How does a woman keep laughing when the thing she sacrificed everything for collapses anyway?

Do rocks actually HAVE bottoms?

How am I supposed to “respect my daughter’s choices” when her choices make me want to fake my own death?

I’ve been trying to answer these questions while surviving emotional wreckage, unconventional motherhood, corporate leadership, cigarettes my therapist doesn’t know about, and life in the attic—THIRD FLOOR!—of my sister’s house in Delaware.

Somewhere along the way, writing stopped becoming just storytelling and started becoming connection.

Through my essays and podcast, Kicking That Kactus, I’m creating a community for women rebuilding themselves after life went spectacularly off-script—a place for honesty, humanity, humor, and the kind of recognition that makes us feel a little less alone.

The humor isn’t refined, but neither am I. Nor is life.

Because maybe healing doesn’t happen when we finally get it all together…

it starts the moment somebody says, “Okay, thank God! Me too.”