The Writing Mamas Daily Blog
Each day on the Writing Mamas Daily Blog, a different member will write about mothering.If you're a mom then you've said these words, you've made these observations and you've lived these situations - 24/7.
And for that, you are a goddess.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Grown Up
All my life I’ve wondered when I would feel grown up. Would it be my graduation from college? First job? First car? First apartment? Marriage, kids, mortgage? My parents’ death?
How many wrinkles and gray hairs would have to sprout before I stopped feeling like a perennial 18-year-old?
I’ve achieved all of these conventional mileposts, but none of them quite did the trick, not even the gray hair.
Instead, I found adulthood in the unlikeliest of places—standing in the kitchen with a bowl of chocolate frosting, fashioning teddy bear ears out of cupcakes for my daughter’s first birthday cake.
I’m not sure what it is about this ritual, but it somehow embodies the culmination of both motherhood and maturity for me. Each year as I cream the butter and sugar together, I remember the real birth day, the one in which I was too busy panting through contractions to even think about baking a cake. I remember my daughter’s ruff of blonde fluff, her incredible self-possession as she slept in her hospital bassinet, oblivious to the din around her and the joyous tumult her arrival brought.
Baking and decorating the cake each year is a kind of meditation on life and the passage of time. How far we have both come from that noisy hospital nursery! As I crack the eggs and measure the flour, vividly recalling that night, it’s like observing my own birth as an adult.
There have been so many cakes, and I am fierce about each one. No Safeway or Costco imposters, even when she clamored for perfect blue roses and cloying drifts of butter cream. Each cake was fashioned from scratch, cut into rough geometric shapes, assembled like some crazy jigsaw puzzle, and coaxed into its final form through the miracle of frosting and colored sugar. After the chocolate teddy bears came pastel bunnies with licorice whiskers, trains with Lifesaver wheels carrying their cargo of sprinkles, rainbow-frosted unicorns and butterflies, a beach scene with candy rocks, cupcake caterpillars.
The cakes are my most sincere offering of homespun goodness. They are charming, impressive but humble, creative, imperfect, structural disasters camouflaged with M&M’s and frosting. They are delicious. They are so much like a ripe life. No wonder they make me feel mature.
Today is my daughter’s first birthday away from home, if you don’t count the day she was born. It’s the first time she’s gotten her cake through the mail, still from scratch, but quite compact and unadorned to better withstand the unloving delivery of the postal service. I imagine it will be a little dried out and crumbling around the edges. So am I, but the purity of the ingredients that went into this cake is as strong as the first.
My daughter is still blonde, still self-possessed, still able to sleep through all kinds of racket. She’s all grown up now. I wonder when she’ll feel it.
By Lorrie Goldin
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How many wrinkles and gray hairs would have to sprout before I stopped feeling like a perennial 18-year-old?
I’ve achieved all of these conventional mileposts, but none of them quite did the trick, not even the gray hair.
Instead, I found adulthood in the unlikeliest of places—standing in the kitchen with a bowl of chocolate frosting, fashioning teddy bear ears out of cupcakes for my daughter’s first birthday cake.
I’m not sure what it is about this ritual, but it somehow embodies the culmination of both motherhood and maturity for me. Each year as I cream the butter and sugar together, I remember the real birth day, the one in which I was too busy panting through contractions to even think about baking a cake. I remember my daughter’s ruff of blonde fluff, her incredible self-possession as she slept in her hospital bassinet, oblivious to the din around her and the joyous tumult her arrival brought.
Baking and decorating the cake each year is a kind of meditation on life and the passage of time. How far we have both come from that noisy hospital nursery! As I crack the eggs and measure the flour, vividly recalling that night, it’s like observing my own birth as an adult.
There have been so many cakes, and I am fierce about each one. No Safeway or Costco imposters, even when she clamored for perfect blue roses and cloying drifts of butter cream. Each cake was fashioned from scratch, cut into rough geometric shapes, assembled like some crazy jigsaw puzzle, and coaxed into its final form through the miracle of frosting and colored sugar. After the chocolate teddy bears came pastel bunnies with licorice whiskers, trains with Lifesaver wheels carrying their cargo of sprinkles, rainbow-frosted unicorns and butterflies, a beach scene with candy rocks, cupcake caterpillars.
The cakes are my most sincere offering of homespun goodness. They are charming, impressive but humble, creative, imperfect, structural disasters camouflaged with M&M’s and frosting. They are delicious. They are so much like a ripe life. No wonder they make me feel mature.
Today is my daughter’s first birthday away from home, if you don’t count the day she was born. It’s the first time she’s gotten her cake through the mail, still from scratch, but quite compact and unadorned to better withstand the unloving delivery of the postal service. I imagine it will be a little dried out and crumbling around the edges. So am I, but the purity of the ingredients that went into this cake is as strong as the first.
My daughter is still blonde, still self-possessed, still able to sleep through all kinds of racket. She’s all grown up now. I wonder when she’ll feel it.
By Lorrie Goldin
Labels: Lorrie Goldin
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