Tag: family

Join-You-ary: The long stretch and what awaits downstream

We pulled off the interstate in Richmond, Kentucky. It was our second gas stop less than two hours into the drive, our SUV heavy with boxes, working hard under the weight of my daughter’s belongings. Truthfully, we could have driven a little farther, but I couldn’t resist introducing her to the spectacle of Buc-ee’s.  

Beneath the giant red-and-yellow sign, we snapped a quick photo to share with family before we hurried out of the cold. Surrounded by families swirling loudly around us, and a grinning, red-shirted rodent plastered on every surface, I felt the shift. It was the first day of 2026, and January had already set the pace.  

Stepping just inside the door, my daughter froze. My secret plan to distract her from the heavy reality of leaving her hometown for college seemed to be working — at least temporarily. I had plenty of help. Lines of hungry travelers waiting for brisket sandwiches. Literal walls of jerky. A Cracker Barrel’s worth of cheeky home décor. And the world’s richest beaver, smiling knowingly, as the cash registers rang nonstop.  

“This is… a lot,” she said, squinting, suspended in amused (and slightly horrified) disbelief.  

I hadn’t expected to be presiding over this rite of passage, but there we were. Out of nowhere, a petite young woman approached me, holding the same pink Buc-ee’s sweatshirt in each hand.  

“Excuse me, ma’am,” she said. Which size should I get?”  

Sophia and I glanced at each other curiously. Was I really just referred to as…ma’am? I quickly sized the woman up. 

“You should get a small,” I answered, definitively.  

We locked eyes. The woman nodded solemnly, as if this were an urgent matter, and marched straight toward the cash register. My daughter and I looked at each other again, exchanging a silent but mutual What just happened?  

The car was packed. The schedule was tight. The stakes were enormous. Yet there we were, giving wardrobe advice to a stranger and debating whether anyone truly needs a giant bag of Beaver Nuggets.  

With more than fourteen hours still ahead of us, resistance felt pointless. We joined the flow instead, one more pair of travelers taking a sanity break before returning to whatever waited down the road.  

“This is how January began, barreling onto the freeway of my life at one hundred miles an hour.”

This is how January began, barreling onto the freeway of my life at one hundred miles an hour. From day one through January thirty-first, the gas pedal never left the floor. Goodbyes and celebrations crowded the same week while endings melted into beginnings. One moment asked me to let go while the next called me forward. All of it unfolding against a backdrop of snow and a relentless cold that seems determined to stay.  

Somewhere between Buc-ee’s and our destination, I stopped pretending this was a month I could curate. It wasn’t interested in reflection. It was asking me to keep up. I decided to put change in the driver’s seat without negotiating with it to slow down. 

I started calling it Join-You-Ary: the month you merge into with your signal on, your heart racing, and possibly an energy drink in your cup holder. It was go time and we were ride or die.

The packed calendar and constant momentum felt both familiar and necessary. There was comfort in staying busy, although I knew it would have been useless to say no. Opting out at any point during the month would have meant resisting the many transitions already underway.  

I have grown used to being a safe place to land while others prepare to move into their next chapters. I embraced my sweet mother as she reached the end of her life. I helped my father, badly bruised, but not broken, find his footing when his world fell apart without her. When my daughter needed me, I sheltered her as she navigated the uneven, uncertain work of becoming herself. 

I have spent years willingly packing and unpacking for the people I love. This season was changing now, and for the first time in a long while, I wasn’t just holding the line. I was crossing it.  

As I delivered my daughter to college, I quietly stepped into a new phase of my own. More space was opening to nurture a partnership oriented toward the future and a widening sense of family. A life shaped less by who needs me most and more by who walks beside me began to seem possible.  

This wasn’t just a road trip. It was a very special delivery. The pain, the fits and starts, and the heavy work of waiting had stretched for what seemed like an eternity. And then, suddenly, we were here. We had arrived. My daughter was ready, and I was carrying her to a new nest she could make her own. I was ready, too.  

“This season was changing now, and for the first time in a long while, I wasn’t just holding the line. I was crossing it.” 

One week later, I found myself seated on an airplane alone while my daughter attended orientation for transfer students only a few miles away. Settled in her new place with her sister and family close by, I felt comforted. But I was sad to leave them. The thought of coming back energized me, though, and I suddenly felt filled with excitement to jet away to the next stop. 

Waiting for the other passengers to board, I wondered how the house would feel now. I had bought it with the intention of making it a safe haven, a home base for both my daughters, insulated from the sharp edges of the world. Although that did not work out exactly as I had planned, it had delivered, carrying us through a decade of joy and grief, sheltering not only me but my entire family through more than I could have imagined at the start.  

