Birthday Magic
August is birthday month in our family and this weekend kicks off the first of four birthdays. Our son, Rafe, has already started the festivities with a big sleepover at his grandparents’ house. Though we missed him, it provided us with more time to prepare our home for the big day. Plus, we know he had a blast!
It got me thinking back to the magic of holidays when I was a kid. I’m sure he has a grasp on the idea of us getting the house ready for the party. But there are hundreds of little details that go into this sort of undertaking. Most of which he will never know about.
Because it isn’t just decorating. There are conversations to be had with neighbors, arranging for seating and guest lists. There’s cleaning, raking, trimming and organizing the yard. The pool had to be emptied and cleaned. The cupcakes had to be baked. The balloons had to be purchased weeks in advance, shipped here and filled, organized and arranged. There were a few other extra expenses of our time and money that we poured into this big day, to offer him a truly special experience. Still, he may never know how much thought and energy his mother put into it (while pregnant and nauseous I might add). And he may never know how much sweat I offered in the heavy lifting.
And that’s okay.
Parents do this sort of thing. This annual magic that we create behind the smell of vanilla drifting from the kitchen. Parents can instantly recall the years of baking, wrapping, and writing cards. Years of buying and building, hiding gifts and decorating while the kids are asleep.
Parents often create magic.
What is magic, anyway?
I’ve thought about the ways that word has been used in my life.
We sometimes use it to mean the “unexplained”. Sometimes we use it to describe the fantastic. But I think mostly we use it in a similar sense to the way we use the word “liturgy”. It’s an act; an engagement of something intangible by someone with knowledge of it.
Magic, I think, is what happens in the space between the human mind and the invisible.
We might picture a stage magician, using illusions to project his reality-defying trade. As adults, we carry a measure of skepticism with us, and assume it’s all an act. Children, typically, are for more open to the existence of magic. They have not yet had their illusions and sense of wonder impaired by disappointment and failure. Children see the hand movements, hear the “Abracadabra” and recognize wonder.
From where my kid is sitting, magic appears to be what happens between the human magician and the invisible world he apparently manipulates. He is the druid, the priest, the shaman; his prophecies of guessed cards prove his power. And children, trusting souls that they are, have no trouble believing them. That automatic trust is something I think about a lot, too; I think that’s part of what Jesus meant when he said “Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
But make no mistake, children always have questions. They want to know the how, why, and where the flowers came from. Can you blame them? How do you not question the miracle worker? Imagine the questions Jesus must have gotten from the kids who piled around him. Indeed, Rafe has asked me before what the difference is between miracles and magic. My answer (“beats me, dude”) was not satisfactory for him at all.
Children crave all the answers, but before they begin their interrogation about the how, they instantly begin to fill in the answers from their own imagination. It’s really something to listen to. And parents step into this role far more often than our kids realize. The great thing about magicians is that it’s always a show. Mom and dad may not be pulling a pigeon out of thin air, but our magic isn’t a one time experience either. Ours is an all day, every day, so-mundane-that-you-can-smell-the-Pinesol-on-it sort of magic.
We are the magicians who work quietly, secretly, and invisibly while our kids sleep. My wife is the alchemist who magically turns a dozen or so ingredients into chocolate cupcakes and cream cheese icing. Think about laundry; they leave their socks lying in the garage and next thing they know, it’s clean and folded in their room. Most of the time they don’t even notice it, because these little magic tricks happen constantly. We don’t want to burden kids with the work behind the magic; ‘just let them play’, we say. We remember being unburdened, and realize now how our parents made that happen.
Our brand of magic clears the way for our children to dance through this difficult world with blinders on. It encourages the shape-shifting of their own character into whoever they want to be on a given day. How can my five (soon to be six) year old pretend to be a robot or a knight if he’s burdened by the knowledge of everything that’s going on behind the scenes?
So let’s let the magic be magic. Let’s allow the veil of the imagination to grant our kids the freedom we might not have anymore. The freedom to play, uninhibited and unbothered.