How Careful the Cake Cutter Can Be

{4.30 minutes to read}  One beautiful weekend in April, one of my dearest friends came out to spend time with my husband Bob and me. Cell phones were off (for the most part), great meals shared, leisurely Sunday morning with chamber music playing, fire going in the fireplace to ward off the cool spring temperatures. One of the things we love most about the “just being together” part is having the luxury of time to catch up and talk about a million different things over the course of the days — what’s happening in our lives, the state of the world, stories about how we grew up…. things like that.

We all have siblings and I don’t remember how it came up, but we were talking about our childhoods when I asked my friend if she and her sister had the typical sister rivalries when they were growing up. I have two sisters and there was a constant jockeying for position about something or other: who behaved as if they were the favored child, who was most adept at getting out of doing chores, who “borrowed” the favorite sweater from whom, and the biggest issue of all — who got the biggest slice of cake for dessert?

Bob recounted a story about how his father handled that last one — the cake! He had one brother slice the cake and the other brother got first crack at picking the slice he wanted. With a big smile on his face as he recounted this memory, Bob said: “You can be sure that whoever the cake cutter was, he was very, VERY careful.” We all had a good laugh! How wise his father was to settle the matter in that most diplomatic way. Very old school… but that was how we grew up.

My friend told the story about how, as the younger of the two sisters, she was always living in the wake of her big sister who also had a big presence and big personality. Sometimes that was a good thing. Many treated my friend with the same expectation that she was a “good egg” like her sister. But there were downsides too — like feeling that she had to live up to her sister’s big reputation and often feeling that she was coming up short. One time, her older sister started working for a company where my friend had preceded her. After a few days on the job, the older sister called and said: “Okay, I get how hard it is to live in someone’s shadow.”

I know I’ve written about walking a mile in someone else’s moccasins before, but it’s an important lesson to learn. And it’s amazing how many times we have to be reminded to do it. Perspective — we all have one. But what if… what if we really did do this more often… switched sides mentally and argued for our protagonist’s position. If you do that, I think you will see how careful your cake cutting will be.