No matter what you’re facing, failure never has to be the end of a sentence. You can always put a nice bold comma on that disaster, take a breath, and continue right on. Hold on, but don’t hold still. Keep turning the pages of your story until you reach an easier chapter, and you just might end up somewhere better than where you started. With a fresh, unexpired Starbucks pastry. And enough hope to spare.
One
Wish Out Loud
There’s a moment at most kids’ birthday parties, just after the “Happy Birthday” song has been sung, when the birthday kid takes a big breath and gets ready to blow out the candles on their cake. “Make a wish!” the parents say. “But don’t tell anyone what it is. If you tell, it won’t come true!”
I hate this moment.
We’re supposed to have big dreams and wild ambitions—for family, career, success, recognition—yet we’re taught from birthday number one that saying what we want out loud is a bad idea. It’s a jinx. It’s embarrassing.
No matter what your aspirations are, whether you want to write a bestselling novel, host a talk show, or run the country, they’ll never happen if you don’t try. But it’s hard to muster up the confidence to try without your loved ones cheering you on, and they’re not even going to get the chance to support you if you never let them know what your dreams are.
That’s why I do the birthday cake thing a little differently with my kids. At candle time, I scream, “Make a wish! Say it out loud! Yell it at the top of your lungs!” And then we all cheer for each other’s biggest dreams and do what we can to make sure they come true for one another.
My hope is to give my kids the confidence to dream out loud. I want to show them that ridiculously good things do happen, even if they seem completely unbelievable. I mean, that’s exactly what happened to me.
When my second husband, Philip, and I got married, we couldn’t afford a honeymoon. I was still waiting tables, and he had decided to change careers and go back to school to become a CPA. (Because, apparently, there are people in this world who actually enjoy doing taxes. And math.) We were living in a small, run-down apartment in Alhambra, California, with my six-year-old son, Luka, and four-year-old daughter, Matea. To get to our front door, you’d first have to walk by a rusting, claw-foot bathtub that our landlord, a sweet old man named Will who lived upstairs in the building’s only other unit, intended to turn into a fountain but never quite got around to finishing. (Honestly, I could see potential in his vision and would have loved a cheerful water fixture on my front lawn. Unfortunately, the reality is that it was just a tetanus hazard filled with what looked like poop water.) The first time I tried to open the oven door in our kitchen, the handle fell off. The washer and dryer were also crammed into the kitchen alongside the worn-out stove. But Philip and I were just so happy to have a washer and dryer at all. We were a very typical young family: we didn’t have all the resources we dreamed of, but we had a surplus of love.
A few days after our wedding, I was running around our apartment as usual, doing, doing, doing, knowing I’d still probably finish the day asking myself, How did I get nothing done today when I did so many things? (answer: motherhood!), when Philip startled me with a question.
“What do you want to do? I mean, besides being a mother?”
“What do you mean?”
“You have all this creativity and all this passion. Is there anything else you’d want to do with it?”
“Like get a job other than waiting tables?”
“It doesn’t have to be a new job. It can be a hobby. Either one. Just something where you can use your gifts.”
I stared at him blankly for a few moments. Being a mother of young children means you spend a lot of your energy thinking about what other people need. You’re always wiping something for somebody or cutting something for somebody. When you finally make your way to the soothing blank bottom of an empty sink, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll blink and the sink will be full again. It’s like some reverse Sorcerer’s Apprentice trick, only instead of having the soaring beauty of the Philadelphia Orchestra as backup, your soundtrack is provided by toddlers banging away with wooden spoons on pots and pans. Just a few years earlier, I’d been going through a painful divorce while struggling to provide for my two young children as a broke single mom. I had been trying to keep my head above water for so long that survival mode was my default. I hadn’t stopped to consider my dreams or desires, independent of my children’s well-being. Philip’s question genuinely caught me off guard.
“I have no idea. I really don’t know.”
This realization made me a bit emotional. I used to have dreams and creative ambitions. How was I suddenly this lost?
Philip handed me his car keys. “I’ll take care of dinner and get the kids to bed. You just go. Go somewhere where you can think. Get away from the distractions of parenting and think about what you would have wanted to do if life hadn’t gotten so hard.”
I drove around the suburbs of Los Angeles—not really headed anywhere, just thinking. Sometimes you need to get away from the noise in order to hear your heart speak.
A few hours later, I returned home with a gas tank on empty and my mind on full blast. “I want to do something with cooking!” I said as I charged back into the apartment, out of breath from excitement. “Philip, I think I’ve got it! When I was at my lowest, cooking is what made me feel alive. Being able to feed people made me feel like I had something to offer when I had almost nothing. I’m thinking maybe I could start a website where I post my recipes. And, I don’t know how we could make this happen, but maybe we could figure out a way to film some cooking videos? Something really fun, different from what’s out there. I want to make the people who are watching feel empowered. I want to make other moms laugh and maybe even give them a little hope that their life and their kitchen and their cooking skills don’t have to be perfect. None of it has to be perfect to still be really good.”
“This is awesome! How can I help?” Philip pulled me in for a hug.
See that response? That’s the response we all deserve when we articulate a new dream. We all need a Philip.
I spent the next seven months revisiting all of my favorite recipes. I had learned to cook from my grandmother, who never measured anything, and so neither did I. But now I had to start measuring out every single thing in order to write down all of my recipes in a way anyone could follow. My goal was to launch my website on my birthday (April 26) with exactly seventy-nine recipes (because I was born in 1979).
Philip saved up money and surprised me with a laptop so I could start building my site. He was juggling his grad school classes, helping with the kids, and running to the grocery store (sometimes four or five times in one day) so that I could keep refining my recipes. He was also solving the daily technical issues that kept popping up and also kicking my ass in the most loving way every time I thought about giving up. Jo, my best friend, who lives in Rhode Island, spent hours editing my recipes to make sure everything was grammatically correct. With four kids of her own, I’m not sure how she found the time, but she was rooting for me and so excited to see my passion lit up in this way.