The Cake Is A Die

My sister and I have had a tenuous relationship for most of our lives. I was the little sister who worshipped her; she was the big sister who wanted nothing to do with me. You get the picture? We grew up, and I moved away and got married. She changed from the self-centered bully who ignored me unless she wanted something from me into a giving, intelligent woman, and our relationship slowly mended… until she started planning her wedding.

A thing you need to know is I have several life-threatening allergies: peanut, mushroom, and tomato. Life-threatening in the way that if I am in the same room of any of these and breathe them I can die. Literally die. I almost have three times. I inherited two of the three allergies from my father and have had them my entire life; they’ve been getting steadily worse until they reached this point of complete anaphylaxis.

Anyway, my sister was planning her wedding, specifically the food, and her first choice of meals was Italian. Tomatoes and mushrooms. Her logic was that Dad and I could eat something else, and maybe if we sat by an open door we’d be fine. I repeatedly told her that if I was in the same room as these foods they could kill me.

She did not listen. She went as far as to begin to book the caterers for the wedding until my dad stepped foot in their kitchens and immediately had a reaction. Suddenly, she pulled back and decided that if Dad was having health issues she didn’t want to risk it because she needed him there. So, she went another direction.

Then came the wedding cake. She wanted to have it topped with peanut butter frosting. I spent weeks trying to get her to comprehend that even if she made a tiny cake for just her and her husband to share, if it was in the room, I could not be there. It took my parents intervening to convince her not to have it.

I love my sister dearly and I understand wanting to have your way at your wedding but demanding I be in a room that could kill me just so she could have a specific type of food… yeah.