The Upside-Down Cake

How having a child helps you become a better writer.

Have you ever tried to make, and bake, an upside-down cake?

LIKE MANY PARENTS, I started making up stories and rhymes for my daughter when she was little. Kids are a great guide to what’s engaging and what isn’t. They love ridiculousness and word play. They make an appreciative but critical audience. If they’re bored or antsy, they can’t help but show it. If they’re tickled, they laugh.

You can gauge the appeal of a story or poem by how well the child remembers it and how often she asks for it. Kids provide an ongoing education in the power of simplicity, repetition, and surprise. Reading aloud to them alerts you to stumbles and awkward moments you missed on the page.

Parenthood helps you become a better writer in many other ways. Loving your own child teaches you to love all children. (Same with dogs.) Having a child intensifies your emotional range: there’s no feeling quite like the surge of panic that comes over you in a mall when you turn around and she’s gone. Being a parent deepens your empathy as you learn to understand and relate to your child's experiences and emotions. Empathy surely translates into more authentic and relatable characters in your writing.

Patience and perseverance are essential to a writer, and a child forces you to develop those qualities. The broader perspective you gain as you reflect on your child’s future, and their (and your) past, is the beginning of wisdom. The centrality of family has, of course, been a literary staple forever. A vivid imagination is central to the writing of fiction, and children turn up the pilot light of creativity that burns in us all.

The author of, and inspiration behind, such classics as “The Glurb,” “The Mighty Ning-Ning,” and “Why Do I Have a Bum?”

I’ve been generalizing with the second-person “you,” but of course I’m really talking about myself—what I’ve felt, and how my view of life, and the world, and my writing, has evolved since my daughter was born 28 years ago. When she was young, she stimulated in me periods of fevered creativity. Poems and songs would come spilling out, one after another.

The poem below was one of her favourites. When I read it to her Grade 2 class at school, the teacher had them draw a picture of what they’d just heard and gave me the collection of drawings as a gift. Alas, I’ve moved a couple of times since then and can’t locate them at the moment, but here’s the poem that inspired them.

THE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE

An upside-down girl named Anna

Thought it might be fun to make

A birthday surprise for her mother

She decided on upside-down cake.

With help from her upside-down father

And time for some upside-down huggin’

She got Mom’s cake all ready to bake

And opened the upside-down oven.

Before long the cake was ready

It turned out a butterscotch brown

With oven mitts, she removed it to cool

Then tipped it out, upside down.

Looks perfect, Anna’s dad told her

What a fabulous job you’ve done

Let’s go wake up your mother

My, this is going to be fun!

They put the cake on a beautiful plate

And stuck candles all around

Anna tiptoed, holding it steady

Which is hard when you’re upside down.

She woke her upside-down mother

Happy birthday, Mom! Surprise!

My gosh, said her still-sleepy mother

I can’t believe my upside-down eyes!

She blew out all the candles

And gave Anna a great big hug

Let’s eat it at the table, she said

So we don’t leave crumbs on the rug.

Notice anything different? said Anna

Your birthday cake’s upside down!

We baked it so that you turn it out

By flipping the whole thing around.

But it’s not upside down, said her mother

It didn’t turn out as you thought

When we’re right-side up, the cake’s upside down

But when we’re upside down, it’s not.

I wrecked it, cried upside-down Anna

I’m sorry, I ruined your cake

Why didn’t we think of that sooner

Before Dad and I started to bake?

It’s the thought that counts, said her father

Too bad, but I’m sure it tastes good

Come on, have a piece, who really cares

If it didn’t turn out as it should.

Wait a second, said Anna, I’ve got an idea

We could stop being upside-down

We could leave the cake just as it is

And turn everything else around.

That’s brilliant, said Anna’s mother

You’re not only thoughtful but smart

There’s an upside-down head on those shoulders

To go with your upside-down heart.

They began turning everything over

Which caused a considerable fuss

They flipped mirrors and stairs and beds and chairs

But left the cake just as it was.

It wasn’t long till they’d finished

And changed everything around

Now that the whole house was right-side up

The cake really was upside down.

They ate it with gusto and pleasure

And laughed at the silly mistake

The cake tasted all that much better

Because they’d been forced to wait.

Thank you, said Mom, for your present

We’ve learned a good lesson indeed

When you find yourself in an upside-down world

Common sense may be all that you need!

P.S. Anyone want to feed this poem into an AI image generator and see what marvels the magic machine spews out? Has AI evolved to the point that it can produce suitable children’s book illustrations? We’ll go halves on the book.

P.P. S. My post last week about my vanished schoolmate Kenneth Owen prompted some unexpected responses, including one from an old friend who happened to have had lunch with Ken and his father in Stratford on Avon in England not too long before his disappearance—the last time Ivon laid eyes on his son.

I was also fact-checked that Ken’s younger brother Gerald did not have any children (I referred to him as a husband and father). Someone else said that the Owen family planned to meet up in Rome, not London as I wrote. Another person heard that Ken had gone to Ireland and been blown up in a bombing, his remains never identified. Yet another spoke confidently of a fatal drug overdose.

I was reminded of an experiment I’d been part of in a university course. I was given the first half of a book to read (author and title anonymized). The principal characters were an English couple on a train in France, on a mysterious mission that was tense and disquieting. I then had to return the book, tell student #2 exactly what I’d read, and speculate about how I thought the story might proceed in the second half of the book.

I was student #11 in the chain (as well as student #1), and when #10 gave me her account, it bore zero resemblance to what I’d told #2. Zilch. No trace of my original account remained: not a couple, a name, a train, a sense of mystery, a setting.

The world is a game of telephone. Life is a mystery. RIP Kenneth Owen.