It’s spring, and birthday party season is upon our household, time again for my outrageous acts of culinary cluelessness.

A few years ago, you may recall, I regaled my daughter Julia and her friends with flat-as-a-pancake profiteroles.

This year, at Emilie’s request, I made poulet à l’estragon (tarragon chicken in our house) for a noisy gathering of 11.

This would not, for most people, be any kind of particularly heroic act. After all, any idiot can roast a chicken — even three chickens, as I was convinced I had to do — add some potatoes and whisk some crème fraîche into melted fat.

But I am not just any idiot and cooking, for me, under the best of circumstances, is always a kind of adventure sport, fraught with mystery and peril. This year, the mystery was how to cook three chickens simultaneously. The peril lay in fitting all three into the oven in parallel. The excitement came when one burst into flames and scorched its accompanying potatoes. The other two birds sort of steamed their way toward doneness.

Why this happened, I do not know. It is not given to me to know such things.

As the night progressed, though, and the revelers settled down to watch a movie, and I lay down, exhausted, on the couch to attempt to read the paper, I was visited by a revelation.

I closed my eyes and first saw leaden cream puffs. I heard the voices of Times readers, particularly those who have on occasion scolded me for jumping through silly and unnecessary hoops to secure my children’s happiness.

Here you go again, I thought. Nothing ever changes.

Except that, in that tired moment, something did. I realized that I was happy. Not crazed, not self-indulgently wretched, not spinning in neurotic circles of perfection-seeking or self-flagellation, just happy. Just as I’d always been when I’d succeeded in making my daughters’ quirky, creative birthday party fantasies come true.



It’s hard to write about, even admit to, simple happiness. It feels somehow indecent. Embarrassing. Immodest. Inappropriate as a topic of conversation for intelligent people.

What I’m trying to get at is, I suppose, some variation of Tolstoy’s observation about happy families, which always makes for a nicely quotable sentence but is, perhaps, wrong.

Perhaps happiness is interesting, because it isn’t, in fact, simple, or uncomplicated. Perhaps the real thing isn’t just a Hallmark card sentiment.

For me, I realized in that moment, happiness is inextricably bound up in striving. In straining for achievement, of whatever kind. In having a challenge and making it to the other side.

It doesn’t much matter what the challenge or object of achievement is. If none is obvious, one always presents itself.

Last Thursday night, for example, I finished writing my book on children’s mental health issues. The one, you may or may not know, that was due in September 2005.

Coming up the steps to my house late that evening, I felt as if I could float, such a weight of stress and worry and long-term self-doubt had been lifted.

“You even look different,” one of the mothers dropping off her daughter for Emilie’s party said to me.

But in fact I was not different at all. Thursday was the book. Friday was the chicken. Saturday morning dawned with the thought that it was perhaps a good time to lose 10 pounds. On Sunday, I was plagued by the certainty that I’d never get that done, and on Monday I met with my editor and learned that I had to rewrite the book’s first 149 pages. And I was saved. Lifted out of darkness, I was on the road to happiness once again.

There are high roads of this kind and there are low roads. In the grand scheme of things, is it really such a bad thing to throw yourself into creating slightly over-the-top holiday happiness for your kids? There are much more self-destructive ways to burn off that particular kind of psychic energy.

The pride of having your children think you can cook, and well enough that they want to show you off to their friends on their most important dinner of the year, is, I now think, a forgivable sin. A permissible pleasure. Perhaps some kinds of self-indulgence are healthy.

Speaking of pleasures and sin and surprisingly healthful practices: This year, drunk on the awareness of my happiness, I threw all caution to the wind and suggested, when the movie ended 10 minutes before parents were scheduled to arrive, that Emilie open her presents. In the presence of her friends.

This brought a look of shock from Emilie — Mommy, really, I never would have thought this of you! — and utter jubilation from her guests, who gathered around her and then fell into place, their raucousness suddenly silenced by the seriousness of the proceedings.

Don’t you remember this solemn ritual from childhood? The circle, with all eyes on the birthday child as he or she opened gift after gift? There was lots of angst associated with these moments: would your gift be appreciated? Would the birthday child have it already? Would some gifts be liked more than others? Would someone — shame of shames — have forgotten to bring one?

This is just the sort of angst we’ve now sterilized out of childhood. Increasingly, my children attend birthday parties at which gifts not only aren’t opened, but aren’t permitted at all. Sometimes there’s a suggestion of making a donation to charity.

I’ve always found this sort of sad, and watching Emilie’s friends clustered around her, ooh-ing and ah-ing about the gifts and squeezing in until they were elbow-to-elbow in solidarity, I realized that it truly was a pity.

Every card, hand-made or store-bought, was painstakingly removed, read out loud and admired.

“What beautiful hand-writing,” I heard Emilie say.

Every effort was taken to preserve the gift wrapping.

“What a beautiful ribbon.”

Emilie’s friends had tailored their gift choices to Emilie’s interests and obsessions. If they had not seen her open the presents, I realized, their pleasure in giving simply wouldn’t have been complete.

It was, for me, another little lesson in happiness, one that should perhaps lead us to question the current politics of birthday party gift-giving.

It’s easy, for parents at least, to turn away gifts. The prospect of all that stuff is associated with a loss of control — like the idea that some less advanced soul will feed your child junk food on a play date. I fully empathize with parents who live in small spaces and are already being crowded out by their kids’ possessions. But there’s a message that comes through the no-present policy — I don’t want your junk cluttering up my house — that isn’t, let’s say, warm and fuzzy.

We’re very big these days on teaching our children self-control. We make a virtue of scorning self-indulgence. But there is, perhaps, a greater virtue to knowing how to graciously receive. Self-denial can, after all, be so horribly self-indulgent.

I’ve always indulged my penchant for negativity. I’ve kind of made a career out of it, in recent years. But seeing that trait start to show up in Emilie hasn’t been pretty. Maybe it’s time instead to start modeling how to take in joy.