baking...
It's what I love to do...
Looking for something Different? So was I…
Hi, my name is O’ree, and I am a baker. But it wasn’t always this way. Up until last year, I used to be one of those individuals from the corporate world who ground out a living as an IT professional. I did that for over 25 years. Was it a good living? Yeah, sure. Was I happy? To start with, I suppose. But then the career began to lose its luster, and I began to seriously dread the idea of attending yet another meeting where the only resolution was to have more meetings to discuss the meeting I just attended…
Pointless, right?
Truth is, I’d been miserable for longer than I care to admit. I was seriously ready for a change. Still, the thought of doing anything else was kind of difficult when the corporate world was all I’d known. Well that, and I wasn’t about to leave my better half high and dry with the bills while I stopped and tried to figure things out. However, no matter how much I felt like I should keep going, you know, toe the line, I couldn’t help but question the path I was on or avoid asking the hard questions, like what was really important to me. This rang especially true when I heard a friend make a comment in passing that when he asked my son what I did, my son said, “I think he’s in sales, I’m not sure. All I know is he’s mad all the time.”
Wow, talk about a red flag, right?
So here I was trying to deny the fact that I needed to get out of what I was doing, when life threw me a curve ball and I suddenly found myself having to take care of my dad who had just suffered a severe stroke.
Naturally, I needed to do that, but unfortunately that wasn’t going to work out so well with my job because I didn’t have enough time accrued in my FMLA bank. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, faced with the choice between trying to juggle work while taking care of my dad, or focusing solely on him.
Needless to say, I wasn’t about to shirk that responsibility, so I said goodbye to the corporate world and moved forward on a new path.
I would like to say that everything worked out as it should, but that would be a lie. You see, shortly after I made my peace with my decision and was committed to caring for my dad, he suffered another stroke and soon passed away.
God did ’22 SUCK!
What does one say to something like that? On top of the existing inner turmoil I was dealing with, I now had to grieve my dad’s passing. clearly I had a lot on my mind
One thing was for certain, I needed some way to cope. So I Pulled out some flour, added some water, a bit of salt, and some levain, and mixed it up. I then kneaded it into a dough while I pondered exactly what it was I really wanted to do and what I was really passionate about.
After a lot of self-reflection, I came to the conclusion that life was too short to be miserable. And while it was good to find solace in the discovery, the question of what to do next still remained.
And then it hit me… Why not open a bakery and make things people actually enjoy? The thing was, I really didn’t feel like renting out space in some strip mall which left me with one option. Open a “microbakery”, which is basically a bakery based out of my house.
So here I am, the owner and baker for Baba’s Breads. And I am happy to report that things are going pretty well. I have a customer base, and am slowly but surely building up my business. I also am a lot happier since I finally feel like I have a direction in my life. Oh yeah, I’m also happy to report that my son no longer thinks I’m mad all the time. I call that a win.
Speaking of my son, he is the inspiration for the name of my business. Baba, by the way, is what my son calls me which means “papa” in Mandarin Chinese.
– O’ree “Baba” Williams
