One calculation in measuring the success of a surprise birthday party is fairly simple: the level of apparent surprise at the exact moment of the intended surprise. For those lined around the room uniformly hollering the surprise, it is the look on the face of the birthday person that reveals all.
When this occasion visited me on Saturday evening I utilized the limited skills one accumulates for such rare events in an attempt to look surprised. I picked up the mail in one hand, appearing to look down at it, as I walked into the ambush stridently. However I was somewhat genuinely surprised to be physically attacked by a dozen kids armed with large balloons. That detail I could not have envisaged.
I knew this whole thing was coming. It was my birthday weekend. I was not sure of the time and place, but the whole affair had been confessed to me, in whisper, some days earlier.
It was probably the power of intimating with parent that drove Havana to lean into her daddy and confide that “they are doing something for your birthday, it’s a Secret.” By bringing me into the conspiracy of the surprise I was concurrently excluded from the actual surprise.
It would have been justified to be mad at Havana. But there are many occasions when a child of diminutive vocabulary makes a parent with more vocabulary, feel short of words. This was one such moment.
I didn’t have much time to figure out how to respond. Without much thought I stopped on the sidewalk, leaned down to my daughter, and eye to eye whispered back to her. “In a couple of years your Mom will be forty. I will be organizing a surprise party for her. Won’t that be nice? However, I will not be telling you about it because it will be a bloody secret.”
She grinned back at me, “too late Daddy, ‘cause now I already know!”
Thus the parent-to-kid life lesson of this story, tossed clumsily at my daughter, made no impact before it was summarily returned so fast as to leave me once again speechless. Unsurprisingly.
