Ten Years In: What a Birthday Cake Can Teach You About Self-Reflection

This week was Mother’s Day. It also marks a decade of me being a mum. Ten years of raising humans, wiping faces, finding lost shoes, packing bags, worrying, celebrating, and trying - and often failing  - to hold it all together.

And like many milestone moments, it’s made me reflective. 

I’ve been thinking about how what has changed and the vast plains of motherhood and life I’ve covered in the last 10 years. The ways motherhood has stretched me, sharpened me, showed me parts of myself I had never known before. But also how some habits - some deeply etched scripts - are remarkably stubborn.

Case in point: the birthday cakes.

I need to start by saying something really important. I am not a baker. I never have been and don't aspire to be. 

I dislike the precision. I resent the pressure. In cooking you can tweak, adjust, improvise. Baking offers none of this freedom. It is chemistry with consequences (sidenote: I was always crap at chemistry). One wrong move and the entire thing collapses. Too much.

And yet.

Every single year, I make my children’s birthday cakes. Not buy. Make.

This becomes a project roughly six weeks in advance when I ask for their cake ideas. This year my newly turned three-year-old requested, over the course of those weeks, a Bingo cake, a Bluey cake, a digger cake, a tractor cake and a rocket ship cake. We settled on a rocket. It was fine.

My eldest and youngest also have birthdays a week apart, which adds an extra layer of stress to proceedings. My eldest has now clocked the intensity of this ritual after an incident a couple of years ago when I stood raging at a dinosaur cake that simply would not rise. At one point I had to ask her to leave the kitchen while I took some deep breaths and tried to remember that this was meant to be a loving gesture, not a descent into baking-induced fury. It is… a lot.

Which naturally leads to the question: why do I do this to myself?

If a coaching client told me that something caused this much stress, I would gently but firmly facilitate a conversation along the lines of:

“If it adds this much pressure to your life, what would cutting a corner look like here?”

After all, everyone loves a Colin the Caterpillar. But there is something deeper going on.

Part of it is undoubtedly the conditioning of what it means to be a good mum. The mum who bakes, who provides, who creates the magic.

Part of it is the pure glory of their little faces when I present some elaborate chocolate-fudge Gruffalo creation.

And of course, we can’t ignore the comparison culture we now live in. Social media means we get a front-row seat to everyone else’s increasingly spectacular cake creations - each year more elaborate, more Pinterest-worthy - often accompanied by a self deprecating comment “ It’s no #GBBO showstopper but happy birthday to my little one!”

But when I start to peel back the layers on this a little further, the truth is a bit more interesting - the making of the cakes are so much  more than a stress induced icing sugar storm: turns out the baking is satisfying my core values. Who knew right?! 

Creativity.

Not in the traditional artistic sense - give me a paintbrush and I’m at a loss - but I love the process of creating something from nothing. Turning ingredients, chaos and vague instructions into something that exists in the world feels satisfyng. 

Challenge.

I have always had a strong internal reaction to the thought “I can’t do this” - almost immediately followed by - “Well that’s even more reason to try.”

This is the same trait that has led me to run marathons, say yes to work opportunities when I felt wildly underqualified, and spend two weeks living in the Bolivian jungle where I was largely terrified of everything.

I am stubborn. And I deeply enjoy the smug feeling of achievement afterwards.

And finally - perhaps the most honest one: Feedback.

Motherhood can be oddly devoid of it. You pour enormous amounts of energy, time and love into raising small humans and rarely get a  feeling of “ I am winning at this!” What’s more, are most traditional measures of success (at work for example) actively discriminate against working Mums (Motherhood Penalty anyone?) and largely uphold standards completely at odds with the feat that working mums are conquering everyday juggling babies and boardrooms, and everything in between. 

But a birthday cake?

That moment when your child’s face lights up when you bring it out - that’s feedback. That’s a tiny moment of acknowledgement. You did good. And this is where self-reflection gets interesting.

Sometimes when we examine our habits, the answer genuinely is: stop doing that, simplify, let it go. For the love of god, BUY THE COLIN CAKE.

But sometimes, when we dig a little deeper, we realise the habit actually connects to something meaningful about who we are - even if it drives us slightly mad in the process. 

So yes, come July and the next child’s birthday, l will probably still be sweating in the kitchen, muttering at a piping, questioning my life choices and Googling “how to stop crumb coat a perfectly football shaped sponge.”

Old habits die hard. But sometimes those habits are also little signposts to what we value most.