A Pile of Cake®

Many people know that my husband's favorite food is cake. (Some people laugh at this, but I find it endearing. How many adults are truthful enough to admit that a dessert is their favorite food?) The other day, John really wanted a cake, so after unsuccessfully begging me to make him a cake, he decided to try it himself. Now, John is a really good chef. In the almost five years we have been married, he has learned the art of making an amazing dinner. But I am the baker in the family and cake was uncharted territory for him.

So he greased the pan, he preheated the oven, he mixed the cake mix (yes, from a box) and the eggs and the oil and by the time it was done baking, it looked and smelled like a wonderful cake. It wasn't overcooked, it was perfect. This was something my mom would have been proud of... Until he tried to remove it from the pan. This is when disaster struck. You see, John didn't know he really should have greased and floured the pan because the box didn't tell him to do that. It's a trick newbies don't know. When he flipped the cake over to remove it from the 9x13, the middle fell out and the edges stayed in. So, we were left with something we dubbed immediately as "A Pile of Cake®". (John is so fond of this term that he insisted we trademark it- another quirky, endearing trait).

Now some people might have been upset by this, and to be honest, if I had needed it for a birthday or something, I would have been one of those people. But since we didn't have any frosting anyway, we just ate it as it was, in bowls. And it was delicious- still warm from the oven, moist, and heavenly.

Why am I equating this story with our adoption, you may ask? Well, I'm not that great at metaphors or anything, but I think this is a great metaphor for what we are going through right now. We've been on the journey of adoption now for over 15 months and while we started out expecting the unexpected, you really can't expect the unexpected. It has taken longer than we thought and there have been turns we didn't see coming. We thought we were going to adopt from India before that country changed their adoption criteria. We thought John would get offered a permanent job sooner than he did. We thought that we'd have a baby by now. But we hold on to faith that even though things aren't happening in our timing or in the way we thought they would, it will still be a great, wonderful outcome in the end when we have our Ethiopian princess. So even though we started this process imagining a perfectly shaped 9x13 cake, I think we might like the Pile of Cake® we end up with even better.