The Meaning of Toys and Cake

An emotional prose poem about differing childhoods.

People sing about the beauty of childhood

Wishing they had never grown up

They sing of the glorious peace

They say, take me back to when the only worries I had were which toy to choose or why I had to eat my vegetables before my cake

 

But what if childhood was adulthood for some?

What about those who carried the weight of the world on their 3 ft, scrawny shoulders

instead of toy filled packs and pride for a game won

Or a puzzle solved

 

Kids like us, hell, we had a few toys to choose from and could eat our cake without even eating our vegetables

We did

The stipulation is while we ate that cake or played with those toys, we felt pain

Much deeper, rawer pain than those who were denied instant gratification, but received a hug for sticking it out

 

We use the toys and the cake to distract from the confusion

Games have rules

Cake tastes good

That makes sense

 

What doesn’t make sense are the words

The loudly, angrily shouted words on the verge of tears

We felt the hurt and the longing heard in those words

They stabbed our hearts and puzzled our minds

 

We felt the pain

We felt the suffering

We witnessed it firsthand

But, sweet six-year-old, may I ask you, why is it there? Can you take it away from them?

 

…….

 

When you live a life of chaos, it becomes what you crave

You can’t function without feeling the pain

And if the circumstances around you canot create the pain for you, you create it inside yourself

And you drown in it

You drown in the cake and the toys, only coming up for short breathes

Then push yourself back under because it, ironically, is the only way to keep yourself breathing at all

 

The broken little girl hiding beyond the face of a now elderly soul asks:

Where is our hug for surviving?

Non existant?

Too bad kiddo because you still have a long way to go