Sweeter than Chocolate: Creativity and a Mother’s Love
– By Katherine Conti, designer
I used to be known as the unofficial “PGAV chocolatier.” I spent my weekends immersed in chocolate, testing unique flavor combinations and devising elaborately-themed collections. I would spend hours hunched over sheet pans neatly lined with truffles, painting them with delicate cherry blossoms or shimmering swaths of gold until my body ached from the strain. On Monday mornings my coworkers devoured the weekends’ sweet experiments with glee. I loved my hobby. It invigorated me, it inspired me, and it stimulated my creativity. It was good for my soul, and it made me a better designer.
Now I’m known as “the new mom who used to make chocolates.” When my daughter was born last summer, I learned overnight what it meant to sacrifice something you love for something you love more. Being a working mom to a new baby leaves little time for outside pursuits, and my chocolate making was thrust to the proverbial back burner. It’s not that there’s no time; it’s that what little time I do have, I choose to spend with her. She won’t be a baby forever, and I don’t want to miss a single minute. Chocolate will have to wait. (Sincere apologies to my hungry coworkers.)
My creative pastime on hold, I am now focused on providing ample opportunities for my daughter to discover her own creativity. I supply the tools, then sit back and let her play. Art, music, dance – she loves it all. As long as it’s fun, it’s fair game.
One of her favorite activities is playing with crayons. She has filled a sketchbook with her colorful scrawls. What began as random scribbles are now developing into more deliberate strokes as she learns how to hold the crayons and manipulate them against the paper (and, all too often, the carpet). I squeeze blobs of paint on small canvases and she gleefully smears the colors together. And she loves to finger paint with her food. The bigger the mess, the more fun she has.
She also adores music and enjoys waving her arms and bouncing to the beat. She rakes her fingers across the strings of our guitar and bangs her chubby hands against its body to create a hollow, drum-like sound. Her deep brown eyes sparkle when she pounds the keys of her miniature piano, dazzled by the wonderful noise she has created. Many of the tools I use to make chocolates also make excellent musical instruments – spatulas, measuring cups, and spice jars produce fascinating sounds in her tiny hands. What is cacophony to others’ ears is music to mine. I know that she is learning to express herself with every sound she makes.
By giving her opportunities to safely explore the sensory wonders of her environment, I am doing my best to nurture her developing mind. The more I expose her to the myriad colors, sounds, textures, and tools of her world, the greater her capacity for problem solving and creative thinking will be. Fostering imaginative and expressive play today will help build the foundation for a lifetime of creativity, and it has invigorated my own creativity as well. Every day I am witness to the joys of experiencing something for the very first time, and it inspires me to embrace that joyful exuberance in my professional life. She embodies the thrill of discovery that we at PGAV strive to create.
Although I wish I could freeze time and revel in this magical stage forever, I also eagerly await the day when I can resume my chocolate journey with her at my side. I want to teach her my recipe for elderflower marshmallows and whisper in her ear the secret to perfect caramels. I long to share with her the excitement of telling stories with chocolate. But more than that, I hope to impart to her the lessons I’ve learned amid the mess of molten chocolate and cocoa powder dust:
the value of patience and perseverance, the beauty in imperfection, and the importance of finding her creative voice.
As she cheerily bangs out a rhythm with a wire whisk and a metal bowl, my heart smiles and I think ahead to the days when she’ll stand on her tiptoes to help stir the ganache. She’ll share her own ideas on which spices to use and how to decorate the molds. She’ll be my collaborator and my muse, and her creativity will enrich my own. In that moment I realize that I haven’t sacrificed anything at all, and that, no matter what marvelous chocolate adventures await us, my greatest creation will always be this sweet, amazing little girl with eyes the color of rich, dark chocolate.
