On the First of January this year, I was rudely awoken from my really, really short date with my pillow by a very excited Damini:
“Amma…what is it?”
“What is what?”
“It is January!” [Duh!]
“Okay” [Can I sleep?]
“Next is February!”
“…Right”
“And then March, April, May, June, July and……”
“…and what?”
“AUGUST… it’s my
birthday!”
She had figured out that it was “next year”, which meant that she was finally allowed to start the count down to her birthday, which is on the 12th of August.
Damini lives from one birthday to the next: no sooner is one
birthday over than she has already started planning for the next one. This is
an intense process as it involves the guest list, the menu, the type of cake, and
the presents.
She usually likes to repeat the previous birthday’s agenda.
Lately however, she has begun to lift ideas from other peoples’ parties.
For instance, her sister’s friends painted the wall of her
study for her 18th birthday. This really caught Damini’s fancy and she
decided that for her next birthday, her school friends would paint her room too. This was 3 years ago. Three parties later, the
ceiling is the only blank surface remaining.
There is now an anticipation of the presents: anything she likes and is denied by her parents is put on the wish list. There are a few items in there that have been hanging around for a while: a guitar and a mike [to add to the drums given to her a couple of years ago], and a couple of movies we do not think is suitable for her to watch, but most of her demands are otherwise reasonable.
As for the food, the table has to be groaning with it. Left
to her it would probably resemble a wedding feast!
The concept of birthday has slowly evolved over the last 15
years.
The first 3 years was pretty much us parents celebrating for
ourselves. Most of the guests were our friends and their kids. Damini had no
conception of what was going on, and I’m sure no memories of it either.
Then came pre-school and along with it a flurry of birthday
parties to attend. And there is a sequence of events associated with these
parties…
§
You wear party clothes and carry a gift
§
Wish the birthday boy or girl
§
Then there are games to be played, organized or
not
§
The ceremonious cake cutting and the singing and
the blowing of the candles
§
Food! The most popular elements always being the
cake and the chips.
§
Grab your return gifts [a really unnecessary
practice] and go back home.
Damini managed to grasp the formula over the next 5 years
and realized that her birthday was when she got to cut the cake and get gifts.
She began understand and enjoy the fact that she was the most important person
on that day. Other than the cake and chips, the food didn’t get much attention.
She simply could not understand games and would either watch from the sidelines
or would do her own thing.
But we took her to every party barring illness, simply
because we wanted her to have as much exposure to big social situations as
possible. As well as the opportunity to watch kids interact in groups.
Damini started looking forward to her birthdays along when
she realized that they were a recurring event. However, the distinction between
when it was her birthday and when she was at someone else’s was still unclear.
As a result, she expected to be sung to and cut the cake at every birthday
party she attended. Some people were okay with that [mainly adults] and some
were not. These are also instances when other kids would think her strange for
not understanding something so elemental.
It took her a couple of years, but she finally learnt to distinguish between her birthday and the others, that when she was called for a party, that day belonged to someone else. However her conception of time had not evolved to the extent of understanding that a year lies between one celebration and the next. She couldn’t understand why we could not simply celebrate her birthday whenever she felt like it. Our reiterations that her birthday was on august 12th didn’t really help much.
“My birthday is on august 12th“
It took another year before the calendar began making sense to Damini. We would constantly list off all the months between one August and the next to give her an idea of a year. She learnt all the months easily enough but thought they could be manipulated or completely dispensed with altogether. Whenever she got impatient with time she would say something like “OK, enough January”, or whichever unfortunate month it happened to be.
The way we ultimately taught her how to comprehend the
months of the year was stumbled across quite by accident. We began populating
the year with birthdays of everyone she knew and liked, starting with our
(myself and her father’s) birthdays, her sister’s and the pet’s. They became
the landmarks to cross before her next big day. So she would count her father’s
birthday in October, her mothers in November, her sister’s in March, Frodo [the
dog] in July and then…her birthday in August.
When we found this working, we started adding other birthdays to the list. That was not too difficult given the size of our clan and our circle of friends. This is an activity that Damini really looks forward to. Now, she asks people for their birthdates and adds them to the list. And she does not forget a single one.
The concept of the birthday allowed her to grasp the idea of
time.
The only little bit that remains to be fit in is the
original idea behind the birthday…that of coming into existence.
I guess we will find a way to that too.
