Playing With Scraps
I've been telling the world I would be a florist since I was 10. When I got in trouble in the summer, my mom would send me off with my Aunt (she was tough, fair, and intimidating enough for me to listen to her). She was a florist in a small shop in Lansing, Michigan. She would sit me at an open bench, hand me a piece of Oasis foam, and let me go to town with the scraps.
As I grew up, people would ask what I wanted to be - "if money were no issue," I'd say, "I'd be a florist". Over the years, I apprenticed with my aunt, mostly family weddings and funerals, and scratched the itch while moving up the corporate ladder in my sales job. After 6 years, heartbreak, burnout, and a move across the country, I resigned from Corporate America with no plan, no job, and no fear. I walked into a flower shop in Seattle, Washington and asked for a job, and my new career began there.
Working in the shop was incredible. Over 100 weddings, at least 15 orders a day, and amazing coworkers and mentors who helped elevate my skills from beginner to expert in just 2 years. When I found out I was pregnant with twins and couldn't stay in Seattle, I handed in my resignation and the soul-crushing thought of my days of floristry being over, just as it was becoming a reality, crept into my mind.
But I'm a natural entrepreneur, and while my skills in marketing and advertising, business owning and (god forbid) taxes are slim to none, my determination to do what I love WHILE being the mother to my newborn twin girls was more powerful than any doubt I've ever had. Relocating to Portland wouldn't stop me, it would propel me into what I have always dreamed of being - an independent, business-owning, wedding and event florist.
Even as I write this, I'm nursing one of my twins on the floor of their nursery, because, as I've recently come to understand, nothing in the world can stop a mother. The definition of success has also changed in my mind. What once was defined by a 401K, numbers in my bank account, the car in my driveway, has transformed into integrity, pride, and doing what I love every day of my life. I need to succeed for my partner, who works his tail off to support my dreams, for my twin girls, who I hope will look up to me one day and have the same fighting spirit, and for the 10 year old, picking scraps off the floor and shoving them into oasis foam thinking, "I want to do this for the rest of my life".
