Bunny Cakes And Memories That Bubble Up Around Holidays

When I was young; age 2 and before age 6, my mother grandmother had a family tradition that I adored. The tradition involved getting a new Easter dress and making the bunny cakes on the saturday before Easter Sunday.  We were a small family then; just a single mother with two kids in a tiny little house and we were happy.  My grandmother thought I was adorable; would take me to Neman Marcus the Friday before Easter; where we would have high tea with our white gloves and trays of sweet little cakes. Directly following our lady's tea time was the annual trip to the girl's dress department to try on and pick out my Easter outfit.  The dress was always a ruffled frilly lacy amazement which resembled the cakes we had with our tea. The girls dress department was atop this spotlighted stage like area and flanked by matching chrome staircases on each side. It was by far the most elegant shopping area this 6 year old had ever beheld. It was designed to make you feel like a princess from the moment you walked up those gleaming stairs. The sales ladies would scurry to and fro to gather matching lace gloves and frilly lace socks and little patient Mary Jane's all to compliment the incredibly detailed frocks and hats. This ritual female pampering happened only at Easter and I looked forward to it amore so than Christmas morning cause it was only for me.

I am 5 years old an in my last ruffled Easter dress - sans gloves and hat
because I had been running searching for eggs.

We spent the day getting all dolled up and then that evening after dinner we would wash and tie my hair into ribbon curls: so my naturally curly hair would make perfect ringlets and look beautiful for Easter sunday. Once my hair was tied up in the ribbon curls all three generations of women would work together making this Easter bunny cake. The cake would be revealed for the family dinner after Sunday services and be celebrated as the highlight of the meal, so it was a huge delicious deal.  We would bake a yellow butter cake in round pans, let them cool and cut them in half to stand them together upright glued with icing to form the bunny body. Then we would carve the bunny face and paws from the second cake round and ice them into place.  Once the bunny was built we covered the body with tons of buttercream mixed with coconut shreds so it looked like bunny fur. I got to mix the rest of the coconut with green food coloring and spread it around the bunny to make the grass and then I always had the honor of making the bunny face and decorating with jelly beans. I was a perfectionist about decor and cooking even back then and would take hours getting the whiskers and placement of jelly beans just right.  We usually finished just before bedtime and we would sit and and share a 'cuppa' admiring our work.

4 years old in my Easter dress showing off the Bunny cake -
I spent hours arranging the cotton ball bunnies too

I loved those times with my mother and grandmother because they we something only we shared and they made me feel special, adored and loved. My grandmother fancied me looking some what like Shirley Tempe when my hair curled into perfect ringlets and she made sure to parade me around to every sales lady in the store to show off her little princess. I loved every minute of those times. Then I turned 6 years old.  You see this department only held sizes up to 6x in girls dresses.  At age five I had outgrown that magic size limit and the sales lady informed my grandmother that I could no longer fit into those dresses and I would have to go to young miss department and probably the husky side.  The young miss section had no ruffles and lace dresses - it was the boring no where land between cute little girl and full grown young lady. From what I could tell the dresses were shapeless floral sacks with very little embellishments and made from scratchy polyester.  I remember the disappointment on my grandmother's face as we descending the stairs for the final time and walked over into the new section.  The sales ladies were not nearly as nice over there and they directed us to the Husky section.  Yes it was named husky - back then they did not have nice pretty clothes for girls who were starting to become chubby.  I was an early bloomer and my body started plumping out to prepare for the curves that would become my life long figure. I was in a training bra by nine and hit my first moon by eleven and had cleavage in 5th grade.

typical bunny cake like we used to make

That Easter we left with the horrible polyester orange aline dress that had no ruffles or lace and no little lacy socks or new white Mary Jane's. Even the hats did not match the hideous yellow and orange of those huge flowers.  I was devastated but as we got into the car I remember thinking, "at least now we can go home an make the cake" We got back home to find my mother had all the normal cake making ingredients ready to go.  But my grandmother remarked we would not me making a bunny cake and to put all that foolishness away.  She told my mother the embarrassing story of how I no longer fit into the little girl dresses and how I had to go to the husky section.  I saw my mother's face change and her eyes tear and I did not understand why. Slowly she put away all the cake making things and I was sent off to my room to play.  Just before bed I came out to ask for a cuppa  - I figured we would still have our ladies' night cup - instead of hot chocolate I got earl grey and my grandmother swatted my hand lightly as I reached for the sugar bowl and started the conversation that would dominate the rest of our conversations until I left for college.

