Missing Her Own Birthday Party
Newsletter 2025-05-23
Leading up to the Triple Birthday Party, we spent weeks preparing for every contingency. We wrapped presents. We ordered food. We cleaned every surface in the house, including the ones that were impossible to see. I don’t know who was going to inspect the transoms above the doors for dust, but if anyone walked in with a six-foot ladder, I was ready. We did everything in our power to give three lucky girls the perfect shared birthday experience. It never occurred to us to prepare a plan B in case one of them had to miss her own party.
Lola and I both used vacation time Friday before the party for one final surge of panic cleaning. As the kids got home from school, we enlisted them in our futile effort to make our house appear to be in livable condition. Only our oldest daughter, Betsy, was exempt. Her conference track meet was Friday night. Of all her mandatory sports events, this was the most unskippable. Her name had been submitted well in advance, and she couldn’t be swapped out. Betsy was required to compete for the honor of her school while her sisters were stuck at home doing chores. It was yet another lesson that life isn’t fair. That’s pretty much the only lesson I have to teach, which is why I’m not qualified to homeschool.
The meet was forty-five minutes away in the middle of nowhere. That’s not true. It was in the middle of cornfields, which are considered to be somewhere in these parts. If you think cornfields are lame, you never found the good parties in high school. My mission last Friday was to clean as frantically as possible from the moment I woke up until it was time to drive to the meet. Betsy insisted that I had to be there to see her run. It was Birthday Eve, so it seemed like a bad time to disappoint her. I would spend an hour and a half in total travel time to watch Betsy make two loops around the track, which would take less than three minutes. At least her event, the 4x800 meter relay, would be the first of the night. I could take off immediately afterwards and pick her up later after the bus brought her back to her own high school. That was the plan, anyway. The weather had other ideas.
According to the radar, a powerful line of storms was about to slam into the entire state. Betsy’s coach messaged track parents to let us know that, if the meet were rained out, it would be pushed to Saturday morning. It was a good thing we didn’t have anything important scheduled for that day. Oh, wait. Not only was it the day of the Triple Birthday Party, but it was Betsy’s actual birthday. Mae’s birthday wasn’t until Sunday and Lucy’s was two weeks later. It was fitting that Betsy was the only one in danger of missing the celebration. The party wasn’t something we could move. We had more than twenty people coming in from multiple states. Most of them would be there for that day and that day only, with several of them planning to depart in the early afternoon. We had ordered a party-sized quantity of food in advance that we were supposed to pick up hot and ready at precisely noon. There would be no do-over. I just had to hope the track kids did whatever it took to get the meet done that night rather than pushing it to the next day. Who cares if you have to run through a tornado? It builds character. It also might help your time if it tosses you in the right direction.
I timed my drive Friday night to get to the meet thirty minutes before Betsy was scheduled to run. It was a good thing I did. While I was still on the way there, Betsy called me to say the start time had been moved up by fifteen minutes. The storms were coming on fast. The boys’ 4x800 meter relay was scheduled to go first. They were already on the track when I arrived. Betsy and her teammates were on deck. The sky was an ominous gray. The temperature was dropping rapidly. The race official led the boys to the starting line. They took up their positions. The intercom crackled.
“Race official, please hold the runners.”
The runners held their places. I held my breath. The seconds ticked by.
The intercom crackled again.
“All athletes and spectators, please move to the school gym immediately.”
We hadn’t even made it to the start of the first event. I hustled around the side of the track and into the school. I met up with Betsy. She was still optimistic we’d get the meet done that night. I found her coach to plead my case. Betsy couldn’t miss her own birthday party the next day. The coach told me not to worry. She and the other coaches had gotten together and decided that, no matter how late the teams had to stay, they would finish the meet that night. Betsy and I weren’t the only ones with weekend plans at stake. I’ve never been so excited about the prospect of a track meet going past midnight. That wasn’t my problem. I only had to stay long enough to watch Betsy finish her two laps. If only there were a three minute break in the weather for that to happen. Surely the storms couldn’t be that bad.
The storms were that bad. After waiting in the gym for half an hour, the power abruptly went out. Girls screamed. The gym was plunged into total darkness. The meet was immediately cancelled. Our party wasn’t. It might just have one less guest of honor.
Betsy rode back on the team bus. I drove myself. It never rained particularly hard. The wind was enough to knock down some power lines, but the worst of the storm missed us by a hair. Mother Nature knew to spare that spot because it has the best party cornfields. We were rewarded with a double rainbow to show us it was nothing personal, except for the part where the weather had conspired to ruin Betsy’s life. I pondered my next move. Betsy had to be at the meet Saturday, but there was still a chance she could make it home for the party. She would just have to abandon her teammates and leave the meet early after her own event was done. Before I left the dark gym, her coach had said I could email the athletic director for permission to bring Betsy home in the middle of the meet Saturday. If the weather was good the next morning and there were no cows blocking the road, I could get her home in time for the party. While still in the van, I called Lola to draft the email. We needed to reach the athletic director as soon as possible. We were in the awkward position of begging for permission to take our own kid to our own house for her own birthday party. Parental rights are no match for high school sports.
We waited. And waited. And waited. The athletic director finally replied late Friday night. The poor guy was still checking work emails. It made me feel a little better that someone else was having a worse evening than me. He said that of course we could take Betsy home for her own birthday. She just had to stay for the team picture. The one at the end of the meet. Track meets aren’t exactly short. She would get home after the food was cold and most of the guests were gone. Perhaps someone would save her a piece of cake. At least she would have a cool photo to commemorate the day she missed her own birthday. It would absolutely create a memory, but not the one the athletic director expected. Maybe I should have been grateful. Betsy could use someone else to talk about at her future therapy sessions other than me.
I replied. You might not know this about me, but I’ve been known to use words from time to time. Was I as gracious as I could have been? Probably not. After weeks of planning and cleaning, I was less than thrilled at the prospect of my child being kidnapped by sports on the one day of the year she absolutely, positively had to be home. I made sure not to use any four letter words and not to say anything that would get me put on a watch list. Mostly, I talked about the majesty of the triple birthday party. This wasn’t some backyard shindig with punch and a pinata (although, now that I write that, I wish we had both). This was our social event of the year. It could neither be moved nor missed. The conference track meet might have been an unstoppable force, but this party was an immovable object. Something had to give.
An hour later, the athletic director replied with a single line.
