To prove I am one of the richest people you’ve ever read about, I’ll tell you this: I had five friends on around-the-clock watch. I’m certain there was a group text tracking my every move like I was in the adult friendship version of the ICU. Their text exchanges giving small updates on what, at the time, felt like life or death.

“She still hasn’t eaten or showered.”

“She is dehydrated but still crying. I’m going to try to get her to eat.”

“My goal is to convince her to shower by 10 a.m.”

In some ways, I guess I was on life support through them. I felt hopeless and isolated because only those five friends knew everything. See, my marriage was over. Really, really OVER. But I hadn’t said that out loud yet. The heaviness of figuring out how to tell the boys, our boys, felt like a boulder sitting on my chest.

I am a person who enjoys building a good five-point plan instead of sitting in anything painful or hard. Truly, pulling out a whiteboard and building a strategy is my go-to move. But not this time.

This time, and only the second time I can remember in my life, the first being when I lost a baby to miscarriage, there was nothingness. Days of waking before the sun and immediately bursting into tears. Staying blurry-eyed in whatever hobo-looking outfit I had been sleeping in for the previous few days.

Marriage, to me, after three decades of believing marriage was disposable, was now sacred. Out of all my “accidental” marriages in my twenties (yes, read the book, there were several), this marriage and this life were the ones I chose with my eyes open, my faith intact, and a belief in till death do us part.

From the dirt road I grew up on to the lake house with a two-story custom-made bookshelf filled with all my favorite first editions in hardback… well, this isn’t a happy ending, God. This is not what I asked for. This is fucking terrible.

About two weeks into barely eating or showering (okay, I did shower a few times due to friend intervention), I asked the man I’d married for zero contact for thirty days. For anyone who knows me, you know I think I can strategize my way out of basically anything. But when that doesn’t work, my backup plan is apparently a solid arbitrary timeline.

I think it’s my way of giving God a deadline to get his shit together. Or maybe giving myself a little more time to realize God is, in fact, not the genie in the bottle I was hoping for in whatever scenario is not going my way.

Thirty days. My goal was to get my shit together. Wake up every morning. Pray. Move my body. Drink sixty ounces of water. Drink a cute iced latte out of a happy glass. And try to hear from the God I had spent weeks yelling at, who mostly sat silent through my rants. Tell me what to do.

The noise in my head during those first few weeks of silent Hobo Barbie life was mostly me sitting and crying and realizing my life would never be the same. But if I’m being honest, it was also the realization that in order to keep all this (please imagine me waving my hands around my very posh life with multimillion-dollar houses and fancy cars and a sunset over the lake that would make you weep), all it would take was continuing to do the thing I had gotten pretty damn good at: pretend.

Could I fake my way into pretending my heart wasn’t shattered by betrayal? Probably. Gross.

Here I was, priding myself on my authentic storytelling résumé, sitting on a big book deal from a top-five publisher, while simultaneously bargaining my way into staying inside a life that required me to pretend. Because I was fucking terrified of going backward. Terrified of becoming the girl I used to be, the one who quit when things got too hard.

So, back to my thirty days of prayer. Every day, per my therapist’s advice, I took out a black leather notebook and RAGED. I addressed every entry to the man I had married and wrote all the things I knew I couldn’t say to him.

My handwriting was frantic across the pages as I recounted all the ways I had begged and pleaded through the years. All the times I knew, but somehow walked away feeling silly or insecure for knowing. It felt good to RAGE.

I would run down the mile-long paved driveway listening to Billie Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever,” SCREAMING the lyrics.

Also, I am terrible at running. So I was simultaneously crying about my life being a pile of ashes and about how much I hated running. Both. It was self-imposed torture to rid my body of the anger. The pain of now. And the deeper realization that I had already been in mourning for two years, standing in the driveway of our life begging my husband to choose me.

The rage, the running (which, if I’m honest, looked more like aggressive walking), and the rage journaling were helping. I was showering. I even left the house a few times.

And then I got the call from him.

Bear has cancer. It’s aggressive. Sarcoma.

Bear was my first anniversary gift from him. Bear Boy Quick. Bucky. Or, as I referred to him, the best human ever dressed in a Bernedoodle suit. Bear became the glue of our family through some hard things: parenting teenage boys, living through a pandemic, house remodels, buying and selling companies and commercial real estate.

Bear was a stage dog at concerts with 30,000 people. He was also a lap dog at ninety-one pounds. He was the perfect dog. Aside from the obnoxious crying he did in the car every time he saw another “baby,” which is what we called every dog on earth.

The cancer was aggressive and painful, they said. So I stopped showering again.

This time the despair became so overwhelming I couldn’t get out of my car. I was too afraid to walk into the mansion filled with memories. Our boys. Our dogs. The art and the books and a thousand perfect sunsets.

I would call a friend and ask her to convince me I could walk into the house. Some nights it took hours. I would sit in the blistering heat of summer, leaning against the side of my car, and cry until there were no tears left. None.

My marriage is dying. My dog is dying.

WHERE ARE YOU, GOD?

I’m writing this for anyone in the middle of their WHERE ARE YOU, GOD? season. And I’m not going to tell you that one day you’ll look back and realize it was all worth it.

Some things are not worth it. Some things are just devastating. Some losses do not reveal themselves later as gifts. Some things I would undo in a heartbeat. I don’t believe we have to make suffering beautiful to survive it. I think sometimes we just have to survive it.

So if you are there right now, if your whole life is lying in a pile of ashes and someone is trying to hand you a silver lining, you have my permission to hand it right back.

But keep going. Keep doing the things even when you don’t want to.

Call the friend who will help you get out of the car. Write the terrible things in the black notebook. Rage. Pray. Yell at God. Drink the water. Take the shower. Put the cute iced latte in the happy glass even if happiness feels fucking offensive right now. Go for the run even if what you are doing could only very generously be described as running.

Just keep participating in your own life in whatever tiny ways you can.

Because I cannot promise you that what you lost will come back. I cannot promise you that the thing you are begging God to save will be saved. Mine wasn’t.

My marriage ended. My precious, wonderful dog, Bear died. There are things I lost during that season that I will never get back. And I still don’t think any of it was worth it.

But I am here. And somehow, so is beauty.

Not because the ashes were secretly good. Not because God tied everything up with a bow and explained why it all had to happen. But because the ashes were not the end of my story. There was still a life beyond them.

There were still books and front porches and dinners around tables. There was still laughter that surprised me when it came out of my own mouth. There were people I hadn’t met yet. There were versions of me I hadn’t met yet. There is LOVE, BIG LOVE on this side of that season of suffering.

And let me just reiterate, pain and suffering and grief are the fucking worst. I hate that we live in a culture that wants to make them holy just because people survive them. And I don’t want to pretend I’m grateful for things I would have given anything not to have lived through.

But I am grateful I stayed in my own life.

