Icing On A Stale Cake

I woke up Saturday morning with a bunch of clanging coming from the kitchen.

I walked downstairs and into the kitchen to quite a surprise.

“Umm, good morning hon, whatcha’ making?” I asked my wife.

“A cake,” she replied.

I looked at her kind of puzzled. “You don’t like cake. In all the years we have been together, you’ve never eaten a piece of cake.”

She looked at me and smiled. “But you know I love the icing.”

So I watched her make the cake, bake the cake, and I watched her let it cool. Then I watched her meticulously layer the icing just the way she wanted it.

She then looked at me as seriously as she ever had and said, “this is my cake. Do not touch it.”

Over the next week I watched her slowly but surely scrape the icing off the cake and eat it. Two scrapes on Saturday, three on Sunday, one on Monday etc. until the icing was all gone, all without touching one single crumb of the cake.

And then on Saturday of the next week I watched her put more icing on that same cake.

I looked at her puzzled and asked, “Isn’t that cake stale now?”

“It’s not about the cake. It’s the icing. “ she said.

And so we went through another week with her eating only the icing.

The next Saturday , I watched her as she started putting more icing on the two week old cake.

“Hon, that cake has to be hard as a rock and maybe a little moldy in spots. What are you doing ?”

“I like the icing,” she said, like she was stating a matter of fact.

“But babe, that’s not healthy. You can’t keep covering up the moldy, hard, stale cake by ignoring it’s not there. The icing may be good, but all you are doing is covering up something that is not good. Eventually, that mold is going to grow onto the icing. “

She then said,” If I keep covering the cake with the icing I like so well, I forget the cake is even there.“

She then looked at me for the briefest of seconds before she looked away. And in that briefest of seconds I saw something I had never seen before. She was scared, she was hurting, she was confused, she was lost, and she didn’t know what to do, except ignore the problem and keep on doing her best to breathe in her next breath. Hoping she could survive this. Hoping it would go away if she ignored it long enough.

I looked at her with tears in my eyes because I knew this wasn’t about the cake or the icing. This was about something deeper. This was about something inside of her. Something she couldn’t face. Something that was tearing her world apart but she felt as long as she had the icing, she could keep living.

I gently and softly grabbed her hands, put the icing knife down and told her it’s time to stop icing the cake. It’s time we started tearing the cake apart and finding out what exactly is inside it. It’s time to cut into this cake and piece by piece, start throwing it away.

It’s time to open those boxes of the past. It’s time for that darkness to see the light.

It’s time for you to heal.