Though, that meant absolutely nothing the day I saw it and made sure my Dad knew that.

A couple weeks after test driving it and only 4 months into me having my license, he printed out a picture of a bow and laid it on the dashboard Christmas morning— pointing to it from inside when it was my turn to be gifted.

It was all for show.

I named it “Dede”.

I didn’t assign it a gender but it presented like a girl going through rough teenage years and drove like a guy trying to impress his friends.

I wanted a “designer car” so badly in H.S. and I got it, but what I didn’t get was much time with it.

About a couple months into me having my first car I let my friend Jordana take it to get bagels while I was getting my eyelashes done. She was a year younger and had barely had her permit (meaning she wasn’t allowed to drive without an adult in the car).

About a minute into handing her the keys and reassuring her that it’s totally fine and that the bagels are just down the street, I felt both the wind from the door that had just shut and the anxiety passed on from a shaking hand.

“Its f*cked. Your car is f*cked” she stuttered as I laid glued down, literally, on the aestheticians table.

She had run it right into the Wheel stop.

I wasn’t concerned about the car itself as much as I was about telling my Dad.

Jordana promised me her family would take care of it and get it fixed so I contemplated even telling him, but then again— I was seventeen and practically living with him, driving my sister home from high school nearly everyday. I quickly rationalized that hiding the truth for this one would not work before coming to the life conclusion that it never does.

It didn’t drive the same after that, not that it was great before.

It would tell me to shut off my engine whenever I would brave the steep hill that led me to my H.S. if I chose to go the scenic route and texted my friends for me that I was there by using squeaky brakes and a booming bass to greet their driveways.

I didn’t care much about it after a few months of being gifted it, though we did have our moments together.

It drove Riley—the third grader I babysat my entire junior year home everyday after school.

It stored alcohol I bought underaged with a Philadelphia fake ID from Franklin Lakes liquors in the backseat for Grace and all her friends on the weekends.

It took me to and from my high school boyfriends house nearly every night and picked up and dropped off friends who didn’t have their license yet.

When I was a freshman in college, my brother brought it to Rutgers with him.

He ended up totaling it the morning after a night out drinking when he and his friend Tim drove to the bar “without sunglasses” to get his wallet left there and “by accidentally” drove it into a pole because, well of course, it was “too sunny”.

It was sold and used to pay off Thomas’ in state tuition there that one semester.

I never asked for another car, I didn’t love having my own. Plus, I was going to college soon and didn’t want to become the too generous friend who drove everywhere and picked up everybody.

Looking back, I don’t think I wanted an Audi.

I wanted what I thought it represented: style and status, freedom and independence.

The feeling that my life was finally beginning and I can make good choices on my own.

For years I had begged for that car.

Not that specific one, it could have been any so long as the logo was known but

then I had it. Just like that.

And it turned out the wanting had been far more exciting than the owning.

The day I get a new iphone it’s protected and beautifully presented with a screen protector and clean camera lens. As I look at it right now, the bubbles from the screen protector mimic the pattern of a leaf and the once pristine camera has a visible scratch straight through.

I do this with new computers as well, and handbags. New shoes and even my teeth after the dentist. I take extra good care of them for a couple days then, just like everything and everyone else—something new takes place.

The other day I ordered a flower pot on Amazon while chit chatting with my Brother before he left for a concert.

The morning after ordering it, my brother walked in to grab the bag he had dropped here before heading back home from the city.

I opened the Amazon package propped up on my bed while we talked.

“Didn’t you literally just order that?” We looked at each other with a bit of disgust and denial.

Less than twelve hours earlier it hadn’t existed in my life and somehow it had already become ordinary.

The thing about buying things now is that the wanting lasts longer than the having.

We spend more time researching them than living with them.

Before I pick out a new comforter on Amazon I watch about half a dozen reels, scour pages of reviews, compare fifteen different colors then, add to cart. Remove from cart, add it back again and confirm my delivery address amongst a 20 person contact book buildup on my Aunt’s prime account.

Then a brown box shows up at the front door and within hours it’s just another thing in your house, waiting for it’s turn to be donated in the next cleaning cycle.

I started thinking about Dede again because she was probably the first thing I ever desperately wanted.

The value was never in owning her, it was in everything that happened because she existed. I’ve started noticing that’s true of almost everything worth having.

The things I value most aren’t the things I “own” rather they’re the things I create, build or grow with.

