The Vulva Cake
A few months ago, my friend became a midwife, and someone baked her a vulva-shaped cake to celebrate her new vocation.
The pink frosting petals were so tender I wanted to weep, thinking of the hands that shaped sugar to resemble the place where life begins. But I couldn’t swallow the celebration while Gaza bled, a mere sixty kilometers south. I couldn’t lift my fork with that frosting while mothers nearby delivered babies into rubble, into silence, into a world that tastes of ash.
The cake sat perfectly on the table, a monument to birth, to joy, to my friend who will catch slippery miracles in her palms and whisper “you’re safe now” to women splitting open with hope. And still, the news crawled across my phone—another school, another hospital, another mother’s cry.
How do we honor life while death drums its rhythm just beyond our laughter? Do we serve anyone by starving our own joy, by refusing the sweetness of a friend’s hard-won triumph?
What Palestinian mother will be fed by my empty plate? What child in Gaza sleeps safer because I couldn’t celebrate a woman learning to catch babies?
Guilt is not solidarity. My hunger strikes no blow against injustice. My silence at this table does not amplify their cries. If I can’t eat this cake, sculpted from sugar and hope, if I can’t toast the hands that will guide new souls earthward, if I can’t hold space for both grief and celebration, then what kind of witness am I?
The world needs midwives. It needs women who know how to hold the terror and beauty of bodies opening, of life insisting itself into existence even when—especially when—everything is breaking. As I sat there, I thought to myself that, maybe the most radical thing to do is to eat the cake, to let sweetness live alongside sorrow, to refuse the binary of joy or justice, as if we could only choose one.
But I sat there with frosting on my tongue and still felt complicit. I still tasted the salt of someone else’s tears mixed with buttercream. The cake was beautiful. My friend was radiant. Gaza was burning. All of these things were true at once, and I still don’t know how to hold them without breaking.
I don’t know if celebration is resistance or erasure. I don’t know if my joy is medicine or poison. I don’t know if eating makes me human or a monster. What I know is this: the cake was made with love.
My friend will save lives. People are dying, and my nation is killing them. I’m here, uncertain, with frosting under my nails and questions that have no answers. The contradictions live in my chest like stones I can’t swallow or spit out.
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—Stephanie Pell is a member of Lilith’s 2025 New 40 Cohort.