Burnt Cake

It was a busy weekend. On Friday night’s agenda was a dinner party for my husband’s co-workers. This dinner party required me to prepare a very nice sit- down meal, including dessert, for nine people, many of whom I had met only once. Further, my husband would not be around to help. The dinner went really well, and we were left with a kitchen full of dirty dishes when the last guest departed at 11:30pm. We tackled the kitchen immediately, and fell asleep around 1:30am. The next morning we awoke to prepare our home for our son Charlie’s 3rd birthday party.

(You may reasonably wonder why these two events were on back-to-back days. Well, the previous weekend the Eagles unexpectedly beat the defending Super Bowl champs, earning them a trip to the NFC Championship game on Sunday. This necessitated a last-minute move of Charlie’s party from Saturday to Sunday. Anyhow, back to the story.)

Excuses aside, throwing two parties less than 24 hours apart was a lofty goal. I immediately got to work on Saturday morning. Sleep-deprived and juiced-up on coffee, I was planning to make Charlie’s birthday cake, cupcakes , and butter cream icing. Thinking I could save some time, I tried to make all three simultaneously. I doubled the cake recipe, pouring one half into a spring foam pan, and the other half into cupcakes. I popped both into the oven and set two timers. I then cleaned my mixer and got to work on my butter cream icing.

Twenty minutes into my icing prep, I smelled something burning. I immediately checked my cake. I had placed the cake on the top rack and the cupcakes on the bottom (they didn’t fit side by side). BIG mistake. The top of my cake was burned and the bottom of my cupcakes burned. I could salvage the cake by scrapping off the burned part on top and using extra icing, but the cupcakes were unsalvageable.

Once I smelled the cake burning, I rushed through my icing recipe to get the cake out of the oven. In doing so, I poured the melted sugar mixture too quickly into my meringue mixture and cooked the eggs! Thousands of little lumps dominated the icing. Six sticks of butter, seven eggs, and an entire package of sugar were completely unusable. I had to ditch the entire bowl of icing and begin again. I checked the fridge for more butter and came up 4 sticks short. An immediate trip to the store was necessary.

Two hours and about $20 worth of ingredients later, I had remade my cupcakes and icing. Guests would be arriving soon and the house was a mess, Charlie’s gift wasn’t wrapped, I hadn’t prepared any of the other food, I hadn’t taken a shower, and the kids were still in their pajamas! In an effort to save myself a half-hour of time, I had ruined everything, and cost us hours of precious time and some money.

The events of this Saturday morning were a microcosm of my life. In an effort to accomplish too many things, I wind up doing all of the tasks poorly and causing stress for everyone else.
When I was a college student, committing to many different activities was an expected part of responsible service to our Church. I bounced from one activity to the next, sometimes with little regard for my own needs for sleep and food.

But now I am a wife and a mother of multiple young children, and committing to outside activities must be a prayerful and serious decision because those commitments affect so many other people. As a social person, it is a constant challenge for me to learn to say No. As our family grows and my children get older, my responsibilities continue to increase. While I think it is important that young mothers serve outside their home in some capacity, those areas of service should be prayerfully discerned and limited. I am by no means advocating that we all become hermits. I do think, however, that I need to put first things first. My husband and family are often asked to make sacrifices because I’ve spread myself thin taking on too many commitments. Our time is limited and very valuable, and the use of our time should be the subject of much prayer and discernment.

Otherwise, you might be eating burnt cake.

Building Community by Asking for Help

I recently befriended a woman in town with 2 children of similar age to my kids. We met at story hour, and after a few chats it was obvious to me that this woman was a serious Christian who attended church regularly and cared deeply about the religious upbringing of her children. We chatted effortlessly about church, local school choices, homeschooling, and cloth diapers, among other topics. As the spring session of story hour ended, we decided to make a playdate for our children to get together. We did so, the kids played nicely, and we decided to get together again. About 1 week later this woman called me with a minor "emergency." Her 18 month old son had slammed his hand in the door and she needed to take him to the doctor for an x-ray. She couldn't bring her 3 yr. old daughter, and so she asked if I could watch her daughter for a couple of hours. Sure, I agreed, and within minutes her daughter was playing happily with my children in the backyard.

As I sat and watched the children play, I realized that my new friend had done something that I am very hesitant to do: she asked for help. If the situation had been reversed, would I have called her up and asked her to watch my children while I took one kid to the doctor? We had only had one playdate after all. No, I would not have asked. I probably would not have asked after 10 playdates. I would have asked my mother or husband to take off from work, or I would have waited until I could pay a babysitter in the later afternoon hours. But why?

Is it because I'm Catholic and the community at most Catholic churches is a far cry from ideal. My new friend is an Evangelical, and since I'm a convert to Catholicism, I do remember a greater sense of community in my old Evangelical days. I think this might be a part of it, and possibly the topic of another post, but I don't think this is the real reason I don't ask for help.

Rather, the reason is pride.

After all, if I ask for help I come across as someone who doesn't have their act together. Asking my mother or husband is different, as they know I don't have everything together, but to ask a new friend, or even an old one, is tantamount to saying that I NEED the help of others, and that takes me out of my comfort zone. Somehow in my mind it's ok to ask family, but somehow not ok to ask other friends, even other Christian friends who share my beliefs. I see myself as a leader, a rescuer, a helper, a woman who those in trouble can turn to and ask for advice or help. How can I be this woman and then need other people to help me?

I always complain about the lack of community in our individualistic suburban society. Every man or family for himself. Back in the day, when your barn burned down and caused a burden too heavy for one family to shoulder, the community chipped in and re-built the barn. Today we have fire insurance, and a culture where each family (or each person) is expected to shoulder their own burdens--or pay someone to do it for them. Asking a neighbor or friend to help is somehow less than ideal. But it is this very interdependence that makes a real community. We have to need one another.

In the past, I was a person always willing to offer help--and I felt that, by offering, I was somehow working towards building a real sense of community in our church and town. And I am. But community isn't just about offering and giving, it is also about receiving, and doing so graciously. I can't have "real" relationships with people if I am giving, giving, giving, but not also opening myself up to asking and receiving.

And that brings me back to my new friend. By asking for help she started a real relationship with me and did more to build community than the 50 unaccepted offers of help I have given out in the past several months. And that is an important lesson for all of us type-A mommies!

My new friend recently invited me to a get together at her home. I politely declined the invitation, as we have a very busy week. I explained in an e-mail how busy our family was this week, and she immediately responded by asking if she could watch the kids for me so that I could run some errands. My gut reaction was, "no, I don't need her to inconvenience herself and watch my children, besides, I would be leaving her two kids and she only left me one." And then I realized that if I don't take her up on her offer, she will be hesitant to ask anything of me in the future, and I will put a stop to the great community web that I desperately want to be a part of building. And besides, I really can use the help!