Cake Lesson

Cake has been cruel to my son for most of his short life. At the multicultural festival in second grade, he cried upon learning that the tres leches cake his sister and I were about to eat was not, in the parlance of our family, “OK for him.” At the cookie decorating party in first grade, he was barred from any decorating, even though his food allergies weren’t severe enough to be triggered by touch. And at every birthday party for every elementary school friend, he could never eat the cake. For many years, I would send him with a vegan version of a Hostess Ding Dong made by a local bakery, until he revealed to me that he didn’t like them all that much. Cake is usually served at the end of children’s parties, and by that time, my son’s personal dessert would have been as disheveled and overheated as the guests themselves. I used to imagine him, with his misshapen brown log, watching his friends clamor for a piece of cake adorned with a green balloon, or Pokémon’s head, or their own initial–tiny delights he knew were too dangerous to request for himself.

It’s hard to see this small, morose toddler of my imagination in the face of my seventeen-year-old son. How can this child who lives only in photographs, and ever more faintly in my memory, be the same young man laughing with abandon as he plays board games with his friends? Friends who sport mustaches, some of them even lush, arriving at our home in cars they drove all by themselves? How could that child who used to scream more than sleep have grown into the person who now sleeps through anything, giving the same affirmative answer to my inquiry about how he slept every single morning? The past of his infancy grows ever more difficult to conjure up; his future even more so. In one short year, when he leaves for college, I will spend days, weeks, maybe even months, without knowing what he ate at any given meal, and the most pressing of my questions for him will not be about food. What will it be like for him to study, to laugh with new friends, to write and read and struggle, without me looking on as he does it, without the sustenance of the definitively “OK for him” lunches I still pack for him? What will it be like for me?

When he was a baby, his misery was a terrible mystery. Why did he cry so much; why did he sleep so little? Why was he so uninterested in the music, the foods (especially the foods) that brought me, the woman whose body gave his life, so much joy? Discovering his food allergies just before his first birthday felt like finding the same irrefutable answer to each of these questions, and sometimes, like a pointed condemnation of the first mistake I made as his mother. I’d eaten everything, including plenty of foods he was allergic to, while I was breastfeeding him. I imagined going back in time and consuming no dairy, no eggs, no nuts of any kind since the day of his birth, and thus restoring for both of us the kind of idyllic babyhood I wished he’d had, the kind suggested by the natural parenting magazines shelved near the checkout at the places where I bought our vegan groceries. The mythical babies who lived in the pages of these magazines slept peacefully for long stretches, waking only to babble happily and drink their mothers’ unpoisoned milk. Their smooth cheeks bore no trace of the angry patches of eczema that covered my son’s skin for most of his first year of life; they hardly noticed what was surely the scratchy wool of their hand-knitted beanies. Their benign, smiling faces taunted me as I waited to pay for my soy milk and frozen vegan waffles. For them, the world was like a perfectly temperate bath; for my son, it was more like a deathtrap.

But he was sensitive to much more than just his environmental foes, and his infancy wasn’t all suffering—there was plenty of sweetness, too. The looks I got back from his liquid brown eyes when I read to him, or talked to him (incessantly) about the scenes of neighborhood life we watched from our front porch showed me depths that those cover-model babies could hardly hope to plumb with their placid stares. Once, when he was a baby, swaddled in blankets on my lap, I made him laugh, and I saw his eyes squeeze together in the corners in exactly the way mine do. There! There was something I recognized, a tiny bit of the person I saw in the mirror every day, and thought I knew—better, at least, than I knew this tiny, complicated bundle of sensitivities and strife, my son.

Before he could speak, I was eager enough to let his food allergies speak for him, and explain away all the misery that I felt powerless to understand and dispel. But cake, and plenty of other things, too, still had the power to make him miserable, or happy, or worried, or excited. Once he started talking in earnest, he could tell me about any and all of his reactions to the world around him, whether allergic or emotional. Over this past summer, he encountered the familiar prompt, while preparing his admissions essays for college, about overcoming adversity, and immediately rejected my half-hearted suggestion that he write about his food allergies. We could both see how far this alimentary drama of his childhood had receded behind an array of newer answers about who he was and what made him happy.

When he was little, family members were astonishingly quick to perceive in him those bits of themselves or their children or their parents that they knew and liked best. Surely, his aptitude for math was an intellectual echo of my father–or maybe of his great-uncles on my husband’s side? Of course, he loved the taste of cinnamon, and the particular sweetness of my mother’s apple tart tatin, because she did, too, and naturally, he was skinny because all the men on my mother-in-laws’ side of the family had been skinny. I myself am not immune to the temptation of seeing the best of myself in this beloved child, who might make more of those morsels of me he contains than I ever could. He loves the vagaries of language, and stories, and talking about it all, and when I heard him refer to a “tranche of documents” while talking on the phone to an admissions official at one of the colleges he applied to, I swooned (inwardly) with pride. Who says “tranche” in casual conversation? Not many seventeen year olds, I would guess, but I probably would have been one of them when I was that age.

Yet more delightful by far than the glimpses of myself that I think I catch when I look at him are the many times I’ve witnessed him talking his way out of any such wishful resemblances to me or anyone else; I have relished–am relishing still–getting to know him well enough to realize how far he is from a mere reflection of myself. His college years will separate us even further. He will come home to visit, perhaps in a car he drove all by himself, and maybe I will feel even more stunned by the depth and breadth of his mysteries than I did when he was a baby. I will be reminded of what his immune system has been telling me since he was born: he may be the flesh of your flesh, but he is not known to you fully. When he was a child, we all saw him as though we were looking in a mirror, knowing him only in part, indulging in the fantasy of knowing a beloved person fully. Such is hardly possible for anyone in this life, and yet we strive endlessly, with thousands upon thousands of words shared with each other over the course of our lifetimes.

My son and I have already exchanged countless words, many of which I’ve forgotten and many more that I will soon forget. I’ve written about him a few times–more often when he had no words of his own; less and less often now that he overflows with language. When I think about knowing him fully and completely, I’m terrified–because wouldn’t that be some kind of end? What else would we have to say to each other? My son and I have never been able to eat the same things, but we’ve always been able to talk to each other. I prefer it this way, and I have cake to thank for it, however cruel it might have seemed when my son was a toddler. Here is the difference between knowledge and love, it said sweetly. Have a taste.