A Season for Becoming

In the quiet courage of stepping forward, and the women still waiting at the threshold.

Spring this year is asking something of me. I am listening.

I am stepping into more visibility for MERZE than I ever have before. There are invitations on my calendar that I would not have believed possible a year ago. The brand I have been building is finding its footing in the world.

It is exciting. And yes — a little nerve-wracking. But the small flutter of nerves is part of the signal. It tells you that you are at a threshold worth crossing.

I want to write today, though, for a particular reader.

For the women who are not yet at the threshold. The women who are still hoping. Still wanting. Still working quietly on something they have not named out loud.

I see you. I was you for so many years.

The years of wanting

For most of my adult life, I worked in the corporate world. Almost forty years of it. It was a real career, and I was good at it. And quietly, alongside it, I carried something else.

I set tables for the people I loved. I styled events for friends and for occasions that mattered. I noticed light, I noticed flowers, I noticed how a room could be arranged to make people feel held. I read shelter magazines like they were sacred texts. I gathered images. I gathered ideas. I gathered a vision of a life I had not yet permitted myself to live.

This is what I think many women carry—the unnamed work. The thing you do in the margins of your real life — until one day you realize the margins are where you were most yourself the whole time.

For decades, I did not call myself a designer. Or a writer. I thought the creative work was a hobby. A part-time thing. Something I would get to eventually, on the other side of some shifting horizon that never quite arrived.

There is a particular pain in being the woman who knows there is something more for her, yet cannot yet name it.

The yes I almost did not say

A few years ago, I did something I would not have believed I was capable of. I cold-contacted a celebrated designer and author — a woman whose work I had quietly studied for years, whose books I had read more times than I could count, whose taste had shaped how I saw rooms and gardens and tables for most of my adult life. I had no introduction. No connection. No reason to believe she would respond. I just wrote. She wrote back. She invited me to her home for tea.

I will never forget what she said to me that afternoon. She looked at me, and she told me, plainly, that I was a designer.

Not could be a designer. Not should think about becoming a designer. I was one.

I had been waiting forty years for someone outside my own head to say that sentence. I did not even know I was waiting. But the moment she said it, something in me shifted — not loudly, not dramatically, just a quiet recognition that lined up with what I had always somehow known.

Then, not long after, came the moment that changed everything.

I was asked, at the very last minute, to enter a design competition called Set to Celebrate. Thirty-six designers, each tasked with creating a beautiful table. They had lost one of their designers and needed someone to step in. I would have three weeks. I almost said no.

I had not entered to win anything. I had not even been planning to enter. I had no time to prepare marketing materials, no time to design properly, no time to do this the way it deserved. I was scared. I told my husband I did not think I should do it.

He looked at me and told me to do it anyway.

So I did. I gathered every quiet skill I had collected over the unnamed years. I designed a table the only way I knew how — with intention, with care, with the entire vision of beauty I had been carrying inside me for decades. I did not think about winning. I thought only about whether the table I was building was true.

I won Most Beautiful Table.

I am not telling you this to brag. I am telling you because what happened in that moment — standing in a room of professional designers with a ribbon and a quiet sense that I belonged — was the answer to a question I had been carrying for most of my life.

The question was: am I allowed? And the answer, finally, was: yes.

I want you to know that I almost said no to the very moment that changed everything. The yes that opened the rest of my creative life was a yes I had to be convinced to give.

If you are standing in front of a yes right now — a yes that scares you, a yes you do not feel ready for — please. Say it.

You may be more ready than you know.

What I have learned about wanting

The wanting is not a smaller state than the doing.

The wanting is part of the doing. It is where the doing is born. Every woman now stepping forward was once a woman quietly wanting. Every brand finding its footing was once a quiet idea held inside someone who wasn't sure yet.

The wanting years are not wasted years. They are the years your eye is forming. They are the years your taste is sharpening. They are the years you are becoming the person who, one day, will step forward — or be asked to step forward at the very last minute.

If you are in your wanting years — if you are reading this from somewhere quiet, with a vision you have not yet named — please hear me.

You are not behind. You are not late. You are not pretending. You are gathering.

A note about the name

MERZE is named for one of my daughter's imaginary friends.

She had three of them when she was small. Girl Dale. Rozy Boo Collar. And Merze. Three companions only she could see, each with her own personality, her own voice, her own role in the small, full world my daughter was constantly building. There were adventures. There were stories. There were rules about who sat where and who was allowed to come along for the day.

It was, looking back, a kind of creative life I could only marvel at. The audacity of imagining three whole people into being. The trust that they were real because she wanted them to be real—the ease of moving through the day with them at her side.

Children have access to something most adults have lost — the capacity to bring beauty and presence into being simply by imagining it. My daughter did not need anyone to introduce her to Merze, or to Girl Dale, or to Rozy Boo Collar. She made them real because she wanted them to be real. That is what creating actually is.

The brand I am building is named after that audacity. The little girl who knew her friends were real because she had imagined them. The mother who is now, decades later, doing the same thing. I am imagining MERZE into being.

So are you, with whatever you are imagining into being right now.

The garden, just before

The peonies in my garden are still tight green fists, holding all their color in like a secret. The hydrangeas are just beginning to leaf. Everything is just before. Just before blooming. Just before opening. There is a particular beauty in the just before. The bloom that has not yet opened. The room you have not yet walked into. The work you have not yet shown anyone. The version of yourself you are still becoming.

The world tells us we are only allowed to be celebrated after we have arrived. But the just before is not a lesser state. The just before is where becoming actually happens.

You are real now, in whatever season of wanting or working or hoping you are in. The opening is not the becoming. The opening is the visible part of a becoming that has been happening all along.

What this season is asking

This spring, I will be designing a French-inspired table — blue and white, layered with linen, anchored by hydrangeas when they finally arrive. I will gather peonies for the centerpiece if the timing aligns. I will light candles at lunch.

But the table is not actually the point.

The point is the courage required to set it. To gather around it. To believe you have something worth offering. Wherever you are in this season, I am cheering for you. Some of us are blooming. Some of us are still becoming. Spring is for both.

"Beauty does not announce itself. It waits quietly in the garden, on the table, in the corner of a room, until someone slows down enough to see it."

— Mary Madore-Hickey

À bientôt,

Mary

Live beautifully. On purpose.

Design with the Heart™.