This year, for the first time in his life and ours, our son celebrated his birthday without us. We had eighteen years of golden cake adorned with red, white, and blue frosting, waving flags and cheering floats at a small town parade, and watching late-night fireworks that he, early on, thought were launched just for him. Sam, the first grandchild on both sides of his family, is a Fourth of July baby; Independence Day for our extended family recognizes both the birth of our nation and the birth of a new generation.
Somehow, I thought that we would always gather together with Sam to enjoy that symbolic moment in the same small Cape Cod town where I had spent my own childhood summers. Just days after Sam was born, his father and I drove him there for the very first time. Year after year we returned to celebrate, the beach house's kitchen drawers gradually accumulating a collection of numeric birthday candles and paper plates and napkins sporting stars and stripes.
As time went by, the presents changed but the celebration remained the same. Early breakfast, off to the parade to catch the candy thrown by the kids working at local restaurants who dressed up as giant oysters and squirted water on the tourist crowd. We cheered for kids popping wheelies on bikes decorated with streamers and playing cards. Then we would head back to the house for birthday cake, candles, and singing before a day at the beach. One year Sam received a model sailboat, another year a model rocket to launch on the beach with Dad, books, Gameboy, a transistor radio from Grandpa. Even as the teen years crept up on all of us and stole some of the easy camaraderie and silliness, Sam came, and gamely ate cake and blew out the candles, tolerating with good humor what he now informed us was a hokey small town parade.
His abrupt departure took me by surprise. Planning the nineteenth annual family gathering, I did not anticipate the absence of the birthday boy.
"I am spending the day with my friends," he told me. "We have plans."
This remark was uttered with such gravity that it was impossible not to hear it as another Declaration of Rights, complete with the not-so-subtle accusation that we, his parents, sister, and grandparents were standing in the way of his quality of life, his hard-won liberty and his singular pursuit of happiness. Perhaps he was right. So no shots were fired, and off went our Yankee Doodle in the sartorial splendor that only an eighteen-year-old boy can assemble, determined to form his own nascent republic.
Celebrating our country's struggle for freedom from the tyranny of British rule is easy from a blanket spread out on a Cape Cod beach. That long ago war seems eminently just. Yet Sam's independence leaves me unsettled. Learning to respect my son's desire for self-governance has been difficult, even though I know that it is the natural order of things and the inevitable result of good parenting. Did we levy unfair taxes? Refuse to grant him the rights we enjoyed? Perhaps--though we did these things with the best of intentions. Could we have done it any better? Maybe. Although parenting is easily misinterpreted as a template for colonial rule, we steadfastly cast our lot with the anti-imperialists: families cannot succeed as empires.
What to do now? There is no choice but to take a lesson from history's mistakes and let him go without fanfare. (Why risk another War of 1812?) I don't know where Sam will celebrate his birthday in the years to come but I know where I will be. There I stand on the sidelines of a small town parade, enduring the slow procession of antique cars, resigning myself to the spritz of water I know will squirt from some large, homegrown facsimile of a shellfish, grinning broadly at the children waving small American flags, catching the hard candies thrown by parading students, remembering the little boy for whom success once meant finding a caramel. When night comes, I will listen for the boom of the fireworks, sing patriotic songs, applauding for my country and, somewhat bemusedly, for my confident, self-reliant son.
