We’ve been doing birthdays wrong — so Happy Birthday, Mom!

We’ve been doing birthdays wrong — so Happy Birthday, Mom!

According to the March of Dimes, which should be the march of many dollars these days, women in the Sunshine State, no doubt delighted by the promise of long and happy lives for somebody, gave birth to 224,433 babies 2 years ago, in 2022, and probably a few more than that last year.

In the United States as a whole, where estimates based on CDC and United Nations data marked the population of our country at 341,894,033 citizens just last week, about 10,000 people are born each day.

That means an average of 7,481 births occur in each 24-hour period in Florida, where having a child isn’t like it used to be, as far as I can tell. Now, parents don’t have to do what my mother did: wash cloth diapers, dry them and reuse them countless times.

But that doesn’t mean things have gotten a lot easier, necessarily. If there are 7,481 new babies arriving every day around here, then every last dang one of them requires diaper changes: 10 to 12 per day and night for newborns, eight to 10 for infants, and five per day for toddlers, baby care experts estimate.

Roger Williams

Following the increasingly frightening numbers, that means that every single day between the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the Gulf of Mexico on the west, south of the Georgia state line that lies too far away for me to worry about, roughly 70,000 diapers have to be changed.

Oh my God!

This is where I start guessing. I warrant that roughly 69,000 of those dirty diapers will be changed by mothers. Maybe that guess is high. Even if it’s half (and I doubt that), the mother, who gave birth, don’t forget, is changing diapers about 35,000 times every day, in Florida.

And yet we don’t hear about it. Even the mainstream media fails to report it, a fact so messy that acknowledging it outright might require us to change our culture completely.

Have you ever wondered why we celebrate birthdays so warmly?

I did again a couple of weeks ago when I had one and when several other men, including my middle son, had birthdays. The show of love and respect for us guys was so energetic and gratifying that I was able to forget all the other issues of the day—presidential races, climate changes, wars in Gaza and Ukraine, my distance from the cafes of Paris—and bask in the epiphanic knowledge that everything was going to be OK.

Why, I wondered in a moment of self-aware weakness, was this birthday with its sumptuous adulations and adorations about me in the first place?

And right there I realized what we should really be doing in this society if we want peace in the world and good will to all men. And women.

We should alter the way we do birthdays, for evermore.

I’m sorry to have to say this here, especially in a column where I’m trying not to offend Republicans, Democrats, Communists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, Buddhists — well, you can’t offend Buddhists, at least not the Tibetan ones, because they just shrug it off, smile politely and go about their business — and everybody else.

But I have to say it: We’ve been doing birthdays all wrong, and our unconscious reaction to the misstep has caused all these problems, including our current American divisiveness.

Let me point out here a couple of other facts.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, the average birthing labor lasts 12 to 24 hours for a first birth, and eight to 10 hours for subsequent deliveries.

They call it labor for a reason. Getting that done requires significant suffering — a task I’ve stood by with furrowed brow and encouraging words watching, doing exactly nothing to help except loom, a talent some men have perfected. Including me.

An online search seeking to compare the pain of labor experienced by about 86 percent of American women by the time they reach their mid-40s, according to the PEW Research Center, is somewhat fruitless. Responses from several legitimate sources tend to tip-toe around the question. They might say it can’t be compared to other things, they might say no two women feel the same pain, or they might say it’s nothing to worry about because women who don’t want to suffer can take pain medications.

But only one source in my search noted that childbirth is among the most painful experiences in life.

I mention that because it’s now time to acknowledge that birthdays should always be celebrations of the mother, first.

She should get a cake.

She should receive generous presents.

Tributes of love and adoration should flood her all day long on the sacred date she once did that most important thing in life, alone: Give birth.

She should even have to sit through the typically awful singing of happy birthday songs, even if the birthday itself undoubtedly hurt like hell, whether or not it was also happy.

There are other pains in the birthing life, of course, and one of them — post labor, post diapers, post the first day of school — is puberty and the teenage years. But have you ever noticed how often, and how dependably, most mothers show up for that labor of love, too?

So next time we have birthdays — and about 7,481 of us Floridians are having one today, followed by another 7,481 or so tomorrow — make a cake for mom. Put some candles in it.

And tell her: Happy Birthday, Mom! ¦

The post We’ve been doing birthdays wrong — so Happy Birthday, Mom! first appeared on Bonita Springs Florida Weekly .