I’m grateful for the friends who kept me alive when staying looked like drinking sixty ounces of water and taking a shower. I’m grateful I kept participating in my life before I had any evidence that I would ever want that life again.

So maybe that’s all I have for you from the other side. You don’t have to believe the suffering is worth it. You don’t have to find the lesson yet. You don’t have to call it a gift. You don’t even have to be okay.

Just stay. Stay for your own life.

Mine became beautiful again. Not because of the suffering. Not in spite of it, either.

It just did.

And the suffering is mine to use to tell stories just like this. Because for me, it’s never been the shiny, perfectly wrapped up stories that encouraged me…it’s these. 

So, take a shower. 

If you’re in the middle of this kind of season, please click this link and take my survey💛

https://www.honestlylaura.com/survey

It’s a time I look back on and remember liking her and loving her.

She lived on Hilton Head Island with a nice older Jewish man who was really very successful. He was at least twenty years her senior and had some sort of hybrid gray ponytail/rat tail that made my skin crawl. But he was incredibly kind. He owned a restaurant equipment business, and she started working for him by selling his surplus inventory at the flea market in Savannah. She would eventually become his receptionist and then, finally, his wife.

Her nice Jewish husband was a New York native who had flocked to Hilton Head and lived in one of those stunning golf neighborhoods with horse stables at the front entrance. It was a bit of a shock considering the last time I had been in close contact with my mother, I was a teenager and she was living in a very sketchy single-wide trailer off Highway 17 in Savannah.

Her single-wide was nestled between drug dealers and drug addicts and other single moms with barely enough. So it was more than a little shocking the first time I had to give my name at the gated entrance of her new neighborhood on Hilton Head.

My mother and the nice Jewish man loved to take quick weekend gambling trips to the Bahamas. Once, for my birthday, she brought me home a fake Louis Vuitton.

This was years before I really understood that even a good fake Louis would cost more than I would dream of spending on a handbag. It was a full decade before I would actually own a real Louis of my own.

The one she brought home was certainly not the one I would’ve asked for. If I’d had my pick of fake Louises, it would’ve been a classic Speedy, maybe. But she knew less about luxury than I did, and so this thing was basically the worst fake Louis Vuitton a post-gambling, tipsy stupor could buy.

But it was sweet.

She knew I liked fancy things.

It was strange to be a girl born into a lower-middle-class family and have such an appetite for luxury. Looking back, I don’t know if it was the luxury or just the longing to be more than where I came from. Since middle school, I had an eye for the girls who wore every day the clothes I only had one or two of for special occasions. Like Gap jeans, for example.

I rationalized keeping my new fake blue-jean Louis Vuitton from the Bahamas by deciding that because it was so unique, surely people wouldn’t dare think it was fake…right?

It was denim-colored with red handles and looked a little too patriotic for me.

So it hung in my closet.

And while it hung there, my mother’s shiny new life started falling apart.

Her nice Jewish husband called me one day and told me he had found her snorting cocaine off the fancy built-in shoe rack in their closet.

There is something almost too perfectly on-the-nose about that sentence now. My mother had somehow made it from a single-wide trailer off Highway 17 to a gated neighborhood on Hilton Head Island, and there she was, doing cocaine off the built-in shelving of a closet nicer than any bedroom she had probably grown up in.

Not long after that, she and I entered another long stretch of zero contact.

A few years later, I bought a cute teacup Chiweenie for my twenty-fifth birthday, post my second accidental marriage and then, within months, the inevitable divorce. I know, I know. Read the book.

I named him Cooper.

One afternoon, I decided to throw a blanket in the bottom of the vintage fake Louis Vuitton and stroll little baby Cooper around downtown Savannah for brunch. He did great through the whole day as I paraded him around, patio hopping amongst my friend groups for cocktails.

On my way home, I stopped at Spanky’s, a Savannah cult classic known for chicken fingers and spuds, and had to leave Cooper in my fake blue-jean Louis in the car. I cracked the windows because it was that mild temperature between winter and spring in the evening. I thought he would curl up and sleep for an hour while I dined on deep-fried goodness with my brother Tony.

When I came back to the car, before I even opened the door, I could smell the grave mistake I’d made.

I pulled Cooper out of the bag with a hesitancy reserved for a woman praying not to get shit all over her outfit and decided to lay the blue-jean fake Louis Vuitton to rest in the giant dumpster behind Spanky’s.

It’s been eighteen years since I tossed that bag, and I still wish I would’ve put it in a trash bag, taken it home and tried to hose it off.

Which is ridiculous.

It was fake. It was ugly. It was covered in dog shit. For years it had meant so little to me that I was willing to turn it into a dog carrier before this was cool.

But that is the strange thing about objects.

Sometimes they mean nothing while we have them. Then enough life happens, someone dies, a relationship ends, a house gets sold, a childhood becomes a story you tell in the past tense, and suddenly the most ordinary things become evidence.

That stupid fake Louis Vuitton is evidence to me now.

Evidence of those eighteen lucid months with a mom I liked and loved.

Evidence that somewhere between the single-wide trailer and the gated neighborhood, between flea-market surplus and built-in shoe racks, my mother wanted and was trying to live a different life.

I think she wanted that for me too. 

Maybe that’s what makes me wish I still had the damn bag. My mom could never give me the kind of life she imagined for me. Hell, she could never really give herself one either. Every time she got close, the ghosts of trauma or addiction seemed to find her again.

But once, on a gambling trip to the Bahamas, she saw a fake Louis Vuitton and thought of me, her daughter.

She saw something she believed was fancy and thought, Laura would like this.

At twenty-something, I saw an atrociously ugly fake handbag.

At forty-something, I close my eyes and see my mother trying to connect with me through a fake handbag, but I see her trying.

I wonder what you have like that? 

That thing you tucked into a drawer or is sitting in a box in your attic or basement that would mean absolutely nothing to anyone else. The tiny jewelry box from your grandmas house. The ugly, falling apart Christmas ornament. The voicemail you can’t bring yourself to delete. The recipe written in handwriting you’d recognize from across the room. 

Maybe we don’t keep things because they are beautiful or fancy or worth passing our grandkids. 

Maybe the things we keep just prove that, for even one tiny moment, they cared. 

I wish I’d hosed off that damn bag.

I’d love to hear about your mommy issues. If you have two minutes, fill out this survey💗

https://www.honestlylaura.com/survey

When I got this book deal with Hachette, one of the Big Five publishers, as a non-famous person, it felt like what I like to call a Christmas miracle. Not to state the obvious, but I’m not famous. I am, in fact, a regular person. For the last decade, I’ve been publishing a magazine called Good Grit, these days people inevitably ask when they find out about the book deal, “What’s your book called?” or “What’s your book about?”

My response has become a bit of a punchline.

“It’s called Mommy Issues, and it’s about, well, my mommy issues.”

We normally laugh, and then, surprisingly, most people start telling me a little about their own mommy issues.

