Prince Harry on Monday did not appear on the first day of a High Court trial, where he is giving evidence against the publisher of the Daily Mirror, because he was attending Princess Lilibet’s second birthday party in California.
I’m not sure where to start with this. Surely the best thing about birthdays is that they fall on the same day every year, making it easy to arrange your schedule around them. That Harry didn’t say months ago (because that’s the timescale on which legal trials operate): “Sorry I won’t be there,” is really weird. Especially as this is Harry’s big day in court, where he gets to stick it to his nemesis.
“I am a little surprised,” said trial judge Mr Justice Fancourt, “that despite the direction I gave… the first witness [Harry] is not going to be available.”
Who knows what happened? Perhaps the Duchess of Sussex abruptly moved the party in order to accommodate Oprah Winfrey’s friend’s dog’s hip operation; perhaps this is just an ongoing part of Harry’s psychodrama with all levels of the British establishment.
But the important thing here is that it is okay to miss your child’s birthday party. All of them! Even if you had nine children and missed every single birthday party it wouldn’t matter. One parent needs to be there, but not both. Not every time.
Children’s birthday parties are, in 2023, fully out of control. Many children I know, as soon as they are able to express an opinion, don’t want to have a party. Some do, sure, but many peel away from the giant wedding-like hoopla that children’s birthday parties have become in droves because they are so chaotic and intense and not what many children actually want.
The other thing that is out of control, in convenient proportion to the parties thing, is our fear of getting literally anything wrong in terms of our parenting.
Oh my God, we think, this or that or the other petty thing will totally traumatise this kid. Yes, absolutely, trauma exists – but it’s not down to attending or missing something as utterly spurious as a birthday party.
Children need to be seen and heard and understood. They want to be treated as human beings, not proxies of their parents or pawns in emotional struggles. Those are the hills to die on, not birthday parties.
When I was little, birthdays were marked with an after-school kitchen table set with Marks and Spencer’s Tropical Fruit Juice, (a serious luxury – it was all I ever wanted), a homemade cake and six balloons. Parties were a gaggle of friends over to the house to just, I don’t know, run about.
And was my dad there? No way. My father is the sort of man who, throughout my childhood, was either working at the office, or working in his room, or doing whatever it was that he did when he wasn’t working. Translating something from German? Doing some “fun” maths? He thought the people in his office who took time off to go and interfere with their children’s piano recitals or bowling alley birthday parties were weird.
I didn’t mind at all. Dad said happy birthday and patted me absent-mindedly on the head and then we went about our lives. Sometimes my dad was away with his work and wasn’t there on my birthday at all. But I didn’t mind that, either. Because when it mattered, my father has always made me feel seen and heard and understood. Even when I was five years old he treated me with the gravity of the university tutor he once was, speaking to an undergraduate about the economic policies of Karl Marx.
And that is the hard bit of parenting – I did say he was a workaholic – because when your child brings you a bad feeling, it can make you feel bad, too. You just want them to be happy, God damn it! Be happy! Look at all your stuff, why aren’t you happy? But so much of parenting is holding your child’s bad feelings for them, to show you are not scared of those feelings, even if they are. That’s the hard work, the heavy lifting, the graft. If you can do that, if you can sweat the big stuff, you don’t have to sweat the small stuff.
And if you can’t sweat the big stuff, if you can’t see, hear and understand your child, there’s no amount of parties and piano recitals that can make up for it.
