🎂 Taste is all that counts, right?! 🎂

Entry#83 on birthdays, cake-making, cake-decorating and fractal patterns maaaaaaan.

#83

Today we have a ten year old son, so this Flow is about birth-days and the thread that binds us all.

It’s also a laugh at my cake-decorating skills.

Let’s get that out the way first.

Here’s me with a creation ‘we’ (let’s be honest, I) made for some young friends who also had a birthday this week. It’s Forky from Toy Story 4, in case you don’t recognise it through the abysmal buttercream. Look, it split OK? I don’t know why and I didn’t care enough to start again.

For any readers who dig cakes, here’s what you’re looking at.

One Annabel Langbein white chocolate and vanilla cake, shaped into Forky, then covered in raspberry essence-flavoured buttercream icing and decorated with lollies.

What’s cool about this cake is that the boys chose this over a gift. They wanted their friends to have a really tasty birthday cake and they thought I could deliver. Apparently we are known for really good cakes now. Maybe not really good decorating (that is Shawn’s department) but really tasty cakes - yes, I can hit that target. You cut it up and eat it anyway, so taste is all that counts, right?!

So, back to when our own babies have a birthday.

Willis arrived ten years ago and everything changed. I really mean that. He is a force.

I’ve been mulling on birthdays and here’s what I have written to mark this day.

The birthday hall of mirrors

I reckon parents get multiple birthdays.

The main one that marks their own birth - and then one more subtle one for every subsequent day that a soul arrives on Earth at their hand.

For the friends who have only had the briefest of visits from their beloved babies, I know this is raw and I hope that you sense I am being gentle. I think even the tiniest soul-visits change people and I also think parents can be born even when circumstances take away the evidence.

I also know that some souls come to you via other wombs and those kids get to spawn step-parents in unlikely and new places. That is cool and confusing and part of real life. So we must all get our heads round it.

The birthday multiplicity is like a hall of mirrors. Like a well, we peer down into an evolutionary phenomenon, looking for meaning and connection. The reflections and faces tesselate into smaller and smaller pieces, but share a common edge as they tunnel downwards back to the beginning of time. We all came from a womb. We all lay in wait within our grandmothers, generations ago. I’d warrant we would all say we are not the same people we were before we had kids.

Imagine if I said to Willis:

“So…you’re here having a birthday because of me today.

And you arriving as a baby also ushered in a new version of me, a mini re-birth….

And the same thing happened when your brother was born….

And I did the same thing to my parents when I was born…

And it feels like I shed a skin and re-emerge as a new person every year you grow older.

So….happy birthday son!

And happy birthday me. And happy birthday Dad. And probably your brother too”

Fractal, man!

That is all for today. As always, I look forward to hearing what you heard, saw and felt when reading this.

With love,

Michelle xx