I owe 44 million people an explanation

There is a video of my son drawing all over my furniture with a red Sharpie that has been viewed 44 million times.

Forty-four. Million.

To put that into perspective, it remains the most viewed incident of my life. It beat the lemonade video by a humiliatingly narrow margin of approximately 4 million views.

And for the past two years, I have lived with the knowledge that millions of strangers have watched my two-year-old methodically destroy a room while presumably wondering:

Where was his mother?

Friends.

I was 14 feet away.

So today, for once and for all, I would like to tell you what actually happened.

It was a Sunday afternoon.

I was in the kitchen cooking dinner, my daughter was with me, and my husband was in the living room watching the Bears.

I had just returned from Whole Foods with a completely unreasonable assortment of ingredients and the confidence of a woman who had decided she was going to make handmade pasta with a cream sauce from scratch.

My Italian friends may stop reading here.

I was also searing chicken. And onions. And peppers.

The cream sauce required attention. So did the chicken. So did the pasta, and so did my daughter, and my phone was naturally somewhere nearby receiving contracts and emails, because apparently I have never once in my life considered simply being unavailable.

But I had this handled.

Importantly, the kitchen in that house was laid out so that I could cook dinner while maintaining a perfect line of sight into the family room, where my two-year-old son Christian was playing.

(I now know he was not playing.)

But at the time, everything seemed fine.

Nobody was screaming.

Nobody was crying.

There was no breaking glass, and there was no crash followed by that terrifying silence that causes every mother in America to drop what she is holding and sprint toward the sound.

There was just the sizzling of chicken, and peace. A tremendous amount of peace.

Suspicious, in hindsight.

Approximately 45 minutes into my culinary extravaganza, I finally glanced over my shoulder.

And there was Christian, finishing his magnum opus in red Sharpie.

On my couch.

On both swivel chairs.

On my coffee table.

And, in what I can only assume was a final burst of artistic confidence, on my daughter’s favorite stuffed puppy.

My mother has a saying: no good deed goes unpunished.

And so there I stood, a woman who had simply tried to provide her family with a beautiful home-cooked Sunday dinner, staring at a sofa that had been unmistakably improved by a two-year-old.

The internet loved it.

I did not.

But I understand, now, why that video traveled as far as it did.

Maybe nobody actually drew on your sofa.

Maybe you were answering an email while making lunches while signing a permission slip while remembering that someone needs a birthday present by tomorrow.

Maybe you were on a conference call trying to quietly unload the dishwasher, and then realized the dishwasher was making so much noise that the entire conference call could hear you unloading the dishwasher.

Maybe you walked upstairs for one thing, came back down carrying six unrelated objects, started a load of laundry, answered a text, ordered toothpaste, and never actually did the thing you went upstairs to do.

We multitask like mothers.

There are so many tabs open at any given moment that we have stopped recognizing them as tabs.

It is simply Tuesday.

Like this one last week on my walk home from work…

And you need to know, I love my life.

My family is the absolute center of my universe.

But I also think I’m entitled to be my own little planet sometimes.

With my own atmosphere.

And my own habits and gravity, and with interests that have nothing whatsoever to do with whether anyone has clean socks tomorrow.

For me, unsurprisingly, those interests lead directly into very old houses with extraordinary finishes.

And there is probably no material on earth I love more than natural stone.

I love marble, quartzite, dolomite.

I love dramatic slabs with veining so ridiculous that they become the entire point of a room.

If you have ever wondered what I do in my free time, first of all, strange question.

But the answer is that I am very likely on Pinterest looking at rare stone and trying to figure out where I can use it next.

There is an entire universe in here. There is the Mohs scale of hardness. There are quartzites, and then there are thirsty quartzites. There are marbles, and then there are MARBLES. There are approximately 200 opinions on how marble should be sealed, treated, protected and maintained.

And then there is my increasingly preferred option, which is to do almost nothing at all and let the thing age the way Europeans have been letting it age for several hundred years.

Once, a designer told me she always begins a project by selecting the cabinet color and then designs everything else around it.

I smiled politely.

I have never done this a day in my life. I find the stone, and then I build the room around the stone.

Which brings me to you.

Specifically, to those of you reading this while managing complex schedules, supervising children, ordering groceries, responding to someone from work, and wondering why nobody else in your household appears capable of noticing when the paper towel roll is empty.

This Saturday, I am taking over the entire Workshoppe for one hour and we are calling it:

Marble & Mimosas.

Come drink a mimosa. Eat a macaron. Look at beautiful stone, have extremely strong opinions about veining, and ask me every natural-stone question you have ever wanted to ask.

Or ask absolutely nothing at all and simply enjoy being in a room where nobody needs you to locate their shoes.

In other words, I’m giving you permission to treat yourself. You deserve that.

I am also bringing in a very special guest from one of our stone suppliers, who is going to give us a proper presentation on natural stone: how the materials differ, what to look for, and why some slabs behave very differently from others.

And here is where this gets particularly fun.

If you have ever walked into a stone supplier and fallen in love with a slab, you may have discovered something mildly infuriating.

They will not tell you what it costs.

Pricing goes through the fabricator, which is all well and good, except that sometimes a woman would simply like to know what the beautiful rock costs before she reorganizes her entire kitchen around it.

Well, friends. We are stone dealers now.

Which means that when you order through us, you can actually get pricing.

Out loud. In advance.

A revolutionary concept.

And if you fall in love with something on Saturday, we will set up your appointment to see the full slabs in person, and then we handle the rest of it: stone, fabrication coordination, measurements, delivery, installation. All of it.

If you’re into that sort of thing.

I am inviting you because you have been running nine programs at once since roughly six o’clock this morning.

And because I think you are allowed to have one interest that belongs entirely to you.

For one hour, there is no agenda other than indulging something because you happen to enjoy it, and I think we could all use a little more of that.

See you this Saturday.

I’ll bring the marble, you just get yourself there.

And maybe hide the Sharpies before you leave.

Until then,
Grace

P.S. I would prefer not to dramatically underestimate the champagne requirements, so please email Christopher Grooms and let him know you’re coming. Husbands are also welcome.

And if you know another woman who loves houses, stone and design, or who simply needs to escape a toddler who is almost certainly coloring on something priceless right now, forward this to her.

She should come too.

The Workshoppe by Kaage Homes address is 562 Lincoln Avenue in Winnetka, IL.