But the truth is, regular people don’t get Big Five publishing houses to buy their memoir unless their lives have been pretty fucked up. The version of me that is normally sitting across from another successful thirty-, forty-, or fifty-something woman doesn’t always remember that. I mean, I am the queen of the personal rebrand. I sell good news for a living, and here I am writing about my own Southern Gothic stew of dysfunction that leans a little more toward Hillbilly Elegy, with enough jaw-dropping storytelling that, not that I had any aspirations anyway, I’d probably be precluded from any future in politics.

Bless my heart.

Anyway, about two weeks before I sent in the completed manuscript, I realized there were holes that only a conversation with my mother could fill. And this was complicated for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I had recently blocked her on all my social media.

I don’t want to get too far into the weeds here, but throughout my adult life I could count the number of years my mom has actually been in my life on less than one hand. Somewhere around my mid-twenties, our relationship morphed into this weird transactional hybrid of text messages and Facebook messages depending on whether she wanted to hurt me or whether she needed money. And our relationship stayed mostly that way until I started writing this book.

For the first time in my whole life, she agreed to let me ask questions. My hope was always to understand her choices, not only for myself but for my readers too. There is a quote I’ve clung to, still cling to, like it’s gospel: “We are born looking like our parents, but when we die we look like our decisions.” In those phone conversations, those were the answers I was seeking. I wanted to know the parents she looked like and who had shaped her reality while also trying to make sense of the decisions she so clearly looks like these days.

Before I started writing this book, I hadn’t seen my mom in person in nearly ten years. The only time I heard from her was if she wanted or needed something. My guilt for having more than enough usually drove me to send whatever I could.

Until it didn’t.

You’ll have to read the book for that part.

That last interview with her before I completed the manuscript gutted me. Not because the stories she was sharing were new, but because I was hearing them differently. I started writing Mommy Issues as a daughter who felt rejected and abandoned and disregarded. I finished it knowing all of those things were true.

It’s a strange thing to completely disagree with your own mother’s decisions while also understanding, maybe for the very first time, how she became capable of making them. To know she’s living on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere Georgia, with single-wide trailers scattered on both sides. To hear her raspy voice interrupted every few sentences by the long, deep drag of another cigarette.

She will die and look like her decisions.

So will I.

That last conversation I had with my mom ended like this:

“Hey, listen. I blocked you on all my social media, and it’s not because I’m mad at you or don’t want to share my life with you. It’s because I’m about to start sharing intimate parts of this book. And based on some of your comments and texts, I’m afraid they’ll make you feel like you owe me something, or that you need to apologize, or defend yourself.

But I’m not writing this book to criticize you or your choices.

I’m writing it because I hope it helps other people. Moms and daughters. People who love each other but never quite found their way to each other.

So I’m going to have to tell stories that might hurt your feelings.

I blocked you because I love you.

And because I already forgave you.”

I’ve thought about that conversation a hundred times since then. I don’t know if she understood what I was trying to say. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t. But somewhere in the middle of writing this book, I realized forgiveness and access aren’t the same thing. Sometimes loving someone looks like inviting them in. Sometimes it looks like closing the door long enough to tell the truth.

I don’t know what your story with your mom looks like. Maybe she’s your safest place. Maybe she’s your deepest wound. Maybe she’s both.

But if writing Mommy Issues has taught me anything, it’s this: healing almost always begins the moment we stop pretending.

Would love to hear a story about your mom🤍

Want to Connect?

Except for plants. Many of us are still quietly murdering those.

Just last week, I returned home to discover I’d accidentally thirsted a perfectly innocent marigold to death. Thoughts and prayers to her family.

But self sabotage? Pretending? Friendships? Grudges? Unrealistic expectations? Stories we’ve been telling ourselves since middle school? We can keep those on life support for years.

If you’ve been reading along, then you already know I once admitted to dressing up my last marriage like Weekend at Bernie’s and parading it around the globe like a complete psycho.

Turns out, my last marriage wasn’t the only thing I kept alive long after the kindest thing would’ve been to let it die.

It’s the day before my forty-third birthday, I’m starting a new tradition. A pre-birthday funeral.

Not for people.

For the things that have done their job but no longer belong in the next chapter. So in lieu of gifts, flowers, or anti-aging creams that promise miracles, I’d like to announce the following deaths:

⚰️ The belief that everyone deserves one more chance.

⚰️ Over-explaining my boundaries.

⚰️ Pretending I’m not angry when I’m angry.

⚰️ Trying to earn belonging.

⚰️ Feeling guilty for outgrowing people, places, and old dreams.

⚰️ The version of success that measures my worth by productivity.

⚰️ Believing healing should’ve happened faster.

⚰️ Managing other people’s opinions of me.

⚰️ My annual delusion that Alabama humidity can be defeated with enough product.

⚰️ Saving the good wine for a special occasion.

⚰️ Apologizing for taking up space.

⚰️ Confusing being needed with being loved.

⚰️ The fantasy that one more accomplishment will finally make me feel enough.

⚰️ Thinking rest has to be earned.

⚰️ Confusing survival with living.

⚰️ The need to have all the answers on a specific timeline.

⚰️ The belief that becoming healthier means becoming someone else.

May they all rest in peace.

The older I get, the less I think transformation comes from adding more things to our lives. I think it comes from having the courage to edit, cut away and put to death what no longer belongs.

A few weeks ago, my grandmother died on the day that I turned in the final manuscript for my book. And that poetic timing got me thinking about death.

Not just the kind that ends a life.

The kind that makes room for one.

The death of an old pattern.

An old identity.

An old story.

Maybe that’s what birthdays are for.

Not just cake and candles.

Maybe they’re an annual reminder that if we want something new to live, something old has to die first.

So, what have you been keeping alive that probably deserves a funeral?

There were a lot of reasons. The biggest one, according to my aunts and uncles, was that it wouldn’t have been safe for me. I think they were trying to protect me.

I don’t know if I actually believe that, the unsafe part I mean. Despite their warnings, I had planned to visit in the days that followed, but she died before I got to her.

Her death happened the way she requested, in the same house she was born in. It was just days after her eighty-eighth birthday. A few days before my forty-third. And, poetically, on the exact day I turned in the final manuscript of Mommy Issues.

I don’t believe in coincidences.

But I do believe in the power of death.

The older I get, the less I think death is only about the end of a life. I think it’s also the thing that makes new life possible. It’s a million little deaths that let us live one big, audacious life.

At least that’s been true for me.

There are a handful of things I wish I could’ve asked Millie.

Does she still think I’m pretty?

Kidding.

Kind of.

Apparently there is still a little girl in me hoping to be beautiful enough, likable enough, palatable enough. Maybe that’s one of the things that still needs to die. Maybe this is the year I finally let it.

My mom found out Millie, her own mother, had died by text message. About the same time I did.

