Why I started Saint Kay Media

The surgery or the check. That was the choice.

I was standing in a bank line seventeen years ago, phone pressed to my ear. I called my father, a chiropractor, and told him this weird thing had happened. I was numb across my midsection and hadn’t peed in a day. He told me I had maybe hours before permanent damage. “Get to the ER. Now.”

I looked at the teller windows. The line wasn’t moving. I was holding a check that needed to be deposited before another one bounced. I was on welfare, in the middle of a divorce, with a six year old and a baby, living in my mom’s basement. I had an organic skincare company that was somehow in Whole Foods and scaling internationally while I could barely keep the lights on.

Check or spine.

My dad said there was no time.

I left the line.

 

What Happened After I Left the Line

I got the emergency surgery. Cauda equina syndrome, which is as bad as it sounds. The doctors laid it out: catheter forever, probably a colostomy bag, sensation below the waist uncertain for the rest of my life. I was thirty one.

I want to tell you I handled this with grace.

I did not.

The day of my birthday, I decided I was not going out with a catheter. I had watched a YouTube video that morning about how to remove one. It required a syringe. That night, I was at a friend’s house getting ready to go out. Her husband was an EMT. He kept his supplies under the bathroom sink.

So I did what any reasonable person would do. I locked the bathroom door, got on my knees, opened the cabinet, rummaged through an EMT’s medical supplies like I was looking for a spare hair tie, found a syringe, and removed my own catheter.

It worked.

I didn’t tell my friend what I’d done until after dinner. My kidneys could have failed. I wasn’t thinking about the consequences. What the next week or year would look like. I never was.

 

The Women Before Me

My mom grew up Catholic but raised us Buddhist, which is a confusing combination for a kid. Around twelve, I bought a Saint Jude candle and lit it every night. Saint Jude is the patron saint of hopeless cases. I was twelve and already sure I qualified.

My mom went back to school at thirty, broke, divorced, with two kids. Sound familiar? And her mom, my grandmother Mary, survived the Blitz in Liverpool, had two houses bombed out from under her, and got sent to the countryside to be raised by strangers. But when she talked about it, she didn’t talk about the bombs. She talked about the adults who took her in. How they sang songs. How they told stories. How they made a little girl who’d lost everything feel safe. She’d tell you about the war the way you’d tell someone about a good childhood, because the people around her made it one.

But she couldn’t be alone. She had five kids, and my mom was the oldest. After my grandfather died, she moved in with two of her kids. She didn’t like being alone. Nobody called it anything because nobody knew to.

She was in her late eighties, having lunch with my mom the way they did every week. She looked at my mom and said, “I watched an episode about PTSD with Oprah on her new book, What Happened to You.” Then she said, “I think that’s what I have.”

A lifetime of singing songs and needing people close, and it took Oprah to name what was underneath all of it.

She was Catholic and English to her bones, even after decades in the States. Loved her family. Hated Yanks. Said it all the time. I’m her oldest grandchild and a Yank, but she never held it against me. She always said if she reincarnated, she wanted to come back as me, which I found adorable.

When she was in hospice, they were choosing a new pope. The dementia was setting in, but on this, she was crystal clear: it better not be an American. I was sitting with her when the white smoke went up. She asked me who it was. I told her it was an English pope, and it made her whole day.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was a Yank. She died the next day, in peace.

 

The Thing That Cracked It Open

Someone once told me that everybody is a villain in somebody’s story and a hero in somebody else’s. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it. That one line changed everything for me.

My biological father moved away when I was young. I never got over it. Never feeling good enough. People pleasing. Fighting back even when I didn’t need to. Making choices that were about instant gratification and knowing the whole time I was self-sabotaging. I could feel the little hurt girl in me bubbling up and then I’d watch her play out in my life, my parenting, my relationships.

I knew I could do better, and I kept doing it anyway.

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a kid. Someone I trusted told me I wasn’t original, and I believed her for forty years. I stopped writing. I stopped trusting my voice. And I spent all that time building businesses, raising sons, surviving surgeries, managing crises, reading everything I could get my hands on, and tiptoeing around the one thing I actually wanted to do.

When I finally sat down and started writing again, it felt like finding a room in my own house I’d locked and forgotten about. The furniture was dusty. The light still worked.

The Sidekick Thing

My best friend Georgia calls me Kay. Always has.

She is magnetic. People just want to be near her. I’m the lucky one sitting next to her.

I recently showed up unannounced at the senior bingo she goes to every week with her mother-in-law. Life got busy. We hadn’t seen each other in a while. I just wanted to see her face.

Georgia’s mother-in-law is in her eighties, walks with a walker, and drips gold jewelry. Red nails always, makeup is a must. She has aphasia, which is a cruel joke from God because this woman loves to talk. She’s a storyteller. She can’t help herself, even now when she knows the words don’t make sense anymore. She’ll tell you about a trip she took, never naming where. “The bus had pizza and trees.” And you’re left going, huh? Somehow, I say Hawaii, and she nods her head yes. But she’s there. Still telling stories even when the words don’t come out right.

Georgia and I both have very loud, very distinct laughs. You might even call them cackles. Her husband tells us we’re not that funny. We think we are. We have been laughing side by side for 30 years, and we think we are hilarious. So it is no shock when we got shushed by the other bingo players. Bingo people are serious competitors. There is no room for our giggles.

But we didn’t care. Kick us out.

When I was naming this company, Googling “Saint Kay” felt natural. Old habits die hard. Turns out he’s the patron saint of sidekicks. Never gets his own icon. Always in the background of someone else’s painting.

 

Why This, Why Now

When my middle son was fifteen, his school counselor called. He was suicidal. I had bags packed for the kind of meeting you don’t cancel. I’d been invited to the “popular kids” table, career defining. I unpacked them, called my business partner, told him I wasn’t coming, and quit everything. None of it mattered if my kid didn’t make it.

A couple years ago, I didn’t think he’d graduate high school. Now he’s studying in Spain on a gap year.

I watched my son and other young men suffer and lose touch with what matters. Connection, community, and each other.

I am the mother of three sons. I mentor a young man who almost didn’t make it. For years, I chased what I thought success looked like. The MBA. The consulting. The businesses. I forgot who I actually was.

I was getting a very ostentatious engagement ring made when I walked into a shop and saw a boulder opal. Lines of dark blue, purple, pink, white, baby blue. It looked like a sunset over the ocean. I bought it. I thought I needed the diamond. The status. What I really needed was to get back to the girl on Santa Cruz Main Beach who played volleyball every day from fourteen to twenty three and became obsessed with salsa dancing at seventeen. A six foot woman in a sea of short Latin men. I was a goddess out there.

I want her back. So I built a place where she could exist.

Saint Kay Media is for the uncomfortable parts. The stupid thing you said out loud that turned out to be the truest thing in the room. The epiphany that hit you in a grocery store parking lot. The conversation you’ve been having in your head for years that you’ve never had out loud. We make podcasts and write essays for people who are done performing. We don’t have it figured out. Nobody does. You never actually arrive. You just keep choosing. But we’ll say the thing and sit in the uncomfortable part with you for as long as it takes.

The other day, my co-host Kylen was at our local French bakery and got into a conversation with a woman about what we’re building. It resonated. Pretty soon, the people around them were jumping in, sharing how they felt about it. Men and women. Strangers. Everyone had something to say because everyone is feeling it.

People want to have this conversation. They just need somewhere to have it.

Pull up a chair.