Let them eat cake?

It's funny how a blog can seemingly be about one thing and a topic can crop up that seemingly does not relate. Like this sudden collection of cakes on my "no tread thread." What on earth do they have to do with anything?

Let me connect some buttercream dots! Years ago, when I was in high school, my "dream" was to be an entertainer. I grew up watching Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and my favorite dancer was Vera Ellen (White Christmas–oh, that nerve tap!). I, of course, also loved Danny Kaye who looked so much like my grandfather and was just as silly. When I entered college, there wasn't a major for me so I chose Psychology with a Dance minor and rapidly switched to Radio-TV-Film which was the "hard to get into" department at my school. I figured that if I got into television production, perhaps I could work my way around and yet still have that "safe, fall back position behind the scenes if things didn't work out."

During this time, musicals weren't in vogue, Donny and Marie were passé and there was no American Idol. I don't even think the Gong Show was on anymore. It was a virtual vacuum of theatrical culture (even before we sunk into the much higher brow "reality series" format (jest) in my world at the time. I quickly gave up on my dreams of being that multi-talented singing, dancing, acting "star" and eventually did work in the television and post production world.

But, here's the rub. When I was in high school, I went to a job counselor, who gave me a test of what I "should be" when I graduated. The test said I should be an "interior designer," a vocation which I dismissed as nonsense, laughed off and quickly forgot. I don't remember if "baker" was on that list of the three top professions. But all these years later, this is what I've learned. Who you are at 8 or 9, is probably who you are meant to be. When I was young, I didn't play with Barbie dolls as much as I designed elaborate HOMES for them with stacked books and gauzy curtains. I remember creating fascinating scenarios of what they would DO in those homes.

During my early childhood, I wrote plays and I made stuff and sold it at school. I once baked and painted at least 50 clay pins in shapes including milkshakes with striped straws, french fries, cherry pies, even a tap shoe—you may not remember this but pins were VERY popular during this time and many young kids wore them as accessories. I sold them for a dollar or so each. Later, I learned to crochet from my great grandmother and made holiday bell pins, ice skate pins—you name it—I sold it! I was a born marketer and entrepreneur and didn't know it.

My parents didn't identify this in me. They didn't educate me on what they saw. They were young. They did the sensible thing, got jobs and to this day are in the same field. My mother has worked for the same company since the age of 19. She is so accustomed to the golden handcuffs, that she has zero tolerance for uncertainty and has lived her life in constant fear of losing her job all of my childhood and into my adult years. I, too, became fearful and sacrificed my BIG dreams in search of the "safe job" that would be more "secure." But as it turned out, my generation did not have the same chances of finding lifelong employment with one company that my parents' generation did. I wish someone had coached me to be in business for myself when I was 20 instead of at 40.

So what of all this baking? As a young girl, being raised in the 70s and 80s, I was literally conditioned and led to BELIEVE that girls were the "same" as boys and needed to have the same "opportunities" as boys and that we were in a "war" of "equal rights" with boys. This was so emblazoned in me that I vowed if I ever had kids, I would NEVER stop working. In fact, I never even thought of BEING a mother or enjoyed being around young children (no contempt; I just didn't fawn over babies the way some of my female counterparts did) until I was already married and suddenly my maternal desire just kicked in. I remember liking Home Economics and learning to cook and sew but it wasn't "cool" to like this class if you were a girl. It was "predictable," "pedestrian," and "old fashioned." You were supposed to "want" to do woodshop and athletics—which I did not enjoy at all.

And so while I actually "liked" baking, making things with my own hands and designing beautiful environments in which to live, I looked for a "job" instead of a career that I would love for life. I dismissed the fact that I could love a domestic career in interior design. This relates completely to the social agenda of the public school's primary agenda to socialize girls to "not be feminine" and instead aspire to be more like "men." In my day (yep, I'm old), girls and boys have been conditioned to be the "same" on some education expert's slow road to hell paved with good intentions. Boys are now "not allowed to be boys" in school—i.e. run, play tag, play chase, get skinned knees and certainly not raise their voices. And girls are supposed to love math, engineering, science and all of those fields once not "encouraged" in girls in the dark ages of my generation—funny, I thought it was the generation before mine that was in the dark ages. May you live long enough to learn that you just don't know what you don't know.

I once read that Colonel Sanders didn't create Kentucky Fried Chicken until he was in his 70s. In the past week, at the age of 44, I have found myself almost locked in the kitchen making cupcake after cupcake and ultimately, a custom fairy princess cake that I took on for an excited and supportive client—simply by just DOING and teaching myself what I had a passion for but never got paid or professionally trained to do. It wasn't even that intentional. I just started "doing it."

The same goes for my unofficial "interior design" passion. My home looks like a million bucks but it is all design on a dime. I wouldn't know a designer label piece of furniture if you showed me but I can make $5,000 look like $20,000 any day of the week and I NEVER pay retail—except for a really good cupcake book! Because it is effortless and intuitive for me, I don't generally think my gifts for design, baking and organization (yep, I've got that gene too) are "marketable" skills because they are EASY for me. But as I get older and more people gently encourage me and say "you missed your calling," I realize that I am more like my grandmother and great grandmother than I ever realized and rather than run away in fear, I am running to my kitchen, my garden and my Ballard catalogs. I'm loving every domestic minute. I've got 4 boys (5 if you count my husband) and I let them eat cake (as long as I'm the one baking it!)