A typical birthday party checklist for a 6 year old may likely include the following: a party, a cake, music, games, presents, wrapping paper for presents, a ribbon for the wrapping paper and a bow for the wrapping paper and a gift tag for the wrapping paper (does make you wonder what we are doing), spare batteries, more presents, jelly, singing, expectations….. This was more of a chuck list for us this year. But save the jelly.
We walked into it with poorly-restrained excitement that SEND parents can be very forgiven for having in the still early-ish years, when their baby is getting bigger again. It might all go really well! It’s just a small family party. We just want her to know we love her. As if the hyper focused, nuanced observations and adjustments to her comfort every single day don’t illustrate this; the highly tuned lens to every flicker and change of feeling when we walk into a new place with unusual sounds and bright lights. The thousands of micro adjustments made throughout the day, every day and nights too, the dark hours we have come to know too well; 2, 3, 4 and 5am.
This week has been about us making some mistakes and re-learning some of the basics that we think we have nailed being SEND parents. Sometimes we get carried away. Even knowing everything that we do, we project and expect and this basically confuses and scares our little girl. And being scared and confused are big feelings for a newly turned six year old who is already trying to make sense of this world, this beautiful but very weird world. We are reminded, once again, that we can’t walk into these things on autopilot, thinking conventionally, automatically. Nora doesn’t want the noise, the fanfare, the faces searching hers for exhilaration and matched excitement, like she could ever possibly put her little feet into our big adult shoes and fully understand this moment and the positioning of it in the overall stretch of a lifetime and whatever that means.
It is a day of multiple misunderstandings, never resolved but, eventually dissolved. The loosely themed very hungry caterpillar decorations, jelly toppers and hanging lanterns - made in the late hours after getting her to sleep - that are scattered around the house suddenly reveal an expression of equal bewilderment like what were you thinking. As the showstopper Patisserie Valerie cake, so grand in it height and presentation reveals a fragile sponge slowly falling in on itself, we too quietly and inwardly collapse. We pick ourselves up, mentally shuffling an inch closer to Monday, where routine awaits and some kind of peace and stability will be restored.
But first, Sunday. We take our wee triangle to Ikea to get some tables for my Patch Works studio ahead of 3 parents coming over the next day. Who knew that Ikea had shades of pink, orange , green and purple too. A rainbow moment after the storm of the day before. It’s a success. We make it around their assault course, pick up the boxes we need. We celebrate with hot dogs and fries and Nora sits on the table and has a smile bigger than their queues. I cup my hand and whisper “I love you” in her ear and she likes the sensation of the whispering sound. She does it back. She eats her chips dry but notices - she notices everything - that I jam mine into a small pot of ketchup. She picks a chip up and slowly dips it and then holds it up to my mouth. Tastiest chip I ever ate. This feels better than a birthday party which all its expectations ever could. When we pack up the car we realise we have been slightly ambitious with the multiple long boxes and the space we have available. No matter; Kev embraces the challenge, tearing away the cardboard, making minor adjustments - like we are learning to do in so many other ways. He stands back, arms folded, nods with his usual optimism and confirms that Hanora will need to sit in the front of the car on the way home. This might be the cherry on the top of her version of the birthday cake. She is Daddy’s sidekick on the motorway. Is it a rollercoaster, a video game, a hey Duggee badge she is earning, or just a content moment. Or all the above. She chomps on chips and occasionally turns around to confirm that I am indeed sitting in the spot she usually sits in. Her eyes are big and curious and she is ok in this moment.
And so the weekend ends on an unexpected high. Perhaps because we all felt emotionally exhausted and didn’t we didn’t put any pressure on it. Thoughts turn to Monday. While the weekend resolved itself, I do long for a moment to myself, to let a thought percolate.
Once I have dropped Nora at school, I get home and tidy up some of the breakfast chaos and then I unlock the door to the little sewing studio at the end of our house. And it’s just me and bags of salvaged fabrics with their beautiful noise and vibrancy. Remnants, scraps, discarded, no-longer-needed, someone’s-trash fabrics. I can make sense of them. I find myself hacking away at all the pink and red flowered fabrics, making squares and then triangles and putting them together to make something that might make sense to me on some level that probably only me and my crazy sleeping brain might understand. The red florals cut through the pink like a deconstructed heart reassembled without the instructions. It doesn’t look like what everyone understands a heart shape to look like, that symmetrical simplified shape we have in our minds when we hear the word but there are hints of it. But that's what I see, maybe someone else will see something different - the beauty of patchwork.
Now our baby is six. This small number never seemed so big. It’s frightening but if I can remember to shake off these life-long acceptances of what these numbers and shapes should look like, what speech should sound like, what birthdays should look like, when you should be a caterpillar and when you become your butterfly, I know I will be speaking Nora’s language and we will be ok in that moment.