I never wanted her to leave, but now that I’m older, I think it wouldn’t have been so difficult if I didn’t feel that she also didn’t want to leave.

If I knew she had a place where she too, would be taken care of.

My mom was always present for us, but I don’t believe she was present for herself.

She struggled with an eating disorder for most of my upbringing, and the image of her hip bones popping out of her baggy sweats on the treadmill is one of the only associations I have of her linked to wellness.

Becoming a woman myself, I began beating down the same path. As she lay in her new bed, set up at an assisted living facility during my senior year of college, I struggled to leave her side, going on hour nine without a bite of food.

When I felt she needed to be taken care of, I stayed. At this time in my life, I too was underweight, noticed patches of hair thinning on my scalp, and was always finding myself in a revolving door of arguments with friends.

On one of the final days of leaving her independent living home during my senior year winter break, I was stopped by the director there.

She caught my shoulder as I cried before exiting the revolving doors and told me that I had to live for myself.

“I gave up my life to be a caregiver. You should not do the same. I see myself in you, but trust me, there’s nothing there. Please take care of yourself.”

This was nearly five years ago.

In that moment, a familiar sense of anger washed over me. There could be nothing or nobody (or so I thought) that would stop me from taking care of my mom.

As the days unraveled, I fell into the same anxious eating patterns of either not eating at all or binge eating— a Wendy’s 4 for $4 was my go to if I could manage to eat something. I was going to the gym “doing” exercises I had no business doing, and my hair shedding became apparent to others besides myself.

I thought about what the director had said. At the time, I was nearing 97 pounds as a 5’6”, 22-year-old and had never been shown what it meant to “take care of yourself.”

This question became a common theme for me to answer. My therapist this past year asked me if I felt that I had been set back from my peers because of my Mom’s illness. My initial response was, “Yeah, they all got to have their moms at pre prom pictures or graduation day,” until she asked me:

“I meant in a self-care sense. When did you begin taking care of yourself?”

That question hit me fast and hard.

I had never learned to take care of myself.

I recalled times that my IHA socks smelled for days without being washed and how I would purposely go days without a shower when I had a cold or the flu. I would sit in my sickness because, without realizing it, it was what I was shown my entire childhood. My mom struggled both mentally and physically. While she was a beautiful, kind, loving, ever-present mother, she did not take care of herself.

I’m not a mom yet, though it’s my biggest aspiration.

I’ve always known I’ll be a great mom, but I struggle thinking about how that would have been possible without healing from and reversing what I saw throughout my childhood and teenage years.

I was scared of weights and what they would do to my body because I never saw my mom touch one. I questioned yoga practices and any type of inner healing work because I always heard the people around me making fun of it.

Over the past couple years, I’ve been subconsciously manifesting building The Miraclub. There’s more than a need for a club like this to exist— all around the world. I just didn’t see or act on it until all my experiences made me feel capable enough.

For myself, being the baby of a woman who was incapable of helping herself, and for my mom, being the mom who wanted to do it all.

You can’t do it all, and you don’t want someone to do it all for you, so you do what you can, when you can, while still being present.

The Miraclub exists to fill the wellness gap that I survived in, alongside my mom.

It exists to fill the gap you or your Mom likely survived in as well, or your Wife, Sister, Aunt or Daughter.

We have built entire industries around caring for babies.

Classes for babies.

Doctors for babies.

Products for babies.

Sleep consultants for babies.

Yet somewhere along the way, we forgot the woman—that she is healing, that she is lonely, and f*cking exhausted.

That she is grieving the version of herself she left behind while discovering the version she’s becoming.

That she deserves to move her body because it makes her feel alive—not because she’s trying to “bounce back.”

That she deserves friendships that don’t have to be scheduled six weeks in advance and somewhere to go that wasn’t built solely around checking another box off her list.

I’m building the Miraclub because I watched firsthand what happens when a woman slowly disappears while trying to be everything and everywhere for everyone else.

My mom loved us with everything she had, but she never believed she deserved that same love herself.

That isn’t the legacy I want motherhood to leave behind.

The Miraclub is not meant to be another mommy-and-me space.

It isn’t a daycare.

It isn’t a gym.

It isn’t a café.

It isn’t a coworking space.

And it isn’t a wellness studio.

It’s all of those things, woven together with one purpose.

To become the HOME modern motherhood never had.

