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Do you care about style? I do. I like things that are fancy and colorful with a lot of patterns and designs. My mom thinks that I just try to make things look crazy. But I don’t. It might seem crazy to other people, but it is just what I think is pretty. I think it looks boring otherwise. When it was time to choose the cake for my Bat Mitzvah, I made sure that it looked the way I wanted it, with many colors and patterns. Let me tell you what happened.

The sliding door slid open and my mom and I walked into the store. My bat mitzvah was next week and we were going to order a fancy three tiered cake for the party. I was super excited because a fancy cake was one of things that I really wanted. I first decided that I wanted a fancy cake, when I saw one at my friend’s Bar Mitzvah. It really grabbed my attention. It was beautiful, and I knew I wanted mine to be just as spectacular. We weren’t going to make everything in my party fancy, but my mom said I could choose to make one thing fancy. The cake would be my thing to have however I liked it. I thought it was a crucial element to make the celebration really festive. I could just picture it. It would be dazzling and magnificent and exquisite. It would sit in the center of the table. Everyone would love it. It would be just as I hoped. I knew what it would look like too. I had a vision from the beginning. My family and I discussed it to make sure they liked the design too. We planned it all out before we went to the store. Planning it out took a long time, since my mom disagreed with me on many things. The design I wanted was going to have three different colors for each layer and flowers cascading over it. My mom thought that flowers were nice, but she wanted three shades of one color instead of three different colors.

“Mom, I want it to be colorful.” I said over and over.

“How about three shades of yellow?” she asked. “You want yellow, so let’s do three shades of yellow. It will look much more elegant.”

“Mom, I don’t want it to be elegant. I want it to be colorful.” I kept repeating. She kept saying that it was my cake, but I still had to convince her. “

Look,” she said, showing me a picture of a cake online. “Here is a picture of a cake with three shades of yellow. Isn’t it pretty?”

“How about this picture?” I asked. “These are the colors I want.” When my mom saw the picture, she admitted it looked nice and agreed to go with my way.

Then we talked about many other things. The leaves would be light green not dark green. The flowers would be red. The yellow layer would be on top followed by coral, and then gold. My mom and I had discussed every tiny little detail. We had talked and talked until we came up with the perfect cake. But, now we were done. My mom had agreed to go with the cake I wanted. Placing the order at the store would be easy. 

I followed my mom to the bakery section of the store. We looked at the book of designs and quickly flipped through the options. The exact design we were going to have wasn’t there. But it wasn’t a problem. We quickly found a similar one. We then started looking at the colors to make sure they had what we wanted. They had everything. We were having yellow, coral, and gold layers with red roses and light green leaves. Everything was set. We were about to fill out the form when we noticed something. This cake also had dots piped around each layer and we never talked about their color. I flipped through the colors again.

“How about teal?” I asked. I thought that teal would add one more pretty color to the design.

My mom frowned. “Teal?”, she asked. “How about orange, or something that matches.”

“I don’t want it to be too monochromatic,” I replied.

“Fine,” my mom said. “It is your cake. Choose whatever you want. I am staying out of it.”

I could tell she was not pleased. I thought teal would look nice. But I was not sure. It is hard to pick something when I feel like no one else thinks it is nice. Then again, orange would be boring. My mom did say I could choose. I stared at the colors and tried to imagine the cake and decide.

“Mom what do you think,” I asked her again.

“Whatever you want,” she said again in an exasperated tone.

“Fine,” I decided.  “Then teal." I was not sure, but I decided to go with my instinct. I wanted the cake to be colorful not boring. It would make my party much more festive. The dots would be teal.

The next Friday, I was super excited as I got into the car after school. “Give me your phone,” I told my mom.  She had picked up the cake and delivered it to the synagogue for the next day while I was in school and I had reminded her, 10,000 times, to take a picture so that I could get to see it immediately. As she handed me the phone she said, “It is even nicer than you could have imagined.” As I looked at the picture, I saw that she was right. It was beautiful. Even my mom admitted that the teal was a good choice and that she was glad we went with it.

I was glad too. I was really pleased with how the cake came out. Everyone at the party liked it. It was gorgeous. It was colorful and flowery and bright. It was the centerpiece of the dessert table. But I was happy, not only because the cake was a success, but also because it was my creation, the way it had been in my imagination. It might seem silly. Why should I care who came up with the design? What matters is that it came out well, right? But I did care. Because it was my design, I felt proud of how it came out. I am glad that I stood my ground.

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