Kitty Litter Cake–Process Vs. Product

This is the cake Delaney made yesterday.  It’s meant to look like a litter box full of cat poop.  She did a pretty good job–aside from the large pottery bowl (because I’m too cheap to buy a litter box just to put a cake in one time, and the alternative is just too horrible to contemplate), it looked pretty darn realistic.  And disgusting.  Lee was so grossed-out he couldn’t eat it.  I was grossed-out, too, but not because of the way it looked (I never, ever care about how something looks–it’s not possible to gross me out that way).  It was all processed stuff–cake mix and instant pudding and store-bought cookies and food coloring.  Nasty.  Even Toby couldn’t be bothered to eat it.

So before we went to bed last night, I dumped the whole thing in the trash.  This morning, before she left for school, Delaney asked where it was.  I pointed to the garbage can, and she just shrugged, as if it didn’t matter that I had trashed the result of several hours worth of work on her part.

And you know what?  It really didn’t matter.  She had made the cake because she thought it would be fun to make–an artistic challenge, if you will.  This is a child who bakes, from scratch, on a near-daily basis.  She had to know she wouldn’t like this cake–we have pretty high standards around here.  But it was the process she was interested in, rather than the product.

I have tried to teach my kids to value process from the very beginning.  I can remember being horrified during some little art class I did with Toby, when he was just a toddler, because the instructor was distressed that I wouldn’t direct him to make the actual project that the class was supposed to be making.  I didn’t care.  We were just there because they had better supplies than I did at home.  To this day, when one or the other of them comes in from a sports event, I’m more interested in whether or not it was fun than I am in who won.

It’s not that I don’t value competition–I do. Competition makes the world go ’round.  It makes us work harder, grow, improve, and succeed.  I’m very competitive, in certain arenas.  But I also realize that I don’t have to compete at everything, and if I try to, I’m just going to kill myself.  Competition is stressful, and stress is tough on our bodies (adrenalin roughs up your arteries, among other things) as well as our psyches. Sometimes I just have to let the competition go, and enjoy the process.  Take racing:  I’m as slow as itch.  But that’s okay.  I enjoy training, and pinning on a race number, and feeling the energy in the start corral, and hearing the onlookers cheering as I plod along–I’m never going to win, but I can still go and enjoy the process.  I enjoy it so much that I did an Ironman triathlon once.  I was slow–it took me 15 and a half hours–but I couldn’t stop smiling all day.  I had a blast just being there–no winning necessary.

My father-in-law was 56 when he died of heart disease.  That was in 1991, long before Lee’s heart attack.  But the motto at our house, even then, was “Life is short.”  Lee’s favorite version of that is a line from a James Taylor song:  “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.”  So if your cake turns out looking like cat poop, don’t worry about it.  Just ask yourself whether or not you had fun making it.  Because really, it’s all about the process.