Party Planner Extraordinaire

By Adrienne Garrison
@adrie.garrison

It started with chocolate chip cookies. We were saying goodbye to some friends when I heard my daughter call out, “And don’t forget! The Chocolate Chip Party is tomorrow!”

“The Chocolate Chip Party?” I asked, as we walked to the car.

“Yep. They're going to come over and we’ll make all the chocolate chip things: cookies, pancakes, muffins. We’ll play games and the prizes will be chocolate chips. We’ll wear hats shaped like chocolate chips!” She waved her hands in the air as she spoke, full of all the enthusiasm a 5-year-old with a big imagination can muster. “It’s going to be amazing!”

“Wow, babe. That sounds … ” and here I had to think of a word that was affirming without necessarily promising, “like such a fun idea! I’ll have to think how I can make that work for you … ” Outside, obviously, and maybe I can just grab a box of those mini-chocolate chip muffins? Every element of this endeavor made me feel tired to my core and also deeply sad that nothing is simple anymore. I am not the woman I was twenty-odd months ago, the mom whose yes was expected.

Luckily, she never brought up the Chocolate Chip Party again. She moved on—to bigger ideas.

In the lamplight, her fine blond hair curtained her face. She quietly sounded out each word and wrote them in capital letters on a stack of hot pink post-its at my desk. Folding the laundry, I was lost in my own thoughts, wondering when we might return to church, debating asking the babysitter to come an extra night the following week while my husband was traveling for a conference. Finally, every sock had a match, and I sat down on the bed to ask her what she was working on.

“Oh, just the invitations for The Big Jig.” 

“What’s The Big Jig?” I asked, a smile forming at the edges of my mouth.

“There’s lots of dancing. I mean, a lot of dancing. And loud music and good food.” She pointed to the stack of carefully folded post-it notes and read off the names written on each one. “Tomorrow, I’m going to deliver this to our neighbors, Miss Penny and Mr. David. I have one for Drew and Luke, too.” I picked up the invitation for “Luck” and nodded. 

“Well honey, we’re not really doing big gatherings right now. Remember?” 

“I know,” she mumbled. “Because the coronavirus.” 

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I love your ideas. Your parties sound like so much fun. We’ll figure something out, I promise.” 

It turned out that being a wet blanket had consequences. The next invitation I discovered was addressed to me, written in her signature all-caps and spelled phonetically: Der Mom I think you are invidid to the piknik. I never heard the final verdict, but by the following week I knew I was restored to the top of the guest list when I received written word that her “Lonch Party,” was happening in “5, 4, 3, 2, 1.” I popped into her room to see her careening through space on her tiny desk chair, shouting orders to her “first mate” little brother who was too busy jumping on her bed (or “bouncing on the moon”) to listen.

To say that the stakes were high for her upcoming birthday would be an understatement. Weeks in advance, I came up with a list of party themes that might be suitable outside in the pre-winter grey of the Midwest. Somewhere covered, in case of rain, but still open-air … I settled on a limestone shelter at a state park nearby, complete with a fireplace and picnic tables. The only problem? It couldn’t be reserved in advance during the off-season.

“You’ll just have to be the first one to get here that day,” they told me when I called the park office. 

I imagined myself shivering as I hurriedly tacked down plastic table cloths in the near dark of 8 a.m. for a party that wouldn’t begin until 2 in the afternoon. 

“No problem,” I told them, more resolved than I felt. So many things have been lost this last year, but not this. I couldn’t bear it. I ordered the invitations and Penny added tiny fairy stickers to the envelopes. 

“Read it again,” she asked. “One more time, to make sure.”

I cleared my throat dramatically: “Dearest gnome and fairy friends, You are invited to Penny’s Magical Woodland Birthday Party.” 

“And it will really be in the woods?” she asked.

“Yep. In the woods.”

“And you bought gnome hats for the boys?”

“With beards, even,” I told her, delighted.

She wasn’t so sure. I couldn’t bear to ask whether it was because so many plans had been cancelled that had become hard to even hope, or if she was disappointed that I’d taken the reins on the party planning. We dropped the invitations into the mailbox and waited for November. 

Six months ago, it had been easy to imagine a trip to Disney World for her birthday. My husband and I had anticipated her first glimpse of the Magic Kingdom and our son’s interactions with his “best friend,” Mickey Mouse. We’d spent most of 2020 and early 2021 close to home and imagined that, surely, by the second half of 2021 we would be back to normal. But by October, I could barely remember what “regular life” was even like. In bed at night, these heartaches fluttered over my head like moths. Small and harmless in and of themselves, but cumulatively, a dark cloud. 

There is power in being able to name these disappointments, to be able to point to the milestones that were missed and lament, to say to a friend or a therapist: It isn’t meant to be this way. There has been so much about these last few years that has been easier with young children. No real awareness of friends who might be doing life differently, only a fuzzy memory of how things used to be, no FOMO or online schooling to manage or big worries to navigate—at least not that they can tell me about. And that is the unease I feel as I filed Penny’s latest party announcement into a careful stack on my desk: Where is the pain that I cannot see? What is the ache she cannot name? How can I redeem the collective losses of dreams deferred and hopes extinguished? Especially when I am not the woman I was when this all started: The “Yes Mom”, planner at the ready, eyes scanning the horizon for new possibilities.

On the day of the party, I pulled out of my garage into a grey haze, a light rain blurring my windshield. Heat blasting, I fiddled with a few different podcasts and albums before giving into silence on the drive to the park. It seemed absurd to be out in the cold, “planting a flag” in an outdoor shelter on a dreary day in November when the predicted high temperature was 40°. I shook my head, realizing the unlikelihood of competition for such a space, but unable to let one more thing slip through my fingers. Entering the park was like slipping into another world. The trees stretch over me, bright against the steely sky, still—inexplicably— holding onto their leaves. When I arrived at the shelter, I was startled to realize that the space was even more beautiful than I remembered, enclosed in the forest, perfect for a gathering of hearty little woodland gnomes and fairies. Some small, residual optimism welled up with the thought: Maybe everything I’ve been calling an inconvenience could also be a gift. It’s quiet enough that I can hear the waterfall a quarter-mile away. 

Later that day, somewhere between “Pin the Wand on the Fairy” and bottling “Pixie Potion,” I caught sight of my daughter, cheeks rosy, sprinting in and out of the trees, wild and perfectly at home in a pack of friends. I ladled some steaming cider into a mug and settled in by the fire to catch up with a friend of my own. It’s more than just parties and milestones we’ve missed, I’ve realized. Its community, togetherness, pausing to celebrate these small moments that become the lives we love to live.