Hold On, But Don't Hold Still - Kristina Kuzmic Page 0,3

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.

As the end of April neared, I had