Happy Birthday, Jane Lawton

Mom on the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, 1997.

Today is my mother’s birthday. She would have been – wait, should I say? She might not like that. Well…she would have been 68. I wish I could throw some kind of birthday party for her, or at least take her out to lunch and ask her how swollen her feet got when she was pregnant, or what she thinks of Mad Men.

This is one of the difficulties of May: first Mother’s Day, and then her birthday. [Perhaps next year we will have shifted over to UK Mother’s Day, which is in March?] You people who like your knitting blogs full of knitting probably don’t know which end is up.

Mom used to have amazing birthday parties for us; I just came across a whole bunch of photos of one of mine. I think I was in fifth or sixth grade. There are at least 30 kids there – maybe all the girls in my grade? – and I remember there being crafts and goody bags and all kinds of nifty stuff (which may be par for the course these days, actually…but seemed amazing back in the 80s). The nifty stuff included my grandmother, dressed as a fortune teller, using an old goldfish bowl to see our futures.

[I am certain that this happened, but knowing my grandmother the mind boggles.]

As I told you all last month, Mom used to call on my birthday and give me little tidbits about what she was doing on the day I was born: she woke up, there were some contractions, she decided to go to the garage sale anyway, her water broke while she was there, she had to get a cab from there to the hospital…you get the idea. Sometimes she’d give me the whole story in one go, but sometimes she’d draw it out and call at different times during the day (“This time 23 years ago, you had arrived! But the cafeteria was closed, and I was really, really hungry, so I sent your father out for a cheeseburger!”). There were years when this tradition of hers seemed hilarious, and years when it seemed really embarrassing. But (looking ahead to our daughter’s birth) I now realize that one’s birthday doesn’t just belong to oneself: it also belongs to one’s mother. And I wonder whether Mom’s mother did something similar on her birthday.

Anyway, for some reason today the idea of a birthday party is in my head. I so wish I’d had a great big party for my mother when she was alive. We did have a party for her 60th birthday, but what I remember most about that is a grand saga trying to get the cake there on time. This weekend, I think the baby and I and Mr. Trask will go to the Randolph Hotel for tea to celebrate Jane. She stayed there when she visited me in Oxford many years ago, and we loved having high tea together there. Mmm, high tea.

The Randolph Hotel, 1995. Photo by Jane Lawton.

And then it also occurs to me that I might make something for her. I have this beautiful red yarn that was given to me by my mother-in-law, and I’ve never made it into the “something to wrap yourself in” that we’d planned. But it’s a gorgeous shade of red, just the shade Mom liked, and if I make something in honor of her but wear it myself then she’ll be pleased. I know, because she used to say, “Why don’t you wear more color near your face?”

I’m tempted by the Leaflet pattern from Knitty, but would love to hear your suggestions. What would Jane Lawton wear?

Now, I realize that I just talked myself into eating a sumptuous meal, and knitting something for myself, somehow to celebrate my mother’s birthday…but hey. I think she’d approve.

Pretty red yarn in our back garden during unusual heat wave. What Would Jane Wear?