It was huge. A four-legged jet-black monster with a purple tongue was standing less than six feet from me, chewing something, and staring at me like I was the one who didn’t belong in my own front yard. He was right.
My first day as a stay-at-home mom was turning out to be almost as bizarre and foreign as my final business trip had been. While my daughter was napping, I went out to my car to unload boxes filled with keepsakes from the professional life I had left behind. When I poked my head out of the trunk, I found myself face-to-face with an enormous cow. Just two days earlier, I was at a power lunch at the Palm in Washington, D.C. Now, instead of enjoying a fine filet with a Bordelaise sauce, I was spitting distance from 1,500-pound bovine with a death stare.
I dropped the box, ran into the house, slammed the door and burst into tears. I called Animal Control. I was certain they would have a cow-catching team, a bunch of guys in overalls hanging off the back of pick-up trucks wrangling rogue cattle, but the officer on the phone said they couldn’t do anything to help. They only send the cow-wranglers if the animal is holding up traffic or immediately endangering someone’s life. She encouraged me to call neighbors to see if anyone was missing their cow.
I didn’t know my neighbors. I had seen some of them now and again, but the only one I had actually spoken to more than once was the Quaker grandmother who lived next door. While she would occasionally shoot groundhogs from her back porch, she didn’t raise cattle. Her only advice was to stay indoors. So I was trapped in the house alone with my kid in a dangerous land where cows roam free and Quakers have guns. Not exactly what I had planned.
I had come out of college working full-bore on a career in the world of politics, media and corporate public affairs. I worked with the best and the brightest in the industry, logging ridiculous hours researching issues, drafting fact sheets and press releases and putting to paper strategies brainstormed by renowned communications gurus. I travelled to exotic places like London, Moscow and Abu Dhabi, and not-so-exotic places like Chattanooga, TN and Paducah, KY. I loved some of it but hated a lot of it. I learned enough about how politics and the media really work to know that I didn’t want to spend my life working in either. Still, it was a career and I was doing pretty well with it until I had a kid.
Everyone struggles with the going back to work/stay at home decision, but I really struggled. I tried working from home once a week. I tried the full-time nanny. I tried driving instead of relying on public transportation. I tried cutting back to part-time. I tried changing my client portfolio. I tried hard and I cried harder.
The final straw came for me a few months after 9-11. I was sitting in an airport lounge having a beer with my boss waiting for a flight to Dubai (we would not let the terrorists win by keeping us from pursuing business in the Middle East!). My husband called to tell me that our daughter had put together her first sentence: “Where’s my shoe?” He was thrilled.
I was crushed.
The five days that passed between that moment and when I could hug my daughter were beyond surreal. I had meetings with Emirati men dressed in traditional white dishdasha, who didn’t try to hide their discomfort with listening to advice from an American woman. I visited the new flagship building of the then-booming United Arab Emirates – a high-rise luxury hotel built out into the Gulf to look like a sailing ship. The lobby was literally lined with gold and rooms went for as much as $10,000 a night. They touted it as a symbol of their business prowess. I thought it was a stunning display of vapid wealth, but I soaked in the scene and gladly accepted the coffee table photo book as a souvenir. I ate raw lamb (suggested by the client) and actually liked it. It was better than the deep-fried baby birds presented to me on an earlier visit. Maybe I was getting the hang of the place.
Working with the Dubai client was going to require being onsite four weeks at a time, so I fashioned a plan that involved bringing my daughter and nanny along to live part-time in the strange new world of sand, concrete, steel and glass. We’d come home for two-week stints (Hi, hubby!) and rack up the frequent-flier miles. My daughter would benefit from the worldly experience and I would advance my career. It would be great.
Next stop, Orlando. I was meeting up with colleagues to deliver an overly elaborate pitch to a different client who was clearly ready to ditch our firm for “fresh” ideas from a competing agency. For reasons I still don’t understand, the meeting was held at Epcot Center. The client had an exhibit there and they thought it might inspire greatness if we saw it first hand. Too bad they didn’t bring us there before the pitch. Seeing the big white golf ball (it probably isn’t a golf ball, but it looks like one) reminded me of the bizarre architecture I had just seen half way around the world. I tried to convince myself that life for my daughter in Dubai might be just as fun as life at Disney. I ducked into a gift shop to buy a Mickey Mouse plush toy to take home to my toddler, who I was sure would be reading before I saw her again.