Not even a phone call.

She didn’t get to see her own mother before she died either. For safety reasons, they said.

The family decided not to have a service. At least not yet.

I hope they do, though.

Because I’ve learned grief needs somewhere to go. It hates being asked to sit politely in the waiting room of your real life.

Sometimes grief feels like easing yourself into the shallow end of the pool on the first hot day of summer. You grip the stairs, inch in slowly, and stay close enough that you can climb right back out if it gets to be too much.

Other times, it feels like being thrown into the deep end. The water steals your breath. Your feet can’t find the bottom. For a moment, you forget how to swim.

But either way, grief demands we enter the water.

If we don’t make room for it, it usually finds another way in. It shows up as anger. Anxiety. Numbness. An emotional outburst in the middle of a staff meeting.

Not that I’ve ever done that…eye roll.

Death asks something of the living.

It asks us to stop long enough to feel what was lost. To honor what was beautiful. To tell the truth about what wasn’t. To let go of the version of ourselves that can only exist while we keep pretending nothing changed.

Anyway, Millie died.

Later this week, I’ll turn forty-three. Maybe birthdays are little deaths, too. A quiet invitation to lay an old version of ourselves to rest so a new one has somewhere to live. That’s the question I’m carrying into this next year.

What part of me is ready to die so something better can live in this next year, Laura?

I’d love to hear from you. What has death or grief taught you lately?

https://www.honestlylaura.com

That first morning though, after a real night’s sleep, we woke to the sound of osprey and house sparrows and the water of Coronado Bay crashing against the retaining wall just outside our balcony. We threw on shorts and hats, grabbed coffee, shared my AirPods, and started a walk down the beach while listening to a sermon.

The west coast sand reminds me of my childhood on Tybee Island. Brown, earthy, almost like dirt instead of the sugar-white beaches I’ve spent the last decade loving along 30A.

The sermon was about Jesus praying in the garden. I need to listen to it again because, while I was trying to pay attention, my mind kept wandering back to being a little girl on Tybee.

I couldn’t have been more than five the first time I found a sand dollar. One of my cousins taught me they weren’t just lying on top of the sand. You had to look for the little mounds the waves left behind, then gently dig beneath the surface. Finding one felt like winning the lottery.

Every so often on our walk I’d spot a broken sand dollar. I’d point it out, Zach would smile, and I’d smile back. Quietly, almost without thinking, I prayed,

“Hey God… I’d really love to find a perfect sand dollar today.”

Every time the tide rolled back and left one of those little mounds with a tiny hole in the middle, I’d use my foot to dig and find nothing. Then another. Nothing. Then another. By about the tenth try, I had started convincing myself it probably wasn’t going to happen today.

The sermon was coming to a close as we turned back toward our shoes. I was digging one more hopeful little hole when Zach reached over, touched my arm, and pointed a few feet away. As the wave receded, there it was.

A perfect sand dollar.

He picked it up, walked over, and handed it to me. No words. Just that bright smile of his. I smiled back while he snapped these photos. By the time we sat on the retaining wall to finish the sermon, tears were rolling down my face.

“You okay?” Zach asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “More than okay.”

I wasn’t crying because I found a sand dollar.

I was crying because I realized I’d asked God for something, then immediately started acting like it all depended on me anyway.

I dug and dug and dug, convinced if I just worked harder, searched longer, tried one more spot, maybe I’d make it happen.

Then, while I was looking in all the wrong places, God let one gift hand me another.

The truth is, I think a lot of us who grew up fighting for love have a hard time believing good things can simply be given. Somewhere along the way we learned to equate striving with survival. We became so good at digging that we forgot what it feels like to receive.

I still believe in hard work. Deeply. Most meaningful things require it.

But I also wonder how many of us are exhausted from digging because somewhere along the way we stopped believing anyone was listening?

Maybe some gifts aren’t found because we outwork everyone else. Maybe sometimes they’re simply received.

Open your hands. You don’t have to dig for every good thing.

To be clear, writing three songs on the drive home from Nashville isn’t normal. But Clay wasn’t in a normal creative season. The songs were coming faster than he could keep up with them, and every time he came home I’d think, Surely this one can’t be better than the last one. Then he’d play another song, and somehow I’d be wrong again.

As he sat on the edge of my bed with nothing but the lamplight from my bedside table filling the room, my mind drifted back to another afternoon two years earlier at our old lake house.

We had this massive, floor-to-ceiling library with a rolling ladder that stretched all the way to the top. It looked like something out of a fairy tale. During that season of my life I couldn’t stop buying classic old books, first editions like, To Kill A Mocking Bird and Great Expectations from antique stores and estate sales. Looking back, I think I was medicating myself with stories because I couldn’t yet tell my own.

I was standing high on that ladder putting another stack of books on the shelf when Clay looked up from the couch and said, “Give me a word.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just one word. Then I’m going to write something.”

I laughed for a second before answering.

“Walking.”

That was it.

An hour later we were sitting on the back deck while God painted the sky shades of orange, purple, and red as the sun slipped behind the trees. Clay picked up his guitar and played me a brand-new song called Walking.

His lyrics arrested me…

“I keep on hiding notes

All around my house

Little lines I’d never quote

To anyone aloud

Like- don’t forget to eat

Hug yourself and take a breather

Maybe go outside

If you’re lonely man, just take a drive. I find that it helps, though I don’t know how long, I know I’ll keep on walkin.”

I can still remember the feeling in my chest as he sang those words. Not because he’d written a beautiful song, although he had. It was because somehow he’d written my life. Clay had no idea my marriage was quietly collapsing. He didn’t know I was privately begging God to rescue the life I’d spent years trying to build. He didn’t know I was living in what I jokingly called my rich white girl jail, a stunning lake house that looked like a dream from the outside but felt painfully lonely inside.

He didn’t know I was surviving one tiny decision at a time. Eat something. Go outside. Take a walk. Journal. Voice memo a friend. Read your Bible. Have a good screaming match with a God who is mostly silent. Make it until tomorrow. What I heard in those lyrics wasn’t just a songwriter finding an idea. I heard my son giving language to a life I’d only admitted to five people.

I never told him that.

Not then.

I was nineteen when I gave birth to Clay. He has this joke he tells from time to time. “We’re only nineteen years apart. If we both live long enough, eventually we’ll be the same age.” It’s funny because I know exactly what he means. For most of my life as his mom, I haven’t felt like I was standing at the finish line waiting for him to catch up. I’ve felt like I was just far enough ahead on the trail to turn around and yell, “Watch your step.” Or maybe more honestly, “I tripped there.”

Years later, while he sat on the edge of my bed with another guitar and another handful of songs. When he finished playing, he looked up at me and said something that caught me completely off guard.

“I feel completely unrelatable.”

He told me the songs wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t sleep. He’d pull over on the side of the road because another lyric would show up before he’d even finished writing the last one. He felt like he was drowning in creativity, and underneath what he was saying was the fear that no one else could possibly understand what he was experiencing.

