I’ve been thinking a lot about surprises recently. It’s a combination of teaching my kids the difference between a secret and a surprise and coming back to some kind of painful memories of surprises I’ve experienced in the past.

First, to get it out of the way, our family doesn’t do secrets. That’s an “absolutely not” situation. Secrets often have an underlying tone of ickiness and “something bad” so we just don’t do them. Instead (and I think this is true for a lot of this generation of parents), we do surprises. Surprises have a much more fun and light-hearted tone. It’s likely no one is going to get hurt in the making, keeping, or receiving of the surprise. Things like gifts or activities or adventures or whatever. Our family LOVES surprises! Even if we’re often times terrible at keeping the thing a surprise because we’re just too damn excited for the person to find out what it is!

But there are times when even surprises can be hurtful or painful.

My 16th birthday is an example of just such a thing.

I wasn’t popular in high school. Or ever. But dammit did I want a blow out bash of a 16th birthday party! So my parents let me invite basically my entire high school to our house for a party. I honestly don’t remember much.

I remember that people came either because a) they felt sorry for me, b) they were afraid of my mom (who was pretty much everyone’s foreign language teacher), c) they wanted to hang out with my foreign exchange brother (who was ridiculously popular and very very cool), or a combination thereof.

I remember that all I really wanted and all I really asked for was a The Little Mermaid themed cake. That’s it. For as often as my family likes to think I asked for the world, I really don’t remember ever asking for much. A cake. That’s all I wanted. But my parents said no, because it was going to be really expensive (a whole other thing that retrospectively, I kind of take issue with). So I naturally got upset. Like, really upset. Which led me to researching how to make my own damn Little Mermaid cake. I got to making the cake the morning of my party. I was upset and disappointed and frustrated…it turns out that, at 16, I had very little experience or skill in the cake decorating department. It was not going well. Which mad me even more upset.

I spent the majority of the day and the majority of my party feeling dejected and, well, sad.

And then it came time for the cake.

And my parents brought out what can only be described as a monstrosity of a The Little Mermaid cake in all its glory! It was perfect! It was huge and beautiful and delicious and literally everything I had been wanting.

Then the guilt set in.

I felt AWFUL for how upset I had been that my parents were actually doing the thing I had asked for (but said they weren’t going to do). I felt terrible that I’d probably made them feel terrible because all they wanted to do was surprise me for my 16th birthday with the ONE THING I had asked for. I felt so ashamed for how I’d treated them over this fucking cake.

But restrospectively?

I had very little to feel bad about. My attitude, at times, was abhorrent and I probably could (and should) have handled it better, but I was also 16 years old.

They surely could see how upset I was getting, how disappointed I was becoming that my party (which was already going to be a disaster because #highschoolsucks and #bulllying) was not going the way I wanted in the least.

There probably should have come to the realization that their surprise was actually hurting me more than it was going to surprise me. It should have been okay for them to say something. Anything. “Don’t worry about the cake; we’ve got something planned.” Literally anything.

At some point, if the keeping of the surprise is actually doing more harm than good, it might be time to call it on the surprise, either partially or completely. The mental health of the recipient should be exponentially more important than the surprise itself.

There’s a lot of other underlying shit that made my party the nightmare that it turned out to be, and that’s all shit that I’ll need to unpack either in therapy or with my journal, but the umbrella issue that I’m learning is that sometimes, surprises aren’t fun for the recipient and it’s important to take that person’s personality and mental health into account.

And a lot of that understanding comes in the knowing of the person.