Baking Cookies for Ukraine
Small acts of faith in hard times
Recently, my daughter’s school hosted a bake sale to raise funds for Ukraine. My 11-year-old loves to bake and spent an afternoon rolling out heart and star-shaped butter cookies. She has a secret ingredient: a splash of maple extract.
The cookies tasted like home. They smelled like autumn, but were bright blue and yellow like spring; like Ukraine. She made nearly 100. She didn’t want my help, and as the afternoon closed into evening, the making of the cookies got tense.
She believed the value in baking the cookies was in doing it all on her own.
I was drawn into an argument before I realized what had happened. All of a sudden, there were peace negotiations happening on my kitchen table.
When my husband walked in the door he saw the look on my face and said, “It’s time to tag out. I’ve got this.”
So I took a walk in the spring evening. The neighbor was out with her dogs. I called my aunt. I felt that spot between my shoulder blades relax. I let my mind wander.
I wondered if baking cookies was a far-fetched way of teaching our kids to engage with the atrocities of the world. I wondered if the cookies matter, or if they were just another way to make ourselves feel better.
I wondered why making cookies had become fraught and why familial peace is so hard to achieve, much less maintain.
I thought the point was to teach my daughter about caring for people even when their suffering is far away from us, and it became a lesson about the importance of working collaboratively.
Humans are messy. Good intentions are bungled all the time. So we keep trying, and sometimes we get to help change the world.
In the meantime, we don’t get to know what difference the cookies will make, but we have to bake the cookies anyway.
I came back inside as they were finishing up. My daughter apologized and said, “It was more fun letting other people help.”
As the war rages on and our adrenal glands get worn down, we have no choice but to keep caring and to keep living.
And maybe, along the way, we’re also learning to live a little more humanely.
Since I can’t share the yummy cookies with you, perhaps you would like to contribute by helping this Ukrainian newspaper:
Or by helping Ukrainian kids through UNICEF:
I encourage you to read Ukrainian authors on Medium. Their stories are so important: Maria Basarab, Yotam Marom, Denys Opria - Ukrainian, Alex Dobrenko
I would love any of your recommendations for Ukrainian authors to follow!
Want to get an email from me every time I publish? Join my email list by clicking here. In a world full of so many words, thank you for taking the time to read mine. Here are some other stories by me:
