In my twenties I had a client who was a couple of years older than me but already everything I hoped to be. She epitomized the phrase ‘my brilliant career’, and had the perfect partner and a gorgeous home. Vogue magazine published an article on stylish women and she featured prominently.
We struck up a friendship and one day she invited me to her home for dinner. The table setting was straight from the pages of Vogue Living and even as the pots on top of the stove bubbled away with the contents of our evening meal, her kitchen looked like it had been designed and cleaned by American homemaker queen Martha Stewart. It was shiny. The pots on the oven looked newly scrubbed. The three-course dinner was restaurant quality – long before that became an at-home cooking trend. She was essentially perfect in every conceivable way: think Stepford Wife with a glamorous career.
I was to learn at a later date that this superwoman had bought our evening meal from a local restaurant, transferred everything from plastic takeaway containers to cooking pots and then served it up as homemade. The thing is I wouldn’t have cared if she had been upfront about her lack of cooking skills. To be honest I was relieved to discover there was still one thing she hadn’t mastered as it was the permission I needed to not have to master that too. But the pressure on her, some of which she would undoubtedly have put on herself, must have been enormous.
It was the early nineties when Martha Stewart Living magazine, a modern day guide to homemaking, was launched in America and read religiously worldwide. Stewart showed us the right way to cook, clean, decorate and even iron. American women admitted to stopping on highways to listen to Stewart’s radio show where she would regularly talk through the steps as she ironed a man’s shirt and folded fitted sheets. I wondered back then where I would find the time to do all of that and focus on my career. Turns out you can’t. At least not to the same perfect ideals, and not unless you outsource it or buy takeaway and pretend. My former client could have saved me a lot of angst if she had confessed.
Two decades later most of my female friends and colleagues have recognised that we each have our strengths and weaknesses, just like our male partners and peers. We openly discuss the things we can’t do. I can’t cook beyond the basics. I don’t enjoy it and so have never devoted time to improving this skill. However I do know how to choose a photo and commission a story that will capture the imagination of someone who is keen on cooking. That’s a skill that I spent many years honing out of passion and I will happily leave the dinner party preparation to someone else.
Do you beat yourself up over the things you can’t do instead of focusing on what you are good at?