My Son’s Birthday Cake
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My son was turning 12 back in a previous century and we were having his party at the local roller skating rink. Do they even have roller skating rinks any more? Whatever, that’s where it was going to be. A few days before the party my boy asked me what sort of cake I was going to make for him and I said that had to remain a secret and if I told him then I’d have to kill him.
“No, seriously Mom, I want to know. You make jokes all the time and my friends are going to be there and I don’t want them to laugh at me.”
Now some mothers would say, “Aww, of course I’d never embarrass you, sweetheart, you have nothing to worry about,” but that wouldn’t be me, now would it? I told him that it remained a secret til his birthday.
The very next day and a day and a half before his birthday he and a friend got into some mischief that included using some of his dad’s tools, a knife that had been put away “til you’re older,” and a very rickety treehouse in the woods behind our house. My kid would be the one who climbed as high into the tree as he could but then couldn’t figure out how to get down. His friend came running into the house saying we needed to call the fire department to get Al out of the tree.
I said, “He’s not a kitten! If he got up he can get down.”
Off I went in pursuit of my firstborn. There he was looking like a frightened koala at the top of the tree sobbing his heart out.
All I could say was, “You little shit, whatever prompted you to climb that high??”
It took about an hour but I talked him down and never got close to calling the fire department.
So on his birthday, this is what his cake looked like. Sort of. I found this photo on the net because after all these years, the photos of the cake are long gone but the memory will stay with all of us for a lifetime.
He saw the cake, remembered his horrible ordeal and knew that he and I would be close forever. And we are.If he was embarrassed by the cake it didn’t show. I overheard him talking with his best friend David saying, “yeah, my mom’s cool.”