“You’re not drowning,” I told him. “You struck water.”

I told him that every artist hopes to strike water. It’s the finding of our source. The place where something alive finally breaks through. But striking water isn’t the end of the journey. In order not to drown in the gift, you have to build a well. Without something to hold them, abundance has a way of feeling just as dangerous as scarcity.

The older I get, the more I think that’s true about far more than creativity. Grief can drown you. Joy can. Success can. Healing can. Even hope, when it finally returns, can feel overwhelming if you’ve forgotten what it’s feels like to carry it. Maybe the work isn’t avoiding deep water. Maybe it’s learning to build something that can hold it.

I’ve thought about those two conversations a lot lately. One where my son unknowingly gave me language for a loneliness I wasn’t brave enough to name. Another where I finally had language for the gift that was threatening to overwhelm him. Maybe that’s motherhood. Not pretending you’ve figured life out. Just being willing to tell your children what you’re still learning and wrestling with…and staying humble enough to let them point out the places you’re still stumbling.

This morning I texted Clay and told him something I’d never said before. I thanked him for writing Walking. I told him I felt so seen by that song, I just wasn’t ready to admit it at the time. It made me wonder how many people quietly change someone else’s life without ever knowing it.

Maybe the greatest gifts aren’t the ones that impress people. Maybe they’re the ones that give someone language for what they couldn’t name. The ones that remind another human being they aren’t alone. Sometimes that’s a song. Sometimes it’s a book. Sometimes it’s a conversation, a photograph, a meal, or simply someone who notices what you’re trying so hard to hide.

I’d love to know your story.

Who gave you language for something you couldn’t name? Who made you feel seen before you were ready to tell the truth? I’d love to hear about them.

honestlylaura.com

My last living grandparent is dying.

Last week they called in Hospice for my grandmother. Her name is Millie. She’s my mother’s mother. She’ll be 88 if she makes it to July 1.

The strange thing is, I haven’t seen her in person in sixteen years.

Now I’m in the weird position of trying to decide if I should.

There are all these small cities sprinkled around Savannah where people live a little more affordably and work at the port, the paper mill, the plants, and a ton of other necessary places that make a tourist destination like Savannah actually work.

Port Wentworth is one of those places.

Most familiar for having an entrance to the Georgia Ports, but you can also find a few grocery stores, convenience stores, and an old public gym with wood floors that doubled as a skating rink.

My grandmother Millie lives right beside that old gym on a quiet side street lined with row houses that look like they might’ve been built for mill workers generations ago.

Millie was born in the house she has requested to die in.

It’s a tiny two-bedroom, one-bath wood house with a charming front porch and big oak trees that shade it no matter where the sun is sitting in the sky.

Millie and my mom lived in the El Chico trailer park after her divorce from my grandfather Fred until her parents died and left her this little house.

I’d be lying if I said that house, that porch, and that old gym with the red train car I used to climb on while passing the time don’t hold some really good childhood memories.

Because they do.

As a little girl, I remember Millie always wore pantyhose and heels, even when she was taking me yardsaling. Which, by the way, is a rite of passage for any grandchild of the lower middle class in the Deep South.

Millie always seemed so tall to me, which doesn’t take much since as a fully grown woman I’m only 5’4”, but as a little girl her five-foot-eight frame felt model-ish.

And according to family lore, she’d actually done some modeling.

Millie was an undeniably beautiful woman, even for a grandma.

Her cheekbones were high and her hair always had enough hairspray in it to take it straight up to Jesus in a bouffant. I remember wondering how, despite smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, she never smelled like smoke the way my mom did.

Millie cared deeply about how she looked.

And to be frank, I think she cared deeply about how anybody associated with her looked too.

As a child, I knew I wasn’t her favorite grandchild because she very rarely got my name right. She often called me Nancy, which was my cousin’s name.

She once inscribed a journal to me for my birthday:

“Dear Nancy, I hope you’ll use this to keep your thoughts.”

You could almost say it was a mistake, but Nancy and I didn’t even have birthdays close together.

Look, you’ll have to read my book, which comes out in spring 2027, to get all the family secrets, but I’ll tell you this:

Millie abruptly stopped even pretending to like me in 2006, the year of our Lord. In her eyes, I did something completely unforgivable. In my eyes, I did what was right.

A few years later, my niece’s first birthday party was being hosted on Millie’s front porch and I decided to stop by.

I would be lying if I said I hadn’t dressed to the nines because I had.

And I’d also be lying if I said it didn’t hurt my feelings that, in my opinion, she was taking the side of a criminal by blaming me for what happened.

The truth is, I didn’t pull into the driveway thinking about how mean she had been those years before.

I pulled in believing time had done what time does. I thought maybe enough years had passed and maybe old age had softened her toward the truth. Maybe there had been enough distance for forgiveness to move in where resentment used to live.

Then she saw me get out of my car and immediately stood up from her rocking chair and walked inside.

No hello.

No wave.

Just a very clear indication that I wasn’t welcome.

I went in anyway.

I’ve always been willing to let my family break my heart. I think it’s because I want the redemption story so damn bad.

My hope runs deep and wide that my family, especially the women, wake up to the generational cycles we’ve inherited and start owning them so we can break them.

After exchanging pleasantries with everyone still sitting on the porch, I followed Millie into the house.

I found her in a familiar state I recalled all too well from childhood, lying in her full-size antique wooden bed that creaked so loudly you could hear it from the porch.

She was reading a book.

Something else I’ve since come to love about Millie, maybe I believe I inherited from her, a love for reading— even if I find the rest of her character questionable at best.

“Hi Grandma Millie, it’s Laura. I just wanted to say hi.”

Silence.

She said nothing.

I awkwardly stood at the door of her tiny bedroom.

She kept her eyes fixed on her book and didn’t speak.

I slowly turned and walked away.

The sound of my boot heels echoed across those old wood floors as I made my way back to the front door.

The reality is that the same way I longed for something normal with my mom, I longed for something normal with her mom too. Whatever the hell normal was supposed to be between generations of women who had all survived similar traumas, passing them down from mother to daughter like a gift nobody wanted and nobody had the receipt to return.

An hour later, Christy came by my house with my niece so I could give her birthday present.

As we sat on the living room floor opening gifts she casually said:

“Yeah, when you left Grandma Millie said, ‘Well, she’s a bitch, but she’s a pretty bitch.’”

And look, I know I shouldn’t think this way.

But it was the nicest thing Millie had ever said about me.

So she thinks I’m pretty, I thought.

I remember laughing out loud.

Anyway, they called in Hospice last week and so it’s official. Millie, my beautiful, kind of mean, grandmother is dying. Part of me wants to go because she’s my grandmother.

And they say she still has all her wits about her. The storycatcher in me is so intrigued with what I could potentially learn from her. I might be able to uncover more truth about what happened to her.

Part of me wants to go because I want to mine for family secrets. I want to know what she’s been carrying all these years.

I want to know if there are stories I’ve never heard that explain some of the generational cycles that have run through our family like wildfire.

The addiction.

The marriages and divorces.

The secrets.

The cover-ups.

But then again, maybe I don’t.

What if there are no answers to make it all make sense?

What if there are answers?

Anyway, would you go see Millie?

honestlylaura.com

I’m sure you know the kind.

She was the family member who technically, if we’re looking at my family whiteboard, shouldn’t matter as much as she did. On paper, she was practically a stranger. But according to my little girl heart? She gave me some of my favorite childhood memories.

My sweet Grandma Ludy…

She always had a strawberry cake sitting beneath a glass dome on her completely pristine 1950s kitchen table. There are a handful of summer evenings from my visits with her that have lived rent-free in my memory for decades now. Just before dusk, she would hand me a mason jar with holes poked in the lid and send me into the front yard to catch fireflies.

I would run barefoot beneath the towering trees that shaded her little yard. Her shotgun house backed right up to the railroad tracks in the middle of nowhere Alabama. Looking back it felt like I was running around on the set of Fried Green Tomatoes.

The grass was cool beneath my feet as I ran carefree into the front yard with my jar in hand. The air buzzed loud with cicadas and the promise of nightfall. Every time I caught another lightning bug, I’d hold the jar up proudly and yell, “Hey! I got another one, Grandma Ludy!”

From her rocking chair on the small covered porch, she’d laugh and call back in her gentle Southern drawl, “You’re gonna have a bright night light if you keep that up!”

And she was right.

I’d stay out there until I had enough fireflies glowing inside that mason jar to light up the tiny nightstand beside the bed in the middle bedroom where I slept. Her guest room doubled as a sewing workshop. I can still see the floral bolts of fabric leaning against the wall beside her sewing machine. Reminding me of the handmade dresses I wore at the time.

Growing up outside of Savannah Georgia, fireflies were a rare sighting. It was usually too hot and too coastal for the magical displays that seem to happen every summer evening in Alabama. Maybe that’s part of why those memories feel so special now.

The older I get, the more I realize it wasn’t really the fireflies I loved.

It was the wonder.

It was the feeling that the world was magical and my only job was to eat strawberry cake, run barefoot through the grass, and catch bugs in a jar. If you grew up with trauma, those memories can be harder to find. The joyful ones. The Eden-type moments. The memories where nobody was leaving, nobody was fighting, and I was simply a little girl, doing little girl things.

Now that I live in Birmingham, every year when the fireflies come back out, those evenings at Grandma Ludy’s wash over me. The way my face hurt from laughing. The pride I felt carrying my glowing jar onto the porch. The ritual of her opening the screen door while I ran to the middle bedroom and carefully placed my nightlight beside the bed on the small antique table.

It was one of the few times as a little girl that I was excited to go to sleep. I’d lie there counting their flashes of light until eventually I would drift off for the night.

This weekend, I think I’ll grab a mason jar, take my shoes off, and go catch some fireflies.

And that got me wondering:

What’s one small, ordinary childhood memory that still glows in the dark for you?

The hardest part was going back to the moments where I knew.

I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly when I started dressing that marriage up and carrying it around like Weekend at Bernie’s. You remember that movie? The guy is already dead, but everyone keeps pretending he’s alive. The truth is, I don’t think my pretending started because I was trying to be dishonest. I think it started because I was hopeful. I believed I was protecting us. Protecting our family. Protecting the future I thought I had seen coming so clearly. Protecting the redemption story I desperately wanted to be true. Hell, I thought it was true.

Then somewhere along the way, protection slowly morphed into pretending.

I remember reading The Choice by Edith Eger while traveling through Germany. I devoured it. Her memoir was brutal and beautiful and such an invitation to examine the small choices that shape a life. Nothing about my story compares to hers. She survived Auschwitz. But we are kindred in the hope we share in our darkest places.

As I traveled through a country where unspeakable things had happened to innocent people, I couldn’t stop thinking about her central message: we do not always control what happens to us. We do control where we allow our minds to live.

And so I did what I think many women do. I focused on what was good. And there was so much good. That’s the part people don’t understand. Even on the hardest days of my marriage, I was living a life younger versions of me would have begged God for. The house. The success. The opportunities. The family. The story. Everything I had spent years clawing my way toward.

But every life comes bundled. Every answered prayer arrives carrying things you never asked for. Every dream fulfilled has a price tag you couldn’t see from a distance. Eventually, we all have to decide: what are we willing to pay?

I kept paying. I kept smiling. I kept showing up.

Until one night my friends looked at me across a dinner table over a favorite French wine. Not with judgment. With concern. All of them. Collectively.

“Laura, you’re dying.”

Dying? Damn. That feels dramatic AF, ladies.

But here’s what I know now: you cannot selectively numb yourself. If you bury loneliness, you bury joy too. When I muted my grief, I muted my wonder, my creativity, and my ability to imagine a different future. If we shut down disappointment long enough, eventually we stop believing we’re allowed to ask for what we want. The human heart does not compartmentalize nearly as well as we’d like to believe.

And slowly, my light was going out.

Not all at once, but one compromise at a time. One rationalization at a time. One decision at a time.

I wasn’t becoming a villain. I wasn’t becoming a victim. I was becoming a non-playable character in someone else’s simulation. Present. Functional. Smiling. Completely disconnected from my own life.

The choice wouldn’t come for another year. But this photo stopped me in my tracks.

I remember seeing it and thinking it was beautiful. And if you’re anything like me, you know that’s rare. Most of us can find seventeen things wrong with a photograph of ourselves before we can find one thing right. But I loved this one.

And immediately after that thought came another: that smile was a performance.

In this photo I was distraught. My insides were in knots. I lived in a constant state of feeling like I was not enough. And still, every day, I got dressed. I smiled. I clung to hope. I convinced myself things were about to turn around. For sure this time.

I would stay. I would hope. I would pray my ass off. I would negotiate with reality.

And maybe that’s what made it so hard. Hope is beautiful. But sometimes hope becomes the very thing keeping us from telling the truth.

When I look back at photographs from that season, I always laugh and shrink into myself a little. Not because they’re funny. Because I know the secrets I was carrying. Other people see a beautiful woman. A successful woman. A put-together woman.

I see a woman whose life was quietly falling apart.

I was carrying tiny drops of hope around like if I collected enough of them, redemption would finally arrive. Maybe even a testimony.

The irony isn’t lost on me.

I used to judge women who stayed too long. Hell, I can think of one particular woman I sat down with only months before my own life started coming apart at the seams. I begged her to wake up. To ask for more. To believe she deserved more.

