cakes raze twelve years ago, when my sleep was a mess most of the time, chad told me his wife wanted to bake a cake for my birthday. her name was danielle. i'd never met her. she just liked making people things that were sweet, and when her husband told her he had a friend who was about to get a little older, she asked if she could make something for me. i hadn't had a pineapple upside_down cake since my mom made one for my birthday when i was a kid. so i asked for one of those. the day chad dropped it off, i got to sleep around six in the morning and woke up ten hours later with a headache the size of a small city. danielle used brown sugar. it was like something out of a dream. all big and brown and beautiful. one piece of her cake and i was as_good_as_new, at least for an hour or two. on days when the scabs that edge the torn webbing of my memory are thick enough to let me touch the past, i almost think i can still taste the unexpected gift that chased the pain away. 220513 ... ovenbird There have been a lot of birthdays recently. Mine was first. I got a cake. My daughter's was next. She got a cake. My sister-in-law's is coming up in a few days. She got the partially cremated remains of a cake. It seems my mother-in-law ran out of batteries after two celebrations and today dumped the crumbled dregs of both previous cakes onto a platter, shoved a sparkler into its heart and called it good enough. The kids sang happy birthday so loudly I had to cover my ears. My sister-in-law beheld the Frankensteinian monstrosity before her (half melted icing, some sprinkles leftover from Christmas leaking red dye, crumbs hardened to the consistency of croutons) and said, with admirably little sarcasm, "I feel so loved!" The cake was served (inexplicably) with some leftover lemon Jell-O and scoops of stewed rhubarb. Look, every mother has been there. It's the moment where you look at the pile of dishes in your sink and the fourteen loads of laundry that need to be done and you notice that it's already 6:00 and you haven't even thought about dinner yet and you have guests and it's somebody's birthday and you haven't slept properly in weeks and you say, "fuck it," and you get out a spatula and scrape stale cake off the bottom of a pan and throw it on the table. I know that look of deranged exasperation. It's a look that has twisted my own features into something that makes my kids stop bickering. When a mother steps onto that kind of ledge there's nothing you can do but smile in submission. We ate the cake. With a side of Jell-O. 250718 what's it to you? who go blather from