Martha & Me

I recently watched the Netflix documentary on Martha Stewart. Even today, she remains a polarizing figure admired for her business acumen and critiqued for promoting ideals of unattainable perfection. Joan Didion once described her as a symbol of female power that both inspires and unsettles people.

She is undoubtedly a complex figure — an icon of reinvention, ambition, and resilience — but to me, she was more than all of that. For a time, she was my mother. Please read on…

My mother died the year after I was married. It was a dramatic and painful death. A death that slowly rejected the gift of a lung transplant bestowed on her by the renowned Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto, California.

At the time, I had just been promoted to a director-level position at the then Pacific Bell Mobile Services, later known as AT&T. It’s the same mobile service I use today. It was a big promotion for me. Ironically, it came at the same time that my mother was in the transplant program at Stanford Medical Center. I was working on a pilot to put wireless data in ambulances at Stanford Hospital.

As my mother lay dying in the ICU a few floors above me, I met with administrators and engineers to make real-time data for ambulances a reality, not just for Stanford but every hospital around the world. In many ways, it was surreal but also incredibly convenient. In those days, we didn’t talk about our personal lives at work, so I would leave the conference room and go upstairs to see my mother without saying a word.

I was also working with Stanford to wire their Accelerator. This was all extremely exciting and cutting-edge at the time, and I was thrilled to be at the forefront of this technology. At the same time, it was probably the most stressful and painful period of my life as I tried to hold on to the tremendous opportunity I was offered professionally while watching my mother die before my eyes.

Luckily, I had an experienced team and could sit in the ICU waiting room using my company’s technology, the first wireless access to email, to manage my workload. I also had the first PCS (as opposed to Digital) cell phone, which had great coverage and crystal clear sound, much like a landline phone at the time. I trusted this because I had helped install the cell sites on the Stanford campus.

Stanford. Stanford. Stanford.

I will always remember that El Nino winter driving from Pleasanton to Stanford in one downpour after another. The hospital had a piano in the lobby, and once in a while, one of the doctors would sit down and play the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow, wearing their blue scrubs. This became my theme song for those heavy, dark months. In the end, Pacific Bell merged with ATT&T, and shortly after my mother died, I was laid off with the rest of the executives at Pacific Bell.

It was dreadful in so many ways, but mostly because, as a highly productive and social person, the very last, and I mean the very, very last, place I wanted to be was at home alone, but there I was.

After the funeral, I sat in silence in my empty house and didn’t know what to do with myself. My college boyfriend called me every weekday morning at 10 a.m. to ensure I was out of bed. My husband, though typically jealous, said nothing, thankful for the support.

I was grieving not just my mother but the job I had lost and all of the opportunities that went with it. I was motherless, unemployed, and in shock.

My grief counselor recommended I find a surrogate mother, someone like an aunt or an older friend. In the end, I decided to adopt Martha Stewart as my mother. She aired at 9 a.m. every weekday, so I committed to being out of bed, coffee in hand, and seated before her show started. At 10 a.m., when it was over, like clockwork, Jim called me to see if I was “still alive.” I was alive but not exactly thriving.

In the weeks that followed, I bought every book she published and subscribed to her magazine. It was like I was being re-parented again and having a patient mother to show me how to do things. Before this, I didn’t even know how to cook. I spent as little time as possible at home and absolutely no time in the kitchen. None.

Martha Steward gave me a purpose. At her suggestion, I alternated between the kitchen, the garden, and the linen closet. My husband and I had bought a beautiful new construction home; everything was white and largely an empty shell. During those months of homemaking, I bought furniture, linen napkins, pantry staples, pots and pans, a food processor, and a pasta-making machine. Because we had eloped, I had never registered nor stepped foot in a store like William Sonoma, so getting my kitchen up to Martha’s standards took a while.

A close friend from my days as a single working girl came to visit and said, “I can’t believe how well you keep this house.” Previously, I owned three plates, kept my sweaters in my oven, came home, threw my clothes on the floor, and left again. While working as an executive, I would go to Nordstrom and buy more suits because I didn’t have time to go to the dry cleaner. I was, in all ways, a domestic disaster.

I quickly found another job that spring, but my start date was delayed several times. This was ideal because it gave me more time to plant heirloom double-blooming roses, make chicken pot pie from scratch, and iron my sheets with lavender water that I made from the lavender I grew in my garden! By the time I returned to work that August, Martha Stewart had transformed me.

She changed how my family lived. Because of her, we had cotton sheets, meals made from scratch, flowers from our garden, good dishes, and so on. In the many years that followed, I shaped a comfortable life for my family with the things she taught me.

On a broader scale, she educated me further on how to be a better entrepreneur, promote my own brand, and be a businesswoman no matter what the product. She reenforced my beliefs that to succeed, I needed to work hard and strive for excellence.

She is a legend because she created something from nothing while transforming an entire culture. In the 1970s, I grew up on frozen fish sticks and Captain Crunch cereal. My daughters didn’t know these things existed. Thanks to Martha, I even made them homemade playdough that smelled of pumpkin spice in the autumn and peppermint in the winter.

Not only did she single-handedly transform our culture and how our homes were run, but her initial public offering was set at $18 per share (equivalent to $33 in 2023) and rallied to $38 (equivalent to $70 in 2023). By the end of trading, Stewart was a billionaire and the first female self-made billionaire in the United States.

She did, however, create a generation of women who, for better or worse, took on the primary role of homemaker when this should have been long outdated, and that was not “A Good Thing,” but it is another blog post.

Love and blessings to all.