Watching women fold themselves into smaller and smaller versions of themselves to fit inside someone else’s dysfunction has been my kryptonite for a decade. I am the woman who stands in front of microphones and tells women to OCCUPY ALL THE SPACE GOD INTENDED YOU TO OCCUPY. The woman encouraging them to stop disappearing one decision at a time.

Then, not all at once but through hundreds of tiny decisions, I became her.

Maybe that’s why writing about this marriage was so hard. It’s easier to write about my blackout decade, the chaos of my twenties. It’s much harder to write about a season when I was awake.

I knew my patterns. I had more than a decade of therapy under my belt. I was surrounded by healthy people. I was pursuing God. I was trying to live out the very things I was inviting other people into.

And still, I was pretending.

Awareness didn’t save me. Therapy didn’t save me. Healthy community didn’t save me. Because none of those things made me incapable of abandoning myself. None of them made me immune to letting hope slowly turn into denial.

Everything in nature knows how to die. There is a natural order to endings. Trees release their leaves. Bodies shut down. Seasons change. But when it came to something I believed was attached to my redemption story, I held on for dear life.

And eventually I started dying too.

What I know now is that death is a necessary part of life. Not always physical death. Sometimes it’s the death of a performance. The death of a role. The death of the version of you who keeps volunteering to abandon herself.

And when I finally got brave enough to let the performance of it all die, I started to remember how to live.

Anyway, Rest In Peace to the girl in this photo.

Anything you’re dressing up like Weekend at Bernie’s you need to let die this week?

One of my favorite things about the street I live on is my neighbors a few doors down, John and Chris.

John is our resident Kravitz and is fully up on who is on the prayer list for falling and breaking a hip, who needs a covered dish, and why the people who bought the house on the corner still haven’t finished renovations. Chris is newly retired, but formerly served as the dean of a very prominent business school.

I fell in love with them as a couple on Easter Sunday when they invited me and my boyfriend over after we’d only briefly met once or twice.

My affection for them has grown immensely since then because they’ve become one of my favorite porch stops as I wander the neighborhood between writing spots.

Sometimes I’ll stop and tell Chris something I’ve just written. He’ll nod politely while I imagine he’s thinking, there is absolutely no way that happened. Then I’ll leave the conversation and spend the next twenty minutes questioning whether it belongs in the book at all.

The problem with writing a memoir is that your life starts sounding like fiction even to you.

Other times they remind me I’m on a deadline and need to get my ass back to it.

Honestly, both forms of encouragement are equally valuable.

On Saturday, though, when they asked how I was doing, I burst into tears.

The pressure was overwhelming me.

I had just dumped 10,000 words I’d decided were unusable. Ten thousand. Gone.

I’d heard writers talk about the emotional roller coaster of writing a book, how one minute you’re convinced you’ve written something brilliant and the next you’re asking yourself, Who the hell gave you a book deal? No one is ever going to read this trash.

I’ve heard that before.

I’d just never felt it quite as intensely as I did this weekend.

So there I was, leaning against their perfect wrought-iron fence while Zach, the kindest man alive and my boyfriend, and our neighbors watched me completely melt down. I’m sure whatever mascara I had left was running down my face.

John looked at me and said,

“Do you need a hug?”

And you know what?

I did need a hug.

He and Chris both hugged me while Zach explained that we were going to find flowers. The kind I could plant. I wanted to put my hands in the dirt. I wasn’t entirely sure why, but it felt necessary.

After getting a full debrief from Kravitz on the best Mexican restaurant within two blocks and learning that Leaf & Petal was already closed, Zach and I kept walking.

The next morning, before church, the doorbell rang.

Standing there were John and Chris holding this giant bouquet of flowers.

“You’ve got this flowers,” they said.

And I immediately started crying again.

What a gift.

To love your neighbor and really be loved by them.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that healing doesn’t just happen in therapy offices or churches. Sometimes it happens leaning on a wrought-iron fence while your neighbors hug you and remind you that you’re going to make it.

I hope you have a John and Chris in your neighborhood.

Do you?

Which feels impossible considering I still remember being nineteen and trying not to break his six pound, tiny body while I placed him into an oversized car seat to take him home from the hospital. Looking down at his squishy little face wondering how on earth someone was letting me do this. Motherhood I mean.

Now he is twenty three and mostly barefoot.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

This past winter he showed up to my house without shoes on. Not boots. Not slides. Not “I left them in the car.”

Barefoot.

“Where are your shoes?” I asked while staring at his frozen feet realizing we wouldn’t be going to any restaurants.

“Oh yeah,” he shrugged casually, “I’m not really doing shoes right now.”

To this day I have absolutely no idea what that means.

And honestly, I think motherhood has become realizing sometimes your children will say things that sound deeply profound to them and absolutely insane to you.

I don’t understand how someone voluntarily opts out of footwear in December. I don’t understand how he could be perfectly content sleeping in the back of his Toyota Tacoma if life required it, just so he could keep making music and living on his own terms. I don’t understand how he somehow maintains the palate of a divorced art dealer and would certainly spend every dollar in his bank account on his favorite sushi bowl without a care of what comes next.

And though I have only ever known him to be in heterosexual relationships, he has explained to me that he is pansexual.

Which, if I understand correctly, mostly just means he loves all people.

And honestly? That part feels beautiful to me.

I’ve told him I don’t need some giant TED Talk to explain his sexual orientation. I just need a little warning.

“Please just tell me their name and pronouns before dinner so I can be respectful and not accidentally sound like a seventy year old Southern Baptist woman named Margo.”

That feels fair.

And if he loves them, I’ll do my best to love them too.

Except for maybe that one vegetarian friend he brought to Smith Lake a few summers ago who announced she was vegetarian approximately every eleven minutes while I unloaded what had to be eight hundred dollars worth of groceries.

Then she asked if she could cut all the fruit up and throw it in one bowl so she would have something to eat.

Absolutely not.

Get out of my kitchen you rude little psycho.

I tried. I really did. But according to my son my “tone and demeanor” gave away that I was not her biggest fan.

He was correct. If you are an unexpected guest and you have food preferences bring some provisions- like your own damn fruit. I have plans for my fruit.

But what I am learning about loving our children through their non shoe wearing, music writing, cigarette smoking seasons — or forever identities — is that love does not actually require my understanding.

And thank God for that because half the time I barely understand myself.

My love does not require my stamp of approval or a full explanation or for him to become someone that makes me feel comfortable at every dinner party.

It just requires me to keep showing up.

To keep loving him while he keeps becoming himself.

And both of those things look messy sometimes.

I am still learning how to apologize when I get it wrong because painfully, I still do. But I think he’s starting to realize something too:

I was never just Mom.

I’ve always been a human being.

A very young one in the beginning.

I was not quite twenty when I had him. We essentially grew up together which means some of my mothering was winging it and instincts that weren’t always right.

Most of it was survival and guessing and praying and pretending I knew what the hell I was doing. And then needing to apologize later for getting it wrong.

