Happy Birthday Mama

Yesterday was my mother’s birthday; born December 6, 1928, she would have been 81 if she were alive today. She was 63 when she died in 1991. Her favorite story to tell was sitting in the movie theater in Baton Rouge on Third Street with several of her girl friends who gathered to celebrate her 13th birthday, December 7, 1941, sixty-eight years ago. In the middle of the movie, that afternoon, the manager stopped the movie and told the audience that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Later President Roosevelt called that day, “A date which will live in infamy.”

For my mother, it did, as she never celebrated her birthday again without remembering the attack on Pearl Harbor the next day. In fact, what became even stranger was that we often made her birthday celebration a two-day event. She always felt cheated that they couldn’t finish the movie and so my father would make a special dinner for us or take my mother out to dinner on December 6th and then on December 7th we kids would bake and decorate a cake for her and give her presents. We hoped it would make up for her missing that birthday party in 1941.

It was a little thing and when you think about it now, kind of stupid for her to hold such a grudge, but you would have to understand this woman, my mother, who lived a charmed life as a child; pretty, smart, pampered, popular, and loved by all. Then once she became an adult and felt her life was not worth living, she spent the majority of it inside the bottle of cheap whiskey trying to will her life away. And we as her children along with our father who adored her used any mechanism we could find to bring the happy, healthy and whole Anna Marie back to life.

So if celebrating her birthday for two days worked, we did it. Not to say, we didn’t mourn the loss of so many Americans that fateful day, but saving our mother was more important at the time and so in honor of those men and women who lost their lives in the attack on Pearl Harbor, I say thank you for giving your lives for your country. And to my dear mother, I say Happy Birthday….the cake’s in the oven.