A place where a mother can drop her baby off with licensed caregivers she trusts, walk 100 feet to strength training or Pilates, meet with her pelvic floor therapist, have coffee with a friend, attend a postpartum support group, work for an hour, get a massage, listen to an expert speak about infant sleep, celebrate another mom’s baby shower, or simply sit in silence without feeling guilty for taking a breath.

A place where children grow up watching their mothers care for themselves.

It isn’t about escaping motherhood—it’s about making motherhood sustainable.

It’s about creating a community where women stop asking permission to care for themselves.

Where wellness isn’t another item on the to-do list: it’s simply part of everyday life.

People have asked me why I’m building this before becoming a mother myself.

The answer is simple.

The Miraclub is for the woman my mother deserved to become and for the woman I hope to become.

It’s for every mother who has ever spent so much time caring for everyone else that she forgot she mattered too.

We’re not just building a club.

We’re rebuilding what motherhood looks like.

I had decided that if my mom could be in the warm, she would heal.

She’d just come out of her second coma and was at a janky rehab center in Wayne, New Jersey. It was mid-December, and I rationalized that in Florida with: warm air, palm trees, her three kids close by whenever we were down there — she’d get a new start.

I landed on Watercrest Living. Mainly because there was a fountain inside, a grand railing to welcome it’s residents, palm trees in every corner, and it was only a five-minute drive from my dad’s. I worked with a woman named Kristi over the phone and got the paperwork done in less than a week. She didn’t want to take her at first — they have a 55-and-over rule, and my mom was only 53.

I made a Notes app list of everything we’d need to order. I called my dad and told him this was the plan. He said he’d be happy to take her to church here and there.

My sister, my friend Amanda, and I flew down with her. She hadn’t been on a plane in over a decade.

I was hopeful when we arrived. The director gave her a warm welcome and toasted her with a beer, and my heart was full at the thought of her having company again.

Then I looked around. The company didn’t look too jolly themselves, and they were far older than she was. Still, I was hopeful.

The aides were kind to her face and probably rough behind it.

She told us they were stealing her clothes. I half-believed her and half didn’t — that was the math we’d been doing for years. Half of what Mom says is true. Half is the tumor talking.

She made one real friend there: a Jamaican aide named Henry. He’d play the radio for her in the mornings and every time I called her for longer than half an hour he seemed to make a guest appearance checking in on her in the background.

She didn’t always pay rent on time. She didn’t always remember she’d been given a one-bedroom we’d furnished in two days. She didn’t always remember she had up and moved down to Naples, Florida.

That first weekend settling her in, Grace and I took her to the beach for a sashimi date. It took us about 45 minutes to get her from the car to the sand — half a mile of boardwalk. Grace disappeared to a hotel across the street to ask to borrow a wheelchair. We clearly hadn’t thought this through.

She came back with no wheelchair, and by then we’d already made most of the way. We set up our little blanket and were laying out the sashimi when Grace and I locked eyes at the sound of thunder.

We burst out laughing. And even more so when Mom looked at us confused what we were laughing at as we both knew she wouldn’t have noticed a small detail like thunder. She was just happy to be spending time with us two.

She lasted a few months in Naples. A hurricane hit. There was a mold problem brewing in her room from the hurricane that was getting worse. She moved to Arizona with Gigi’s help, and the past three months of rent she had owed, got dropped.

I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone what it felt like to set that up alone at 22.

Not because it was hard.

But because it was the moment I crossed a line—the one where you realize you’ve been parenting your own parent, and you can’t remember when it started.

One day, when I’m a mother myself, my kids will get the version of me who learned how to hold a hard conversation, and how to make what felt like life-or-death decisions, at 22.

April 18th, 2021:

There should be a way that we can control our dreams.

1/3 of our lives are spent sleeping.

We might as well remember it.

and your Aunt Lisa too.

Send a simple text— check in on your cousins. You have over a dozen of them.

You haven’t talked to your tennis coach who was a huge part of your life through the most critical years of your life, will you ever see or talk to him again before he dies?

And what about people you’ve wronged? Shouldn’t you reach out to them and make it right?

Are you using the full capacity of your brain, why don’t you download more apps and stick true to learning Italian and German. You’ve built and lost a streak too many times.

There's so many books to read and knowledge to obtain, so many clubs to join and restaurants to try.

For sure join a tennis club and meet more genuine friends.

Go to as many concerts as you can and while you can, build a career for yourself.

Why does it feel like theres so much to be done with so little time?

In actuality, I have a lot of time on my hands.

If you know me, you know this. I wake up, decently early, around 7:30am.

