Madeleine, like, a hundred times.

But you knew that hitting was wrong, Kyle said to her. Yes, Daddy, she replied. But I’m only five, and even though I knew it was wrong I was still confused. I didn’t want them to hit me. I didn’t know what to do.

What does one do with this? Emilia is one of the youngest children in her French Immersion kindergarten class, and the youngest among the girls, girls that her teacher described to me once as ‘all Alphas, every last one of them, and more than a little bit socially aggressive.’ I hadn’t been bothered by this state of things, when Mme Santos described them to me, because she’d also told me that Emilia frequently stood up to them, and asserted her independence from them , and was unafraid to be vocal in expressing her sense of injustice. But there was still one small, nagging worry: mightn’t it serve her better if she were able to get along with at least some of them? Not if it meant following the clique, of course, but maybe she need not resist them so aggressively? Mightn’t she otherwise end up a loner, at five? And, oh god, how is it that we even have to worry about this, when she’s just five?

And now here we are, facing a situation in which – it sounds like – Emilia is being bullied into being a bully, and her vulnerability to being so bullied is stemming, apparently, from a desire to not be excluded, which is exactly what I’d worried about for her – being excluded – but it seems that I worried wrong, and that maybe she was better off excluding herself, and – again - oh god she is only five years old what does this all mean?

I don’t want her to be a mean girl. I don’t want her to play with mean girls. I don’t want her to be bullied by mean girls. I don’t want her to be a bully in order to be accepted by mean girls. I don’t even know what it means to describe 5 and 6 year old girls as ‘mean girls.’ Maybe it’s not even fair to describe 5 and 6 year old girls as ‘mean girls,’ when they are, really, still just so young and still learning what means to navigate a social landscape and to move ethically and civilly within that landscape, to abide by the rules and norms of their own community and the larger community, and also to recognize when some or the other of those rules and norms are unjust.

Then again, children can be assholes. Emilia has her tyrannical impulses. It would be naive of me to assume that children her age aren’t – it would be naive of me to assume that she isn’t – capable of social tyranny. The question is, are they capable of understanding the implications of what they’re doing? Hannah Arendt insisted that Adolf Eichmann was not a monster, but that he was, perhaps, a clown; an ignorant man. Small children, likewise, are not monsters – honey badger jokes aside – nor are they clowns. But they lack developed faculties of critical reasoning, moral or otherwise, and they are as vulnerable as anyone – perhaps more vulnerable – to lapses of judgment under conditions of fear. As Emilia put it, she’s only five. Sorting through the nuances of right and wrong in the context of highly charged social dynamics – to say nothing of, in the context of social fear – can be challenging for grown-ups, never mind kindergartners.

Hannah Arendt insisted that “under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.” I want my daughter to be among the latter. I want my daughter to be the sort of person who puts her own fears aside when faced with the kind of choice that she faced the other day; I want my daughter to be the sort of person who is willing to risk exclusion and bullying to protect someone else. It breaks my heart that she’s facing these dilemma now. It breaks my heart because it seems that she isn’t ready for them. It breaks my heart that she failed one of her first tests. It breaks my heart that I call this – this struggle, this lesson – failing, and that I judged her for it.

She’s still so small. And it’s such a big, complicated world.

I want to guide her well. I’m so frightened that I might fail.

(Please note, all, that I am not suggesting in the title to this post that my daughter is like Adolf Eichmann. I’m suggesting that the problem of bullying involves some Eichmann-ish dynamics, and, more to the point, that Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann and the so-called banality of evil applies to how we might understand the sometimes disturbing moral character of the playground, to say nothing of the politics of that playground. Which is NOT to say that all children turn into Nazis the minute they form tribes in such spaces. It’s just to say that any analysis of good and evil therein is complicated. See also: William Golding, George Orwell.

It’s also worth noting that I’m overthinking this. But that’s what I do.)

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.

- Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

For filing under Things That You Probably Didn’t Know And Didn’t Think To Ask: all five year olds are fundamentally Nietzschean.