cake
I made this cake, my first public cake, for the baptism party. With lemon peel icing and tulip flags. And I tried to use those piping tools to edge the cake. And I made lemon curd to go inside the cake in between two of the four layers, plus sliced hearts of strawberries and extra icing. It was delicious, though I’m always the critic — the recipe was for a pound cake, but that seemed too thick for four layers. It was hard to swallow that thick cake. And the lemon curd wasn’t thick enough so it seeped into the cake instead of creating its own layer. And I didn’t really know how to ice a cake, so it turned out not as smooth as I had hoped.
A woman at the party was looking at the cake and she said to the woman next to her, Courtney’s getting very ambitious.
The woman next to her said, Courtney’s getting very domestic.
I smiled, but I was hurt, and today I want to throw the cake at her. I can’t fully figure why it hurt me so, but probably because I’m sensitive to the word. Domestic sounds insulated, protected, quaint. It doesn’t sound like a four-layer cake with tulip-flags. Domestic is tame. Interacting with a baby all day does not feel tame. Domestic sounds like the opposite of Ambitious.
I don’t want to be small. I don’t think being interested in making a cake makes me small. The conundrum: I can’t be content with being perceived as only domestic, domesticated, yet I am thoroughly preoccupied and enraptured by the shifting world inside my house. I don’t want to be swallowed up by smallness, yet I only want to consider my small world.