Eat, go to a workout class, come back, eat again, work for an hour or two. Then?? Who knows.

I could go to a sample sale—weather permitting, spend hours with headphones in and no music playing in a thrift store, make a care.com or rover profile to make side money.

Read a bit. Watch a bit. Write a bit.

Sometimes, I nap.

But even with “all the time in the world”, it never feels like you’re doing enough with it.

Somehow it’s the first of the month and rent is due.

Time for a new tube of toothpaste again.

I just bought my entire six-step skincare routine — how is it already gone? Didn’t I just fill up my laundry card and get my yearly check-up?

The older I get, the more I understand what that we don’t have all the time in the world.

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I can’t imagine the feeling that Jesse felt when he woke up in the morning and found the girl he was falling in love with had choked on her own throw up after they shot up together.

Or the girls dad, pulling up to the house and seeing the stretcher to take her lifeless body away.

I can’t imagine that feeling, until I think hard enough about it.

And then I think I might, I think a fraction of that feeling was seeing my mom foaming out of her mouth from seizing. Not being able to do anything about it, playing the game of will she survive this one too?

A seizure every 2 mintues, Status Epilepticus but I doubt she remembers it.

I try to forget, I don’t think about it often.

I’ve realized I’ve done that with a lot of memories, suppressed them to the point of their non existence.

Though now, I want them to exist. I want to feel those sharp and painful memories that choke me up.

And thats why I write, I write to remember.

I also want to remember the good times, the times that make me feel whole and loved and at peace.

I want to remember the softness in my moms voice me Julesy and the way she looked at me with such love and admiration. I want to remember her rarely saying no to me, to a playdate or the next girly trendy outfit/accessory. I want to remember my dad playing mother may I downstairs in the basement with my siblings and whoever was closest running into his arms for a big hug.

I want to remember the easter egg hunts, the anticipated christmas mornings and the first and last day of school.

I want to remember dancing with her at my 8th grade graduation to “summer” by Calvin harris when she could stand, hug me and dance.

I want to remember looking at her after she came home one day after running errands with Nella and seeing her rocking a skinny pair of jeans and giving me an overwhelming feeling of her old self. I want to remember it all and feel it all. I want to re read this and have it trigger these memories, remind me of my blessings.

Remind me of my battles, remind me how far I’ve come.

Even the ones who told me they “liked me back” in middle school and the men I’ve told I loved.

She is the funniest person I have ever met. And not funny in a way that tries to be. Funny in a way that’s just her—witty, scrappy, full of life and sure of the joke.

It just comes out of her and you can’t help but take a beat to appreciate it.

It’s made my brother and I question if she ranks highest amongst the three of us on the funny scale.

In Grace’s most positive light her eyes sparkle and her curls bounce.

Her attention makes you feel chosen just for being near it.

She’s vibrant, kind and calm in a way I wasn’t growing up. Her voice whistles to you like the wind hits on a becoming spring day.

She will recall a memory you wish you hadn’t forgotten for 5+ years because it hits so deep that you’re immediately back in that moment. And will do it in a way that makes you certain it’s lived with her almost everyday. She is thoughtful and intentional.

Her matching light pink workout set reminds me of the summer nights we would chase around lightning bugs on the grass in the front yard. Vibrant but in a calm way, innocent but in a determined way.

In Grace’s most positive light she is sensitive and caring. She will go to the ends of the earth to find a solution to your problem. She’s curious and a quick learner, there’s nothing she can’t grasp and very little she won’t accomplish.

In Graces most positive light I learn what I dislike most about myself. She puts me in check in a way that doesn’t make me feel poorly— instead, in a way that makes me feel hopeful.

She is impossible to be without for too many days and creates a void to fill if some odd hours pass by without talking.

I am dependent on her and our happiness is shared.

The love I have for Grace is deeper than any I could imagine. Though I didn’t always show it in a way that made practical sense.

I hope she knows that in my most positive light — I am her biggest fan.

She is my absolute best friend.

I couldn’t imagine a world where we weren’t sisters, and I’m grateful I won’t have to.

It was where my mom got sick.

It was also where I developed strong friendships with my first real best friends.

Where we got h*gh in the pool shed and came inside to my nana yelling that we’re a disgrace — but making us buffalo chicken dip anyway. Each time we asked for more, we swore it was gaining spice on purpose.

Where my Italian great-great-uncle came over from Italy and my friend Anna got confused with the double kiss and accidentally kissed him on the lips.

