Welcome. This One's for You.

If you're reading this and you're one of my kids... this one is for you. All five of you. This is the one I've been trying to figure out how to write for a long time.

I used to have a blog.

I started it years ago during one of the hardest seasons of my life. I was young, I was scared, and I was figuring out how to be a mom, a professional, and a person all at the same time with very little roadmap and not enough money and more uncertainty than I knew what to do with. I wrote to survive. I wrote to process. I wrote because putting words on a page was sometimes the only thing that made the noise in my head slow down enough to breathe.

And then life got fuller and busier and louder in the best possible ways, and the writing stopped.

But I never stopped having things to say.

So here I am. Back. A little older, a lot wiser, and writing with a completely different purpose this time.

I'm not writing for career visibility or professional clout. I'm not writing to build an audience or grow a brand. I'm writing because someday you are going to want to know who your mom really was and my career has a lot to do with our story. It's not just the version of me that made your lunches and showed up to your games or sat on Zoom calls and working from the bleachers. The full version. The real one.

And I want you to have that.

I want you to know that there were years that were really hard. Years I was carrying more than I should have had to carry, figuring things out, and doing my absolute best with what I had. Those years are not entirely my story to tell in detail here because parts of them belong to you too, you were there and you will tell your own version in your own time and in your own words. But they happened, and they shaped everything that came after.

What I can tell you is this: I decided, somewhere in the middle of all of it, that my life and my trajectory were going to change your world. That I was going to be better for you. Better for myself. Better in the long run.

So I did the work. And not just my "job".

I went to therapy. I went to CoDA (Co-dependents Anonymous), and I sat in rooms with other people who were also trying to untangle themselves from patterns that weren't serving them. I worked on myself, quietly and consistently, in the background of a life that kept moving forward. It wasn't linear and it wasn't pretty and there were setbacks. But I kept going.

I want you to know that because mental health matters. It matters so much. There is no weakness in asking for help or sitting across from a therapist or raising your hand and saying I am not okay and I need tools to be better. There is only courage in that. I hope you never feel like you have to white knuckle your way through hard seasons alone. I hope you always know that getting help is one of the bravest things a person can do.

I also want you to know that through all of it, you were always first. Work had to come because you have to make the money, keep the lights on and build a life. But you were always the reason. Every decision I made about my career, my education, my growth as a person... it was for you. So that your world would be bigger and safer and fuller because of the choices I made before you were old enough to understand them.

Chris showed up for our family in his own way, from the very beginning, and that matters and is part of our story too. We have built something really good together. Not perfect. Good. Real. Ours.

And now here we are.

A family of seven. A house in small town Iowa where the backyard is my happy place, watching you all play and sunsets that stop me in my tracks. A career I am proud of. A life I chose intentionally, piece by piece, starting from a place that didn't look anything like this.

I'm writing again. Not to survive this time.

To remember. To reflect. To leave something behind for you to read someday when you want to know where you came from and who carried you here.

This blog is my love letter to all five of you.

Rori, Donovan, Harleigh, Clayton, and Colton.

You are why I do every hard thing. You are why I keep going. And you are why I'm writing again.

I love you.

Mom