Once upon a time, there was a little girl who wanted a cupcake. A lemon cupcake, with yellow and pink frosting on top.
She wanted it with all her heart…until she saw the brownies.
Then she wanted a brownie and a cupcake, and when she couldn’t have both, she threw herself on the floor, screaming, and had to be carried out of the restaurant.
After her daddy toted the girl out, her mommy, rationalizing that she really would love to have a little piece of brownie herself, added one to the order and had it all bagged to go.
A few minutes later, the still sniffling little girl opened up the tantalizingly black cupcake box…only to start howling again.
“I wanted the PINK cupcake,” she screamed.
The cupcake, unfortunately, did not have pink frosting, but only white. The flustered mommy had forgotten to specify exactly which cupcake she had to have.
What followed was an epic tantrum of proportions rarely seen.
The little girl screamed and howled and beat her fists on the ground. And when her mommy bent to pick her up, she kicked her right in the face.
That meant she spent the next four blocks being carried by her daddy like an overgrown infant in a fashion that meant she couldn’t pinch or hit or kick.
Her mommy and daddy, veteran parents that they were, took it in stride. They saw the half-hidden giggles of passersby as the sympathetic oh-we’ve-been-there reactions that they were, and even offered to give her away a time or two. Unfortunately, they got no takers.
Well, that little girl, she screamed all the way down the street. She screamed while being put in her car seat. She screamed because the music was too loud and the wind was too, well, windy. And when, 20 minutes later, her mommy asked her why she was still screaming, she answered (still screaming), “I DON’T KNOW!”
At which point her mommy’s heart melted (for she knew exactly what that little girl meant), and went to sit beside her daughter, head in the three-year-old’s lap so she could run her hands through her mommy’s hair.
Eventually she calmed, and her parents turned the car toward home.
She dozed, but woke when they finally turned into their driveway.
“Mommy, I want my cupcake now,” she said. As if the last horrifying 45 minutes had never happened.
A little while later, she sat at the kitchen table, grinning happily as she shared her pink frosting-free cupcake with her mommy.
“This is ‘licious,” she proclaimed, not quite managing the difficult word.
They finished the cupcake amid laughter and smiles, and went on to snuggle and swing and laugh away the rest of the afternoon.
There’s a lesson here, folks. Sometimes we’re so focused on what we wish we had that we simply can’t enjoy what’s in front of us.
And that’s a damn shame.
Enjoy your cupcake, whatever the flavor. It’s sure to be a damn sight more delicious than the bitterness that will otherwise eat your brain.
Morality tale over.
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