Where almost every Friday and Saturday night after a house party we’d order $90 worth of CARS — the local takeout with the junkiest sandwiches and burgers, the kind you could only pay for in cash.

Where my friends and I hid every flavor of Svedka in my dresser before a house party, applying black eyeliner to our bottom lids and throwing on leggings with riding boots and knee socks.

And where they greeted me with a cake in script reading “Vroom vroom baby girl” after I failed my license test knee and 4 shots deep into my surprise pool party.

Where I packed for college with one black and pink suitcase I stole from my mom’s room downstairs — the one that safely kept all her vintage heels.

Where my mom once drove us everywhere from.

Where I came home from college and cried in her arms about how I didn’t like college.

Where I cried the hardest.

Where I felt the hardest.

The day we sold that house was the same day my mom had woken up from her second coma.

She didn’t get the chance to say bye to it. But we thought it was fine — it wouldn’t have felt like a good bye anyway.

We let go of the four walls that held the worst decade of our family at the same time the woman who’d lived inside them was awakening from another unconscious few days upstairs at the hospital.

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My mom in memory care.

My nana terrified she’d fall out of bed and break something else. Terrified she’d wet the sheets and no one would know until the smell soaked up a mornings appetite.

I told nana I’d pick her up, pack her a bag, and monitor her. I told her I’d handle it.

I told her the way I used to tell my mom I’d handle her chemo and pill schedule when I was 14 and didn’t know what either was.

Lying next to her was the same feeling I had at seven when she surprised me at soccer practice with my then best friend in the backseat ready for a sleepover. Love Story by Taylor Swift beamed through the bass.

That same kind of feeling. Tingly. Full.

She woke up at 4am trying to sneak out so she wouldn’t wake me.

I’m the deepest sleeper alive — my roommate last year drilled a hole in our wall once and I slept through it.

But when my mom moved I was wired the second her body shifted.

“Where are you going.”

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Okay let’s go to the bathroom.”

I changed her depends.

Threw out the diaper, watched her smile wide at me through the mirror washing her hands.

Brought her water she wouldn’t drink (in her head it was time for coffee)

I asked if she wanted to go back to bed.

She said no, she was hungry.

I asked what she wanted to eat.

“You’re going to laugh at me but what I’d really like are my Brussel sprouts.”

I slugged into the kitchen at 4:13am, body asleep and eyes wide open, and plated the Brussel sprouts my aunt had made her that evening.

She took one look at them.

“Oh no, I won’t have that. Can you make me some corn flakes.”

I gave her a protein bar instead.

We crawled back into bed and watched mid-Season Three Sex and the City and I looked at her sleeping next to me.

55 tomorrow.

With the softest skin I’ve ever seen on a woman her age. No wrinkles. No pores. All those years of La Mers’ $300 2 oz bottle beaming in the middle of the night.

The whole time I’d been there that trip — washing her hair in the shower with a towel over her eyes while she joked “what am I a baby”, changing her sheets, holding her hand at lunch and observing her every move—I felt closer to myself than I had in months.

There is something about taking care of the person who once took care of you that re-orders every part of you that is scrambled.

I love her.

I love caring for her.

I love being the kind of daughter she raised — the patient one, the kind one, the one who never gets tired of asking what she’d like next, even when she changes her mind three times in a row.

I want to bottle the feeling of that bed at 4am and carry it with me forever.

She doesn’t always remember my address or which friend I’m closest to.

But she remembers everyone in our hometown and the fourth grade gym teacher’s daughters name.

And I embrace her indecision of which ballet flat she wants to slip on, whether she needs her phone charger for a 10 minute walk with her phone on 78% and total lack of care for what time of the day it is or how long we’ve been “ready to go”

Of course as I grew older, what was being said got more controlled. If someone smelt a certain way or made an unfunny joke, I didn’t tell them to their face or pick them last in kickball.

In high school, I’d say it behind their back.

But that’s high school, and that’s where you learn what a filter really is and where it belongs.

But somewhere along the way the lesson got twisted. A filter stopped being something you put between your thoughts and other people.

It became something you put between yourself and your thoughts.

You know what else we did when we were five?

We forgot hurtful words within minutes of them being said.

We didn’t overthink friendships or two-minute interactions months later.

Things came naturally, mostly — unless two moms never understood how the filter works and only wanted their daughters to be with one another.