On the flight home, I looked deep into Mickey’s big, shiny eyes and knew I couldn’t do it anymore. I was so very far from finding the “balance” people talk about, and I had nowhere to turn for help. Most of my friends hadn’t had kids yet, and there were very few mothers at my agency. The successful women, if they were married at all, had married men twice their age with already grown children. They were on the fast track and that meant skipping the whole annoyingly time-sucking childhood phase of being a mother. I wasn’t cut out for the fast track and the road I was on was completely unpaved, so I took the nearest exit ramp and ran smack into that cow.
It almost sent me screaming back to work, but instead I set out to charter a new life on and around the playgrounds. Conference calls were replaced by play dates and stress was no longer defined by meeting deadlines for demanding clients, but rather by enforcing naptimes for a cranky toddler. Thankfully, I met an amazing group of women who helped me adjust to this new life. They even invited me to join their book club.
Some of my new friends were “just moms” like me, but others were artists who had converted their garages or basements or barns into working studios where they could paint or throw clay or knit. They taught classes, hosted workshops and sold their wares online. Once their kids went to school full time, they flipped their productivity switches back to the “on” position and turned hobbies into fulfilling small businesses, pursuing their chosen careers with dedication and passion bolstered by the confidence, patience and wisdom that come with age.
I was a failure compared to them. I didn’t make anything. I never have made anything. I did a lot. I had a real job once. I volunteered too much. I was really busy. Still, I had little to show for it and certainly nothing worth selling. My productivity switch was burned out and rusted and probably trampled by that cow.
Even with my kid in school full-time, I could never see how to make the old job work, so I threw myself into volunteer projects and occasional freelance work. I still felt like part of me was locked up, waiting to come back out. To help maintain my sanity, I would occasionally sit down and jot off an essay about life’s absurdities. It amused me and made me feel like I was a writer, but I rarely shared my work with anyone. My articles were raw and rough and sometimes just silly. Best they remained my little secret.
Then, I got an invitation for something called “The Night of the Radish.” The book club had dissolved, but seeing a thriving art community blossom from its ranks, a few women decided to host a creative showcase to “share our reflections and artistic interpretations on a theme.” The theme was a radish. That’s how creative these people were. They could make a radish interesting and fun, or at least use radishes as an excuse to drink wine together. They even created an adorable illustrated logo for the night.
I wanted desperately to attend. I hadn’t hung out with these women in far too long. I have other great friends and have more fun than I should, but this group was different and I needed a dose of their humor and wonderfully quirky yet wise worldview. But I didn’t have anything to share. I wasn’t like them. I didn’t make anything. I never have made anything. But the radish challenge inspired me to dig deep and try to find my inner artist. While I don’t make things, maybe I could create something. I did what I do. I Googled.
Wow! Radishes (derived from Latin Radix = root) can be beautiful. They can be the round red things I pick out of salads, but they can also be long and white or even lavender. There is a different kind of radish for every season. Spring and summer radishes are the ones we all recognize. They grow quickly, but they are generally small and not terribly interesting. The winter varieties are far more exciting. They have exotic names like the “Black Spanish” and the French “Gors Noir d’Hiver”. They have dark, rough skin and “hot-flavored” flesh. They can be big and round or pear-shaped and are very hearty.
Radishes are the garden metaphor for women. When in our “winter” season, we may be bigger or pear-shaped, but we are still “hot” at our core and far superior to the premature spring and summer versions.
Yes, the radish was proving to be an inspiring muse.
There are several restaurants and cafes with “radish” in their name, including the “Weeping Radish” in the Outer Banks of North Carolina where I am pretty sure I had too much to drink in my summer season. That was the same time that an alternative band called Radish broke out in Greenville. I’m sure I would have loved them, but they never did make it big.
Radishes are rich in potassium and folic acid, and their greens are a good source of Vitamin C. They help prevent cancer, treat liver disorders, improve digestion and help you maintain a healthy gallbladder. Maybe I should stop picking them out of my salads. You can caramelize radishes with onions, but they will lose some of their nutritional punch if you cook them. There are lots of recipes out there, and I’m sure my artsy-fartsy friends will have a smorgasbord of glorious dishes to sample at the party. Yes, the fabulous art crowd can cook too.
So, while I can’t cook a radish, let alone sculpt or paint one, the challenge pushed me back to the keyboard to peck out this article and to revisit and rewrite several others that have been sitting, stagnant on my hard drive. Maybe “The Night of the Radish” will embolden me to share some of them, knowing now that some things are best served raw.
Confessions of a Target Mom 