Special Specialness

There are seven billion people on the planet now, and sometimes I feel as if I’m responsible for baking a birthday cake for every damn one of them.

My name is Julie, and I have a problem with special specialness. If last year’s “fill the house with balloons until Mom passes out” party was a hit, what about a color-coded scavenger hunt this time? Original sonnets for every party guest? Goody bags that rival an Oscar nominee’s swag bag? Sure, just let me slip on my comfortable shoes and I’ll get to work.

If I can't control my crazed event-related behavior, at least I realize I’m a victim of my gender. Garrison Keillor (a man) once said that Christmas, in its current over-the-top incarnation, would not exist if women weren’t around to perpetrate it. The same, I feel, goes for birthdays, book clubs and every grade school production ever mounted since Jesus was in First Grade.

Only women are willing to turn themselves inside out to please others, or at least to attempt to impress them. Don’t believe me? Exhibit A: High Heels. 

Exhibit B: The special specialness that turns up every February at my house, when my daughters celebrate their birthdays. The fact that one of them was studying in Beijing this year didn’t stop me. I drove myself crazy trying to come up with thoughtful gifts that could lie flat in a first-class envelope – a newly minted DVD of videotaped birthdays past, a hand-made accordion-fold card with recently scrounged and reprinted photos of her blowing out the candles on the specially special cakes I’ve baked her over the past 16 years. Just reading this makes me want to smack myself and go mix up a pitcher of martinis.

If something can be done with that magic combination of sickening thoughtfulness and insane exertion of effort, women will find a way. There's no point in blaming Martha Stewart, either, because I've done it to myself -- no one pulled that trigger on the glue gun for me.

I’ve been in a number of book clubs in my time, and every single one has started with a “wine and chips” motif that quickly escalates in one-up-woman-ship into a multi-course, sit-down dinner, served by a sweaty and stiffly smiling hostess, with every morsel themed to a chapter of the book in question. (Don’t even ask what my latest group did when we read “The Help”).

I know a woman who is an absolute marvel – the sort who hosts a meeting of the planning committee, gathers silent auction donations and bakes one hundred dozen cupcakes for the school Bake Sale, all before noon. I serve on a board with her, and, on a recent day, we arrived and walked in to a meeting together. I noticed that she was carrying a giant armful of agendas and reports she’d prepared for this deserving nonprofit. With grace and good cheer, she mentioned that she’d been at her child's school since early that morning, toiling at an event.  As we reached the door of our conference room, she stopped. “I just need to run back to my car and bring in the crock pot of jambalaya. I thought we all could use a snack, and today is Mardi Gras!” she said, brightly, as she trotted off.

I used to be a feminist. I subscribed to Ms. Magazine (remember that one?) I believed that some day I would be living and working in a world with total gender equality in pay, recognition and social status. And now I’m blowing up balloons, and she’s toting crock pots through icy parking lots.

I wonder if Gloria Steinem wakes up every morning and smacks her head against the wall. Possibly, but then she runs to the kitchen to whip up a batch of jambalaya for that board meeting tonight.