And despite all of that, he has surpassed me in so many ways by twenty three.

He loves people more freely and loud.

More openly.

More courageously.

This kid knows at least a dozen unhoused people by name in Nashville. Not as statistics. Not as inconveniences. As humans. He knows their favorite drink order. Gives them rides and cigarettes. Talks to them like they matter because to him they genuinely do.

And maybe that’s the thing I understand most about him.

Not the barefoot winters.

Not the cigarettes.

Not even the ever evolving explanation of who he is becoming.

What I understand is his heart.

And what a privilege it has been to spend twenty three years watching it grow. Happy Birthday Clay. You inspire me and baffle me in the best ways.

What are your kids teaching you about love these days?

The old man who tapped my shoulder was gazing at me, his eyes were the kind of faint, grayish-blue that reminded me of my granddaddy’s. He was dressed head to toe in athletic wear and a pair of giant 1980’s headphones resting around his neck.

“I’ve never seen someone focus so intently,” he said with a little smirk. His voice was strained and whispery as he waited for my answer. “You really haven’t let up. Do you mind me asking what you’re working on?”

“Oh, hi there,” I laughed a little, startled back into reality. “Yeah, I’m working on my first book and I’m up against a pretty tight deadline.”

I assumed that might end the conversation quickly.

“Oh, I see,” he nodded. “Well, I knew you must’ve been doing something meaningful. Even as a surgeon, I don’t think I ever concentrated that hard when I was repairing hernias.”

Well now I’m intrigued.

“You were a surgeon?” I asked, looking at him and trying to guess how far into his eighties he might be.

“Yes,” he said proudly. “I was a general surgeon for more than forty years.”

“What’s your name?”

He leaned in toward my table, and turned his left ear toward me trying to really hear me, “Oh, my name is Mario. What about you?”

“I’m Laura. So what are you listening to these days, Mario?” I gestured toward the headphones around his neck.

“Always the opera,” he said, as if I should’ve easily guessed that. “My wife and I both love it.”

“How long have you been married?” I asked, already certain the number would astound me.

Mario smiled softly.

“My wife is brilliant. I met her when she was a young nurse. She is always learning something…” His voice trailed off for a moment like he’d lost his train of thought somewhere inside a memory.

My curiosity about Mario and his opera soundtrack needed to know more.

“What do you think the secret to happiness is, Mario?” I asked the most Laura question of all time. Any of my people will tell you, I suck at small talk. I want to know what’s hurting you, what you are learning, and what mysteries are keeping you up at night. But something about Mario let me know he would have something worth remembering with his answer.

“Well now, that’s a very good question.” He laughed before continuing. “I think my professors were maybe the closest to having it figured out, ya know?”

He paused and I realized there were remnants of a New York accent underneath the sound of his last few decades in Birmingham, Alabama.

“When I went to the University of Georgia, I had never felt like a real person before. As a kid whose parents were immigrants from Italy, I needed a lot of help in school that I never got. In New York they didn’t care much. But when I got to the university…” he stopped himself and laughed. “Well, at the University of Georgia…they treated me like I was smart and a whole person. Like I had real value. They helped me so much.”

His eyes looked watery with memories and it made me emotional too for some reason.

“I actually asked my wife the other day, do you think we should send the University of Georgia some money or something???,” he laughed again. “They really changed my life.”

I let that sit between us for a beat before responding.

“I love that they reminded you of your value Mario,” I said. “Clearly you are smart. You became a surgeon! So why did you think your professors had the secret to happiness?”

Mario smiled again, his light blue eyes dancing behind the answer before he even gave it.

“Well, they get to keep learning and discovering. And I believe that’s the secret to happiness. To keep finding new things that intrigue us enough that we want to spend our time and energy trying to figure them out.”

“Hmm,” I smiled. “I think I agree with you.”

Mario adjusted the giant headphones around his neck and grinned at me.

“Well,” he said, “you certainly look intrigued enough by whatever you’re writing to keep going. That’s a good sign.”

And just like that he stood up from the outdoor table beside me offered another little smile and a wave. He placed the old school, corded headphones back on his head and shuffled onto the side walk. I sat there staring at my laptop no longer thinking about deadlines or edits or whether this book was good enough to exist in the world.

Instead, I thought about curiosity.

I let Mario’s words remind me the goal of a life isn’t becoming fully healed or fully impressive or fully certain.

I think it’s just about staying awake enough to keep discovering things.

New music.

New people.

New parts of yourself.

New reasons to renew our hope.

I looked back down at the manuscript that, moments before, had felt impossibly heavy, like the weight of finishing it or it ever being good enough for anyone to read overwhelmed me.

Then I opened the pages of my book again and kept writing. Believing I was on the brink of discovering something worth giving away.

What’s something in this season of your life making you curious again?

Part of me wants to sound smart here. Thoughtful. Well adjusted. Like someone who has healed enough that her writing is dripping with wisdom and surely a masterclass is coming soon.

Unfortunately for all of us, I think the reason I’m supposed to write is because I’m willing to tell the truth while I’m still figuring shit out.

So let’s start there.

Hi. I’m Laura.

I’m a storyteller, mother, entrepreneur, divorcée, Southerner, recovering self abandoner, and a woman who has spent the better part of my life trying to outrun the parts of myself and my story I hated.

Sometimes by achieving.
Sometimes by performing.
Sometimes by pretending.
Sometimes by staying too long.
Sometimes by leaving too fast.

This Substack won’t be a place where I show up as an expert with a five point plan to avoid every mistake I’ve made.

I don’t think healing works like that anyway.

I think healing looks more like waking up to a pattern and fighting like hell to get out of it only to find yourself in therapy three months later realizing you did it again.

It looks like awkward conversations and apologies to people we love.
It looks like finding people who will love you while you’re still a damn mess.
It looks like screaming matches with a God that never yells back.

My healing started with getting sick and tired of myself.

And then:
A world class therapist.
Books.
Women who told the truth.
Long walks.
A brand new journal.
Onsite.
Coffee shops.
Writing things down before I was brave enough to say them out loud.

And slowly, painfully, messily, I started waking up.

Not into perfection.
Not into some wild salvation story.
But into consciousness.
Into accountability.

This space is for women like me.

Women who come from complicated people.
Women who love their families and still have wounds from them.
Women who are successful and maybe exhausted.
Women who are funny because of their trauma.
Women trying to become accountable adults while still holding compassion for the younger versions of themselves.
Women still trying to figure out God.

I want this space to feel like relief.

Like therapy and God and generational cycles and Southern culture and bad decisions and beauty products and books and shame and motherhood and nervous system regulation can all exist in the same conversation because honestly… that’s what being a woman feels like to me.

Messy.
Sacred.
Hilarious.
Hard.

Mostly, I hope this becomes a place where people feel less alone.

So welcome.

I’m really glad you’re here.