Hold On, But Don't Hold Still - Kristina Kuzmic Page 0,2
messiest. You do not need to be transformed by the latest twenty-seven-step program. You do not need to take pointers from that mom who seems to have it all figured out. (FYI, she doesn’t. No one does.) You don’t need to aspire to more—more money, more stuff, or more answers. You just need to show up. Just as you are. Flawed and unshowered or perfectly polished. Just as you are.
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?”