Beneath, Between & Behind on Easter Sunday

In the kitchen all is a' bustle,
with a thousand things to do,
to make a meal for Easter Sunday,
because that's the day Jesus came back,
and three days in a cave
is enough to make anyone peckish.
So everyone must Act Adult
and Work to make the food Just So.
(While looking at each other askance
as if to say, "You know what's going on, right?")
As if she knows how to prepare potatoes
the way her Mother did,
and when carving time comes
I'll depend on a Father above
to learn me things mine never did.

Little women and little men playing house
(safer than playing doctor,
if, in truth, less fun to practice).
Who then should sit at the table's head?
Who gets to play the provider?
And if we are eating in some Lord's name
Shouldn't one amongst us know the words to Grace?
But we work around it, the weirdness of this lack of elders,
the vegetable victims of our untrained hands.
and it occurs to me that this flying blind
is just what our parents have always done,
their easy conversation a nervous imitation
of parents gone by, their familiar recipes
but shadows of meals grown greater by imagination.

But then comes the cheesecake,
and it's clear that we are not quite of even their stature.
This brave little cheesecake
that started out so firm then fades,
as if stricken by a sense of iniquity,
into the saccharine goo of self-awareness.
The heartbreaking cheesecake our mirror,
children dressed up in Mommy's clothes,
(Oh what an awkward moment for Daddy)
and all that we do is made clumsy
by the ill-fitting mantles we adopt,
leaving we poor lonely cheesecakes
to an amusing bit of musing about how
in the bedroom, even Easter is Palm Sunday.

Even the floorboards seem against us
creaking to betray the elephants in the room.
One boy sneaking up the stairs
feeling put aside with the childish things
by hands surreptitiously held,
raising his arms in supplication as if to say,
"Pick me up, bounce me on your knee
Hold me so close it's Freudian."
We all feel beneath the notice of those
who we wish would hold us the tightest,
so caught between the bonds of friendship
and the demands of fickle biology,
all in all behind where we thought we'd be
by the time we'd reached these boring twenties.