The conversation when something like this: you are growing  into a young woman now and gone are the days where you can have cake.  You have the weight problem of all our family's women and will never be able to eat cake.  You will need to widdle that figure from now on.  My grandmother laid out the diet plan I was to follow - which included Cambridge Shake meal replacements - the most disgusting diet shakes ever made. After Easter that year I took a tupperware cup filled with this chocolate flavored powder and enough money to buy milk and while the other second graders were eating sandwiches and trading twinkles and fruit cups I would shake my sad little tupperware glass and try and get the ash tasting power to not be clumpy.  From that point on I was always on a diet of one kind or another until I left for college.  First it was the Cambridge diet then it was Slim Fast,  it did not matter it all tasted gross to me.  That easter was when the generations of women in my family taught me to hate my body and gave me the mantra that haunted the whole of my life.  When I stubbornly refused to drink that first cambridge shake, and my grandmother reached over to pinch my nose and lift the glass so I had no choice, she declared that if I did not lose weight no one would ever love me.

My memory of this dress is that my mother and grandmother remarked how I
should never wear white because it made me look fat, I remember my
 date asking why I held my hands  around my wait like I was covering myself
 -well I was cause I was told how fat I looked as this picture was taken
and spent the evening trying to hide it with my hands.  I grew up with
such a distorted understanding of what I actually looked like,

Easter always swirls up conflicts of family memories, mainly because of the conflicts of my family. My childhood was dysfunctional and my relationship with my mother and grandmother resembles a Tennessee William's play on a good day and a Flannery O'Connor story on a bad day.  But under all that conflict there was love, confused, misguided, and at times hurtful love but love none the less. No family is perfect and I regret nothing of what happened to me as a child because it was not my choice nor was there anything I could have done to stop it. I know their misguided ideas about weight loss and the value of being thin was product of their generation and was done in "love".  That Easter broke my spirit and forever changed my relationship to food and weight and self worth. The self loathing which developed out of this experience paved the way for future physical abuse. My lack of self worth made me an easier target for the predator and influenced the hows and whys of what happened later.  Those haunting thoughts of none will ever love me unless I lose weight is why I developed eating disorders into adulthood and why I allowed a surgeon to cut me open and forever damage my GI tract which resulted in a lifetime of medical complications.

My H.S. yearbook photo, I remember crying over how
I looked and my grandmother remarking how chubby
my face looked and giving me lessons in the mirror
on how to suck in my cheeks.

Those scars of my childhood are what carved and shaped my soul.  For the worse and for the better.  I eventually healed myself and began to use those scars as a way of recognizing others, like me who needed help seeing their worth. It is why I wanted to teach and why I became a great teacher.  Those scars made me want to live in a way that helped others.

Easter is a celebration of renewal of the death of one life and the rebirth into another.  Below is the 4 year old me, the me before the world and the female role models in my life taught me to hate my body.  I do not regret the woman I have become now - I am the sum of all my experiences and i add up to a pretty remarkable woman now.  But every time I see one of those little half round easter bunny cakes I think back to this memory and wonder how different my life might have been had the ladies of my family focused their admiration on my intelligence and academic accomplishments, if they had simply let my body go through the natural course of gaining weight to prepare for puberty and not interfered with my developing metabolism by forcing me onto liquid diets in second grade.

So Easter is a conflict of emotion for me, and if you get anything from what I just shared is how important the words said to the young lives around you really are, and to remind you that voicing value in other things than weight and appearance for young girls is critical to how they grow up and to who and what they become.