I didn’t have a filter when my mom asked if I “had fun” at one of those forced playdates, and I said in front of the whole family, “not really, our basement is more fun.” I was reprimanded in the car and told, again, to have a filter.

That was the first time I remember thinking it might’ve been smart to lie. Not because the words felt wrong coming out of my mouth but because of the reaction I got, which made me feel embarrassed.

I didn’t have a filter when my mom stopped the priest outside our church to politely ask, out of “curiosity,” why he takes five minutes to clean the chalice after communion. I knew it bothered her. I knew it bothered everyone. So I beat her to it. “Oh yeah, why do you take so long to—” before her hand grazed my shoulder and she stepped in front of me to demonstrate how to actually ask a question.

This wasn’t the norm in my house. Curse words flew through it as quickly as the seasons passed. I didn’t grow up with a filter because no one around me had one.

Here’s what I think a filter is actually for.

Not filtering means you don’t violate yourself. Your thoughts, your emotions, your judgments. You don’t tweak them to fit the filters someone else has decided are theirs.

The problem is everyone tries to be filtered in exactly the same way, and ends up exactly the same.

It’s why Salomons’ are on every white girl’s foot with a matching Alo set and why guys decide to pick up golf at twenty-five.

It’s not taste, it’s camouflage. And it produces a strange tension — people performing the same self-edit and then wondering why they’re stuck in the same loop.

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I would recount the stories and hardships she went through to stay, and would well up with hope that if she could fight two comas, two brain surgeries, and one too many falls — she too could fight re-learning how to walk again after a broken pelvis and fractured hip within three years of each other.

When she was first diagnosed, at fourteen I was already sparking conversations with holistic doctors before she’d even decided on chemo. I would research, compile, and over-exhaust new findings that could help.

But what I didn’t realize is that it was over before it began.

It was over when her ear doctor told her, so gently, so carefully, that he believed there was a tumor and she needed to see a neurologist. That all the built-up earwax and extreme fatigue was something more than being run down, more than the “Lupus” she told us she had.

She had multiple seizures before the one on the treadmill that rainy September morning. Several times her body tried to tell her something was wrong, and she kept it nonchalant.

After the surgeries — no physical therapy. No talk therapy. A license she refused to revoke until her car flipped upside down in the Wyckoff Starbucks parking lot. Years later, I cried reading the handwritten note from the woman who “went in a one-way” explaining her version of what had happened, and how it ruined her business and her life.

Countless car accidents. Countless falls. Countless times I cried for her to please get help. Countless times I tried.

Her stubbornness kept her here eleven years past what any doctor predicted.

Her stubbornness also kept her from getting better.

I just spent a long time only letting myself see one of them.

You could hear it from upstairs through closed doors, through the “green room” carpet which was really just an awful colored bright green carpet we named the entire room after and through the immediate dance moves we uncontrollably would mimic to eachother.

I was probably seven/eight.

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The “media room” was a wide-screen TV at the bottom of our basement that we called a movie theater — minus the seats, but it had even better. It had the huge blue tie dye waterbed my mom surprised us with on my favorite Christmas morning.

My mom had the kitchen alive with chips & dip, pigs in a blanket and crackers & cheese — the kind of spread that meant we were not eating dinner that night, we were grazing.

I’d peek down the stairs at the men I half-knew.

They wore windbreakers or golf polos in muted colors.

They laughed in a register I’d only ever heard from my dad on Friday nights — louder, lower, less afraid and ever excited.

My mom would float through the kitchen in a slinky black maxi dress and sandals with gems on them, with her dark hair pin straight and her hand around a glass of wine she wasn’t really drinking much of.

She would ask me to grab her something and I’d half skip/half run to get it.

I liked seeing my parents have fun.

Especially together.

That song still plays in my head on a loop without warning — in an Uber, in a CVS, in the gym, at a pregame.

Beautiful day comes with the sight of my dad’s colorful poker chips.

The clink of ice in a cooler filled with beers as we’d run to the downstairs fridge and fill up on “flavor ice”

And my dads face a bit red from his third or maybe seventh beer.

It comes with the feeling of not knowing that you could love a song because of who was truly alive when it played for the first ten times and how it can still bring back that same feeling twenty years later.

I wrote it myself.

“Heads she lives, tails she doesn’t” was the very first line.

It was good — really good.

The tutor that every Bergen County kid went to, the one who basically ghost-wrote everyone else’s, fixed maybe one to two sentences of grammar.

That’s it.