With less than twenty-four hours before my next flight — this one to New York for an engagement celebration — there wasn’t much time to think about where I’d been. In a few hours, I would put away the shorts and flip-flops I’d packed for Florida and pick up the winter layers from the pile of clean laundry I’d left folded on my bed. Next stop Manhattan and a host of new faces I couldn’t wait to meet. 

Pink Walls and Pantene

Finding love and grace amid heartbreak and chaos

When I got the text that both of my parents had fallen and had been taken to the emergency room, I felt alarmed and defeated. How could this have happened, I questioned? But I already knew the answer. My father had no doubt tried to help my mother walk and, in their declining health, both had taken a tumble.

I learned quickly that dad had been released but they’d kept my mother. Not because she’d been injured in the fall – miraculously she hadn’t been hurt except for a few deep purple bruises. They’d kept her for observation because, for what seemed to be the hundredth time, she had pneumonia.

Frustrated that I couldn’t get to them right away, I felt satisfied enough that at least mom was in a safer place and under 24/7 medical care. I’d lost count of how many times she’d been hospitalized. What started with a collapsed lung more than two years earlier had quickly become a steep and steady decline as she became weaker with each ER visit. She now weighed only 70 pounds, and it was truly an act of God that she hadn’t broken anything in the fall.

From my home office three hours away, I joined a call with the medical staff. On the call, I learned the full weight of my mother’s diagnosis. With my sister and I on the line and the rest of my family in the hospital room, I listened as the head nurse discussed care options, including hospice. We knew she was very sick, but wasn’t hospice for dying people?

Then, the plain-spoken nurse spoke what none of us had fully grasped until that moment: There is no cure for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and mom was in the final stages of it. The frequent emergency room visits could not help her.

How did we miss this? One of the countless doctors she had seen over the years had surely discussed this with her, I rationalized. She just didn’t remember. Or maybe she hadn’t fully understood. Or maybe she didn’t want us to know, to spare us from worrying about something we were powerless to control.

Suddenly and painfully, everything made sense. The extreme weight loss, the confounding bouts of confusion and delirium, the onslaught of respiratory infections one after the other, the crushing fatigue — all of these were symptoms of end-stage COPD.

A painful hush followed the nurse’s words. After a long silence, my brother’s girlfriend, holding the phone on speaker, said, “I’m so sorry.”

On Friday after work, I drove to my parents’ home in West Virginia. They’d released my mother shortly after that phone call and sent her home for palliative care. I found her resting in her bedroom when I arrived, cocooned in fluffy blankets and cushy pillows. The room’s bright pink walls, covered in old family photos, contrasted sharply with my mother’s ever-worsening health. She’d been given anxiety medication to calm her nerves and help her navigate the frightening bouts of confusion that left her mistaking my dad for her own deceased father-in-law.

As we visited, I held her hand and tried to keep a sunny demeanor. We chit-chatted about my drive from Ohio, talked about the weather, and tried to focus on nothing in particular — avoiding what was obvious. After a few minutes, she became restless. With great effort and intention, she suddenly sat up and, looking in my eyes she said, “You’re so beautiful. You’re such a beautiful woman.”

I felt a rush of warmth cover me as the pride radiated from deep inside of her. I felt both modest and proud to be the baby she had made more than 50 years earlier, and a living testament to the mother she had been ever since. She was smiling, and I smiled back at her and said, “Well, I got it from you.”

Then my mother took my hand in her cold, frail ones and said, “Thank you, honey. I love you with all my heart.”

Tears filled my eyes. I tried hard to stop them, to keep her from seeing me upset. But it was no use. The stinging liquid poured over my cheeks under the warmth of my mother’s loving gaze.

“I love you with all my heart too, mama.”

She reached for me gently, and I leaned in wrapping my arms around her tiny frame. I could feel the bumps of her spine in the palm of my hand and her ribcage with my fingertips. My mother’s sharp collar bones pressed into my chest, and I breathed in the smell of her freshly washed hair and the faint scent of Pantene as I held her tight.

I didn’t know how to fix her. No one did. So, I hugged her for a long, long time crying like a baby all the while. She felt so soft, so dainty, so fragile. I wanted to comfort her but realized that it was the other way around.

In the sunset of her life, my mother was the one comforting me, just as she had done a thousand times before. She gently patted my back, soothing my broken heart, and in an instant, I felt every fraught memory dissolve, chased away by her light. Every time I’d felt misunderstood, every argument we’d ever had, every harsh word exchanged — probably more from me to her as a teenage girl, if I’m honest — faded into nothing.

The only thing that existed in the world was that hug sitting on the bed in the too-pink bedroom. In that moment of energy between us, that transfer of love and grace, she’d given me everything I had ever needed and everything I would ever need.

For once she had no fear, no anxiety, no confusion — just love, light, and boundless comfort for her daughter. I didn’t know at the time that we would have a few months left with her. But I did know that in that hug, I was being given an extraordinary gift— her selflessness, her resilience, her joy, and her essence.