Sundown on the Birthday Cake. There’s no season more exhausting than… | by Chelsea Judge | Bless Her Heart & Mine Too | Sep, 2025
There’s no season more exhausting than birthday season when you’re the single aunt.
In the span of three weeks, Loretta Jean had attended five birthday parties, baked two cakes, bought seven toys that would be forgotten by sundown, and survived three inflatable bounce houses — one of which collapsed halfway through the day because somebody’s uncle had no business jumping in there with a half-slab of ribs and a soda in hand.
She wasn’t bitter, not really. Just tired. Bone-tired.
Each celebration felt louder, stickier, and more chaotic than the last. The balloons popped too soon. The music was too loud. The aunts — her sisters and cousins — were too quick to assign her cleanup duty. She never said no. She never did.
“I don’t mind,” she’d shrug, her smile automatic as someone handed her a trash bag or pointed to the plates crusted with icing and melted Cheeto dust.
But this last party — the one for baby Lashay’s fourth birthday — had her reevaluating everything.
It was 6:45 p.m., golden hour casting warm streaks of light across the backyard. The kids were running wild. Her youngest nephew was sobbing into her lap because he didn’t win the potato sack race, and the birthday girl had just bitten someone. Again.
Loretta wiped sweat from her brow with a napkin that had “You’re Llamazing!” printed on it.
That’s when her niece, Nia, came over and plopped beside her on the deck step. “You always come to everything,” she said, licking blue frosting from her fingers. “You never miss nothin’.”
Loretta blinked. “Well… that’s what aunties do, right?”
Nia, all of nine years old with jelly shoes and a mind sharp as her mama’s tongue, looked up and said, “Yeah, but you ain’t just an auntie. You’re like… the one who makes stuff feel okay.”
Loretta’s chest got tight. Not in a bad way. Just… full.
No one had ever told her that. She was always just there. The helper. The ride giver. The last to eat. The one who didn’t have to rush home to nobody, so everybody assumed she could do everything.
She glanced at the table where her sisters sat sipping wine and talking trash about their husbands. They looked happy. A little worn down, sure, but happy. And maybe… maybe Loretta was happy too, in her own different, wandering kind of way.
She stood up and smoothed her sundress. “C’mon, Nia. Let’s cut that second cake. I hid the good one from the heat.”
As the sun began to dip below the trees, and everyone gathered one last time for photos and cupcakes, Loretta realized she wasn’t just the single one in the family. She was the soft place to land. The one with time and heart to spare.
And when the candles flickered out and the kids ran off again, someone handed her a plate.
Not to clean.
To eat.