She then charged me $300 and when she went to cash the check I cried to my mom to write her— it bounced.

And I’m happy it did.

The rest was mine.

I wish I still had it, I’ve searched high and low for it throughout the years.

I wonder who read it and decided to accept me.

It was more than about a coin flip.

What started off as a detailed description of my brother and me in the living room the morning of my mom’s first surgery bled into everything she meant to me beforehand—which meant way more than a 50/50 yes or no to the meaning of her life.

It was a six hour long emergency brain surgery and at 3am, Dr. Fox was on call by the grace of God to perform it.

What do you do with information you don’t understand?

At fourteen it’s likely you play an odds game, I did it with most hefty decisions I would ultimately have no control over as a seven year old kid.

If I get to the trampoline in 100 steps my parents won’t divorce.

Still at an older age, we were just that desperate for something to hold onto, even if the something was a coin.

In my homeroom teachers handwritten note to me opened at my 8th grade graduation she wrote “you were thrown a curveball and you hit it out of the park”

I didn’t quite grasp the gravity of her analogy at 14, I just remember it made me tear up reading it.

But I did when I was 18, writing my college essay.

The curveball was more than a cancer diagnosis, it was watching a new person develop in front of my eyes. It was the weight of a coin flip to determine an outcome of something unimaginable only a day prior, and what the two odds would soon signify.

The odds of heads turned into the days where would laugh and reminisce together. Where she could still walk and even drive.

The odds of tails turned into the days where an ambulance was called and my hand would rest in hers overnight at valley hospital.

I was recently thinking back to a time where I went to a friends older sisters Fordham soccer match, the parents drove us in and the entire time I anxiously checked the time as it didn’t seem likely I’d make it back for my 5pm European wax center eyebrow appointment.

I remember the parents asking if it was okay to move the appointment so we can all have dinner after, I don’t remember exactly my response— only that I made the appointment.

And we didn’t get dinner.

And that they likely, could see the struggle of a fourteen year old not being able to control anything beyond getting her eyebrows done at the time she intended.

The curveball hadn’t even made it’s way around the corner at the time she wrote it to me, it had just struck the bat.

In my high school years I braced for impact and in college the sprint began.

This was nearly ten years ago that I wrote my college essay— and I finally feel, at 26, that I have all my bases covered.

I never want to see them again.

I am one of the most confident people I know.

I circle my pores the moment I wake up.

I want to be alone with my thoughts and feel them.

I spent all last year partying until the sun rose with strangers.

I am so grateful for everything I possess.

I show up late to every girls night because I can’t land on what to wear.

I love the way my body looks in a skin tight silk dress.

I get daily ads for cool sculpting to freeze the fat on my hips.

I want to accomplish everything I’ve ever dreamed of.

I struggle to finish this thought.

I spent every day for three months trying to get my Instagram back.

I’ve logged in twice since.

I love my sister so much it physically hurts.

I need distance from her to breathe.

I think about what I’d say at my mom’s funeral.

I can’t imagine never hearing her call me Jules again.

Was a phrase I traced with my fingers as tears fell onto the paper.

I’ll never forget reading it — in part because I don’t think she’s ever written me a note.

But mostly because of how it made me feel then and does to this day.

She starts with a quote.

“Life isn’t measured by the amount of breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”

Then she unquotes it and finishes it herself.

“I’ll never forget it was you who squeezed my hand and brought life back into me, so I was able to breathe freely again.”

I’ve contemplated this for years.

Did she mean when she woke up from her coma and Thomas was the only one there? When he was fifteen years old sitting next to her watching Seinfeld and she just — came back.

Or did she mean when he was first born and squeezed her hand for the very first time.

I think it’s likely, both.

I recently developed tapes from an old tape recorder that collected dust in my dads guest room in Florida.

I watched them on repeat for a whole two days— pausing, clipping, rewinding and crying over hearing her voice and mimicking her smile at the same age as me.

We look identical, I always have been told that.

But I never saw it the same way I did rewatching those tapes. Seeing her expressions, reactions and sighs— the same ones I’ve watched back of myself in the countless videos I take when nannying.

I never saw the way she held us on her hip.

Or the way she held my hands together as she kissed my cheeks.

I never saw the way she reacted to Thomas running her over Tupperware as she breastfed me like he had been delivering her diamonds in what seemed to be a routine nighttime game.

I never saw her being the mom of two babies under 1 year—beaming over sneezes, side eyes and smiles shared between my brother and I.

