The Young and The Restless | Cake or Kate?

As I said to Nick, I’ve had many a sleepless night in my life and survived to tell the tale, so what’s one more?

So he put me on the list and told me he’d tried to come up with a Cake Miller-Heidke joke to respond with, but had fallen short.

I laughed and concluded that he’d succeeded in making one anyway.

Everyone around me at Eastbank seemed to disappear that night as Kate’s haunting vocals drew me in and made me feel as though she was performing just for me.

I think everyone there for her intimate performance might have felt the same way.

My thoughts were only of Kate in that moment, not of cake.

It was a lovely brain break before launching straight into an exhausting weekend of entertaining a birthday boy, maintaining the heights at a fairly elevated bar I set myself 16 years ago, from the very first of my children’s birthdays.

I only have myself to blame for the pressure I bring.

But I’m also not mad about it. If you can’t make your kid feel like a king on his birthday, when can you?

You see, in our house, when it’s your birthday, you get to pretty much dictate the day of your birthday, whether it falls on a weekend or not, and you get the whole weekend that’s closest to your birthday as a whole “birthday weekend” as well.

On it, you’re excused from doing any dishes or other chores, you get to choose what café-style cooked breakfast you’d like Mum to make you, and all the other food too whether it’s Mum’s famous home-made burgers or restaurant or takeaway food, you can nominate the activities at venues or at home. You even get to choose the movie, if there’s one involved. You pretty much get to monopolise Mum’s time, attention and bank account.

I don’t mind doing it, but it requires preparation — either more work ahead of it all to clear the weekend’s to-do list early, or lots of catch-up work afterwards to, well, catch-up.

So I found myself ordering groceries at 3am after only starting cake-baking at midnight, while waiting for a friend I hadn’t seen for a while to pop in at 4am en route to work, when I hadn’t yet had any sleep myself.

I grabbed two or three hours of shuteye, then I woke and had to find energy to cook that extravagant breakfast I’d promised and shower quickly so as to not cut too far into the birthday boy’s special day.

All I wanted to do when I felt that hot water hit my skin was soak in it mindlessly until it turned cold and then crawl back into bed.

But us parents, we stay on task and we keep going.

I run kids to work, pack the ordered groceries away, clean up the obscene amount of dishes breakfast created and watch the lawn grow a little longer every time I cast my eyes towards a window, mentally adding ‘mow’ to the other to-do list that can only have some attention when it hits midnight on the Sunday of birthday weekend.

My exhaustion and my purse gratefully thanked my son for being so easily pleased.

He didn’t want to leave town or partake in any expensive and out-there activities for his 17th.

As he draws closer to driving age, he gets more obsessed with motoring culture.

He’s simply happy with driving his own pride and joy around town and going to local meets and shows.

Luckily for him, two car-themed events fell on his birthday weekend; a meet in north Shepparton on an icy-cold Saturday night and a show and shine on sunny Sunday morning at The Overlander hotel.

A drive before and after each meant further learner hours clocked on the roads.

It’s a cruel thing to be a Victorian who has all 120 of their required hours by the time they’re 17, watching kids in other states get their Ps at the same age.

Of course, the more hours the better, because I reckon I’d have been lucky to have even had 20 hours of driving experience by the time I was 18 and licensed.

It’s quite an unsettling afterthought knowing there were so many ill-equipped solo drivers on the road back in the day.

The eighteen-year-old daughter in me loves that I avoided awkward driving lessons with my folks, but the 40-plus-year-old mother I now am loves that my children need a hefty amount of hours before they can even sit a test.

Mind you, I’ll forever be baffled as to why Victoria thinks allowing teenagers to drink and to drive at the same age is a good idea.

It’s one of few things I reckon America has right (separating the two things by five years) and probably the only reason I’d agree getting licensed at 17 in other Australian states makes sense.

Alas, I don’t make the laws, nor break the laws.

I know nothing except my firstborn will be driving without me riding shotgun in T-minus-365 days now.

And that I need a good, long sleep.

Except I can’t, because my to-do list keeps screaming at me to catch up.