When I Turned Six, My Birthday Was on Mother’s Day

One of my more memorable birthdays was my sixth one. Public school kindergarten was far in the future for Texas 5-year-olds, so I hadn’t started school yet. But I did know several neighborhood kids, and I wanted to invite them all.

Mother was a well-organized, careful party planner. We had a good-sized backyard and while you can’t rely on Texas weather, we’d had good luck in the past. She planned lots of games and had prizes ready. A friend was making a cake that had a doll in the center and frosted so that it looked like the doll was wearing a cake dress. My new red and white dotted Swiss birthday dress was ready.

Then, a giant problem. An uncle died suddenly, and Mother and Daddy had to be away on party day. Here’s the first and foremost memorable thing, and I didn’t appreciate this until many, many years later: Mother’s friends stepped up and supervised that party, just as it had been scheduled. Maybe they’d already agreed to help, but they came in and did it all for her. For me.

This led to another much appreciated memorable moment. Mother’s idea was that if you were the birthday honoree, then you couldn’t win prizes at the games. In other words, if I was the only one who got the donkey’s tail any where near the big  red X on his rear, too bad, no prize for me. If I dropped twice as many clothes-pins into the milk bottle as anyone else, congratulations, but no prize for me. Much to my amazement and delight, Mother had not shared that philosophy with her friends. That birthday, if I won, honey, I got the prize! And all the birthday gifts! (FYI-those games were played over and over again, so lots of prizes were awarded, to lots of kids.)

But far and away the longest-remembered family story from that birthday involved the friend who took the responsibility of photographer.

This is the kind of camera we had. That part on the top of the camera was usually down and flush with the top. When you wanted to take a photo, you flipped it up and looked down into the camera. There was a mirror in there, behind that top, larger hole. It worked something like a kid’s periscope works; you looked down and you could see, reflected in the mirror, what was in front of the camera. So you could position the camera to get the shot you wanted. Then you would click the shutter, which was down in that smaller hole at the bottom, and the film would be quickly exposed, taking the picture, and then you would advance the film (manually, if you can BELIEVE it!), and be ready to take the next photo.

So, the party’s happening. Kid are there, games are going on, the weather’s nice (well, it seems like there was a pretty gusty breeze blowing through the yard), and one of Mother’s friends is happily snapping pictures. After a few shots, I finally noticed her. I went over and said, “You’re holding the camera wrong.” I was pretty sure about that, because Daddy always took lots of pictures, and I knew she was looking down into the front of the camera instead of into the top. The mirror, of course, worked both ways. So, she was able to look in the front and see the reflected action out the top of the camera. She could position the camera to see what she wanted to take, but when she clicked the shutter … . Well, you’ve probably figured out what happened. When we got the photographs developed, there were lots of party pictures, and several photos of Mother’s happy friend, smiling delightedly into the the camera’s lens, as she snapped (or, thought she snapped) pictures of my party.

A true friend loves regardless of the situation,

Proverbs 17:17a (The Voice)

Last week, Sarah sent me a link to a blog post by Christian writer Rachel Held Evans. She writes about Proverbs 31 and shares what a Jewish friend explained to her: “Ahava repeated a finding I’d discovered in my research, that the first line of the Proverbs 31 poem—“a virtuous woman who can find?”—is best translated, “a woman of valor who can find?” (The Hebrew is eshet chayil, “woman of valor”; the male equivalent is gibor chayil, “man of valor.”)  To make this fact even more fun, Ahava explained to me that she and her friends cheer one another on with the blessing, celebrating everything from promotions, to pregnancies, to acts of mercy and justice, to battles with cancer with a hearty “eshet chayil”! (Think of it as something like the Jewish “you go girl.”)”

Our lives are full of these women, sometimes obviously in front of us, others times at the edges, in the background, quietly doing what needs to be done. So today-eshet chayil to my mother’s friends, who stepped in when she needed them.

Rachel Held Evans’ blog