Decorating is no Piece of Cake

 My daughter is getting married.  Wow, yeah she is getting married in 18 days.  We recently had a shower for her.  A dear friend recognized how crazy and overwhelming our life is and agreed to help me organize the shower.  Then, she and her mom pretty much lovingly took it out of my hands and threw an amazing party.  My only job was to get the cake.  I insisted on taking that duty.  It was the least I could do.  

My daughter is not particularly fond of cake.  She asked for one from a local retail store's bakery so I obliged.  I went to the bakery section and there was a very cheerful young lady decorating cakes behind the counter.  I selected one and asked her to write "Congratulations, Kylea" on it.  I could not see behind the counter and she worked with a big smile and walked around the end of the counter to hand the cake to me with great pride.  The cake was beautifully decorated and said, "Happy Birthday, Kylea".  She was so proud of her work and, admittedly, it was beautiful.  I just did not have the heart to tell her it was wrong.  I accepted the cake and Kylea and I walked away to burst into laughter.  You see, this is the metaphor for our life.  We want "congratulations" but we often lovingly and carefully get "Happy Birthday" and have to learn to deal with it.  

I decided to keep that cake and tell the fun story and just get a smaller one for the shower table.  So, we went to a local grocery store bakery.  I asked the young decorator to write "Congratulations, Kylea" and you can see how that worked out for us above.  The young lady handed it to me a little less proudly this time realizing it was an epic failure and not quite knowing how to handle it.  I took it and yes, I paid for it. I don't know if I was dumbfounded or if I simply just didn't want to ruin a young person's day by complaining. By this time my daughter and I were shedding tears of laughter.  The metaphor continued. 


Later that afternoon as we puzzled about what to do with two cakes, neither acceptable for a beautifully prepared table at a shower, Kylea had a brainstorm and we made a trip to the florist.  Here is what resulted:

She did a fantastic job of making lemonade out of lemons.  And, in the end, the cake tasted wonderful and all was well and we came away with a great story to share. We made some great memories that day and we learned a lot about life from those two cakes.


You see our journey with cancer has been two cakes.  We were sailing smoothly and we found out about the cancer, our first cake.  It was not at all what we wanted but we accepted the challenge and fought and came out on the winning side.  However, the second cake (round two of the cancer journey) arrived and it was an epic fail.  Cancer on the liver was not the cake we wanted at all.  I would like to believe, though, that how we have dealt with both rounds of cancer thus far is a beautiful flower covered cake and that we have made memories full of laughter along the way. Cancer is not a piece of cake but it can be beautiful some days if we let it shape us and decorate us along the way.