- December 25, 2024
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Can we talk about exploitation of 1-year-old babies?
It goes something like this: He is plopped in his high chair and presented with a miniature cake all to himself, but he doesn’t immediately react with the kind of cake-eating-contest abandon you might expect. He is tentative. He’s looking at all of these beaming adults crowded around him, taking videos with their phones and cheering him on. The pressure builds. He starts to sweat.
“Do it!”
“Dive in!”
“Let’s get dirty!”
He has stage fright. He’s too young to know what a cake even is.
Eventually, by sheer chance, he’s bound to accidentally flop his hands around enough to land them in the frosting. And then the cheering begins. These adults are waiting for a freak show. They want to see globs of frosting overflowing from both nostrils and cake bits smeared everywhere like a mud facial at a spa.
Why, I ask, is this a tradition when children turn 1?
I admit that I have done it, as well: I put each of my three children in this zoo-like scenario and cheered and took pictures. But it struck me on Saturday, when I was watching this again at a birthday party for Logan Kal-El Wrenn: Why?
“Go on!” the child’s mother, Jackie, was saying. She took photos and even helped him at one point, using Logan’s hand like a paintbrush to add color to the canvas of his cheeks.
The poor kid also appeared to be bumping into naptime. His eyelids drooped, and I was afraid for a moment that he would do a face plant in the cake and fall asleep.
As a top-notch investigative journalist, I imagined the expose on the front page — "Make them eat cake: How far is too far?" — and I began my interviews.
“I would say it’s a rite of passage,” Jackie said, deflecting the accusations of exploitation. “Before 1, you’re not supposed to have sugar or sweets. After 1, he can eat whatever he wants.”
She continued: “What other time in your life can you eat cake like that and have it be cute? If I did it, it would be a little disgusting. Although, I guess we could try the next time we go out.”
Across the room, I watched the mayhem with the little boy’s father, Dan Wrenn. He’s a successful businessman and a bit of a neat freak. His clothes are always 100% wrinkle-free: He can make a gray T-shirt look executive. He also ate his cupcake with a fork over the sink, if that gives you any indication (I thought it was such a good idea that I did the same, if that gives you any indication). In fact, Dan’s nickname is Moose, and it’s not because he’s a big linebacker-type guy, which he is. It’s actually because on some sort of camp as a kid he brought hair product with him. So, while the other kids were stinking up the place as the days wore on, he was clean, and his hair was styled with mousse. Of course, you can’t have a nickname like “Mousse,” so we call him “Moose” instead.
“Why do we do this?” I asked Moose. “Why this tradition of the personal cake for a 1-year-old?”
“I don’t understand it,” he said, thoughtfully squinting. “To me, it’s messy.”
It was a eureka moment, like the first time tungsten was used as the filament for a light bulb.
Yes. That was the word I had been searching for all along: messy.
I can live with a little exploitation. But messy is going too far.
Little Logan Kal-El was named after Wolverine and Superman, so you know he is destined for greatness. But I had a feeling as I watched him spread the sludge of cake around on his tray that an even greater destiny was being written in his soul: Perhaps he is the Chosen One.
Some day, when the world is rid of messiness — when people everywhere in the world are eating their cupcakes over the sink, when we will remember this cake-eating tradition as a thing of the past, kinda like polio — we will have the great Logan Kal-El to thank, as he darts back into the crisp, immaculate shadows, leaving a whiff of pine-scented cleaner in the air.
