Finding Our Own
I think I must have been in the third or fourth grade when my school tried a brief experiment of having moms lead after-school activities for interested children. Sign up, show up. I went to a couple of these things. It took a lot to make me wanna be in the school building after the bell rang. The activity I recall was one on cookie decorating. The idea was that the children would each make a cookie with a face on it, using candied cherries, chocolate sprinkles, M&Ms, that kind of thing.
Seemed like a pretty good deal. And you got to eat the cookie. I think about 10 or 12 kids showed up for it.
So the mom, bless her heart, had this all planned out. I forget exactly how it went. I think it was like brown M&M’s for eyes, chocolate sprinkles for hair, a sliver of red cherry for the mouth. It was something like that. Of course, me being me, I had to do something different. I made a weird-looking bearded guy and I know I decided to break up one of the toppings to experiment a bit, which made a mess of it. Every other face on the cookie tray was identically cute.
And no, I’m not trying to tell you how ding-dang “creative” or “original” I was as a kid. I did have a vivid imagination, but a hefty piece of what happened there was that I had a willingness to confound the expectations of authority. Overall, I experienced school as a cruelty, a stupidity, and an injustice. In consequence I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder at the time, and it wasn’t a chocolate chip. Point is, I knew I was flouting expectations by taking my cookie design in a different direction than the others were doing. I knew what I could get away with. I also thought the face I created looked pretty funny.
Looking back, I feel for the parent. It’s not easy to deal with a passel of other people’s children, especially without any prior experience and training, which I don’t think she had. It’s stressful. And here she’d volunteered to come in and do something nice for us. She’d planned it all out, procured the materials for the activity, and showed up. I mean, having been a teacher myself for years, I know how much work this kind of thing is. Plus responsibility. Working in a kitchen. With children. For no pay. She had probably never done anything like this before. It was all very generous of her. I see that now. But I certainly did not see it then.
About 20 minutes after the cookie sheet went into the oven, out it came again, smelling wonderful, presumably. What I for sure clearly recall is that up till then I had no idea our school even had an oven. But here’s where things got interesting. Seeing the tray emerge, I immediately identified the “monster face” cookie I’d created. It was like nothing else. Of course you can’t eat a cookie right out of the oven. You can, however, watch them cool in quiet anticipation…
But that’s not how it worked out for our little group of after-school cookie aficionados. Almost immediately, the other children started squabbling about whose cookie was whose. The facilitator had not adequately accounted for the fact that with children this age, “which one is mine” matters. A lot. But since the cookies were identical and there was no pattern to their placement to sort them out, this super-generous, super-nice parent was soon in over her head dealing with the rising tempers, confusion and hurt feelings of those who had followed her directions to the letter.
Seeing this and anticipating my own satisfaction being unnecessarily delayed, I raised my hand. “Can I at least have mine?”
And this is the part I remember most clearly: the look on the face of the parent volunteer, flustered and beset, as she looked at me and said, “Oh, right. Yours was different.” Even now I recall how the word “different” seemed, just by her speaking it, to give her mouth a particularly ugly shape, further highlighted by the garish lipstick fashionable among so many moms back then.
As she transferred that cookie with a spatula into my hands, the look of disgust on her extravagantly made-up mouth contrasted vividly with the sweetness that soon filled my own.
It was without doubt the most memorable cookie I’ve ever eaten, spiced as it was with some strange and enduring lessons.
Yes, it’s true, on a basic level: You gotta make your own cookie if you wanna get yours. How else can we know what’s real? That’s my main takeaway.
And yes, there are risks any which way we go. There are risks in really showing up as who we are, and there are risks in pretending to be otherwise, whether in pursuit of convenience, acceptance, or security. That’s life. But to lose one’s self in the crowd, or to use one’s personal life energy to support the illusion of viability in a programmatic approach to living — I mean, how can that ever really work in the long run? Every time I compromise on something fundamental, I end up regretting it.
Still, it was a painful kind of victory to recognize for sure what was mine and experience the delicious satisfaction of that moment while the rest carried on. And it was instructive to experience how disapproval for my failure to conform reached a high point just as the costs of conformity became obvious to everyone present. Honestly, right about then I just wanted to get the hell out of there.