Life Can’t All Be Cake

By Amy Lane

So, coming off of youngest daughter’s birthday today. We’re meeting with her grandparents for dinner, dropping her older sister off at the airport, and that’s it. No more birthday. I wouldn’t feel quite so badly about this if she hadn’t been planning it in December. (Yes—it’s April.)

Kids are always looking for that one brilliant perfect moment of glory, right? That thing that makes all of the math tests and stinky playground nemeses and broccoli worth it. And we can’t even explain to them that this sets up a whole gauntlet of painfully inflated expectations people have about life in general, because we do it too.

But the really happy adults I know—the ones who are all Tigger almost all the time—haven’t actually had that many birthday parties. They haven’t had many moments of spectacular glory and cake and joy. In fact, some of them have had an unholy crapbag of spiders and snakes before they got to a place where they could weave, sew, and stuff their own bag of personal experiences without any help from the people around them.

Which is what makes them grateful for the sunny days, ice cream in the park, and quiet moments with loved ones or pets, watching television and knitting. (Okay—knitting is me, mostly—but I’ve heard from other people that knitting really helps.)

And this brings me to Vinnie from Selfie.

People aren’t going to like Vinnie—which is too bad. Vinnie isn’t malicious. He doesn’t set out to do mean things to Connor in the course of their relationship. He works really hard at improving himself so he can be the kind of man Connor needs.

But he falls short. He cheats sometimes. Abuses alcohol and chemicals. Hurts Connor in spite of his best intentions.

And people are going to think that Connor’s a doormat—but he’s not.

Connor is just really aware of human frailty, and he doesn’t want to penalize Vinnie for his. Connor has seen some shitty days in his life, has experienced the sudden loss of love and support, has known what it’s like to have someone in his life who has no soft words or kindness. Vinnie’s love and support mean everything to him—it’s all he really wants.

And he knows that you don’t get cake everyday.

So I hope people love Connor for the bright soul he is—for someone who could love Vinnie through weakness and who deserves Noah to love him through his own. Connor’s an actor, so he mostly eats chicken and vegetables—but that doesn’t mean that if life was fair, he shouldn’t get cake.