My brother is my mom’s favorite

I wished my mother her 62d mother’s day yesterday. Sixty-two years as a mother must do something to one’s psyche. (I’ll leave that one alone as it applies to my own mother.) She’d been up to my brother’s for the day. My brother is her favorite.

Bitter? moi? Not in the least.

My brother’s birthday is a couple weeks after Mother’s Day. It always made me wonder if there was some connection there, being born immediately after the love-fest that is mother’s day. But my shrink says to let it go.

Mom was actually pretty good about birthdays, unless she was hurried or harried. I had a couple of really bang-up birthday parties as a kid, replete with pin the tail on the donkey and cake. My birthday is in late September, so we were always back at school, with ready-made party attendees. I always pitied the kids who had birthdays in the summer. My nephew Eric fell into that category. Dead summer: end of July. Everyone on vacation, friends from school blown to the winds of summer nonschedules. Those birthdays sneak up on a mother.

Eric’s mom, Sue, was pretty much on top of things, but a late-July birthday sometimes even does a planner in. It was Eric’s 10th birthday I seem to recollect that he found himself bereft of birthday plans. Rex and I were home to Iowa for a weekend of lazing about the pool, and Sue suggested we all come out for dinner  at in honor of birthday boy. (lucky him, he gets to spend his bday with adults.) But somehow, before Sue could blink, mom had commandeered the event and insisted on making a birthday cake for Eric. I’m quite sure Sue had one in the hopper, but she had learned long ago to cease and desist in the face of Mom and her PLANS.

A couple of hours later, I walked into the kitchen to find mom muttering to herself, flour everywhere, and baseball-bat sized zucchini splayed on the countertop. This could not be good.

If you recall the earlier post about her flower gardens, you won’t find it surprising that mom tends to attack her spring garden with zeal, only to have her interest sag like a crisp white shirt in Iowa’s late July humidity.  The result is tomatoes exploding in the hot sun and zucchini that Rex once suggested we have handy in case of intruders.

On this day, she was hacking the zukes into big chunks and tossing them, unpeeled, into the cake batter. I just walked away. I’m sure zucchini cake is a very good idea, in the right hands, but I feared for this one.

We were due out to Sue’s in about an hour, and I was headed to the shower. The next time I passed through the kitchen, I found her pulling the cakes out of the oven. Voila. Then the worst happened: pfffft. One of them sunk to the size of pita bread. Uh-oh. I tiptoed backwards into the living room and made for the front door and the long way around to the back yard.

Flat cake, 15 minutes until we’re due at Sue’s, and now she’s pissed off. Out comes the mixer, the Crisco, and not enough sugar for the frosting. Now most people let their cakes cool before they frost them, but patience is not a virtue in my mother’s mind and she believes on always being early. The metal beaters clanged against the metal mixing bowl until there was some semblance of frosting. She plopped a couple spoonfuls onto the pita-cake proceeded to attack the still-warm bottom layer. We all know what that does.

Oh dear. The results were not good. Her mood was at the crisis point now, where all innocent comments like, “how’s it goings?” or even, “when should we leave?” get a reply I can’t repeat here. Her voice drops an octave, not unlike Linda Blair in the Exorcist, and we all know to flee and just wait in the car.

Ten minutes later she appears, cake in hand, hidden under a headdress of aluminum foil (tupperware cake carriers are not in her vocabulary).

Once out at Sue’s the mood brightens. Eric is in his 10-year-old funk at having no friend’s nearby. Tara is still traumatized from a bad hair cut, which sends her naturally curly hair into a Roseanne Rosanna Danna do. Jerry, Dad, and Rex high-tail it to the deck with cocktails. Yes, it’s just what every 10-year-old wants: his old parents and aunt and uncle, and even older grandparents hanging out at his birthday. But he’s a trooper and makes the best of it. What a sport.

We make it through the dinner–steaks off the grill: perfection achieved by Jerry’s  10-minute-a-side rule.  It’s time to sing happy birthday. Eric brightens at the prospect of some serious “me” time and a couple presents.  And then mom unveils the cake.

It is, by far, the sorriest excuse for a birthday cake I have EVER seen. I mean ever. It’s listing so badly that the candles are at a 45 degree angle. The frosting has big pieces of cake rolled in and around. And the zucchini are protruding in sharp edges like the alien in the pregnant mother’s belly in Swamp Thing.

We light the candles and pretend nothing is amiss. We dare not say anything. And like well-conditioned orphan children, we dig in and eat what is before us. To be honest, once you got past the zucchini and skipped the frosting, it wasn’t all that bad.

But I bet my brother never had a listing zuchini cake on HIS birthday.