She poured every ounce of love and energy into the three of us.

And was the best to do it — because when I think of her I can hear her calling me Jules.

Without needing to replay the tape.

My shoulders drop a bit and I too can breathe freely again.

I met him only three weeks ago at a house party on a Friday. We spent the entire time together, and he took me out to dinner that Sunday.

I’ve never laughed so much during a first date; his energy was contagious.However, because he’s three years younger, I didn’t take it too seriously.

I thought to myself, “Okay, this could be great and fun for a little while until I meet the one.”

I had been gearing up towards meeting someone special. I began dating intentionally and finally understood what I wanted and deserved through realizing what I didn’t.

I wasn’t looking or seeking; I was more so accepting it while rejecting most.

I was ten toes down and knew it would take someone entirely unlike the others I’ve met to lift them.

That’s a good feeling, by the way—upping and actually sticking to the high standards I have. I never properly promised myself that before, as my prior boyfriends (or those I saw consistently) were pretty much all awful.

I made a rule to myself going into this new year: not to sleep with anyone new unless I could see it going somewhere long-term.

As I held myself accountable to my roommates regarding this New Year’s resolution, we rationalized that prior hookups, or * ONE exceptional “okay, this could be consistent and fun and not serious” situation, was within the rulebook I would soon not need.

So I waited. As I waited, I grew impatient—but not to sleep with him.

I was impatient to get to know him and for him to get to know me.

Our second “date” was the very first day after our first, at Blue Dove coffee shop in Soho.

The photo of me on the cover was taken during a lunch break he took to meet me for 15 minutes. He met my best friend, Julia, and shortly after he left, we joked that I looked in love with him in the picture as I showed her his sunglasses, complimenting how well they suit his personality.

We began spending lots of time together that first week.

We met up at WSP under the arch to head to his tennis club together for an 8:00 PM court time, followed by Sugarfish for a 10:00 PM dinner and a midnight, 20-minute walk home opposite his way. So he could leave me safe, with a kiss, and with 20 minutes more of information and conversation to be shared.

The questions I began asking him shifted from “You’re not someone I could take seriously” to “If this feeling is what I believe it is, then I could see myself truly with you.”

He had a dinner party with his friends at their rented Airbnb in Greenwich Village that first weekend.

His friend asked me how I felt about him the second I sat down, though we had only met about one week prior.

I replied by holding my hands up to my chest, forming a heart while tilting my head and smiling.

I was half-joking, but as I held them up, it hit me that I really was only half-joking.

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One of them leaves with a contact, a plan, and that electric feeling of something is about to happen. The other leaves early, annoyed, convinced it wasn’t their scene (though they decided this before they walked through the door.)

In the same room

With the same people

Crowding around the same open bar

and likely attending from the same invitation.

I’ve been both of those people. I know exactly what the difference is and it has nothing to do with luck — though I used to call it that.

It’s what you walked in looking for.

Not in a manifesting, vision-board, love-and-light way — something more wired than that.

Your brain is constantly scanning every room you walk into and filtering out everything that doesn’t match what you’ve already decided is true. If you walked in convinced tonight wasn’t going to be your night, your brain found every piece of evidence to prove it right.

The people who didn’t wave/smile back.

The conversation that died before it started.

The agonizing sight of the choice of your sock color that slighly shows in a very specific (likely only from your) angle which everyone is staring at and judging.

If you walked in open — actually open, not performing open — you caught the cracked doors.

The kindness, laughs, and ultimate company email shared from an editor of the New York times after assisting their team with a scavenger hunt for bring your kids to work day.

The server who own a staffing company half the price and twice as nice as every vendor you'd exhausted over the past month searching for your new bosses pop-up.

The same boss you signed as talent in your previous role, offering to accompany her to Vogue's annual vintage pop-up market, and who, within ten minutes of talking, had essentially offered you a job.

I think about this a lot living in New York, going to events weekly, working in a world built entirely on who you know and who knows you.

The most connected people I’ve met aren’t the loudest or the best looking or with the highest impressions on Instagram. They’re the ones who walk into rooms like something good is about to happen to them.

And then it does.

That’s not luck it’s architecture. You built that reality before you even walked through the door.

And you’re building tomorrow’s right now with whatever you’re choosing to focus on today.

The ones I’ve come across dating in NYC who do cheat are, almost without exception, insecure losers.

I’ve been cheated on in nearly every relationship I’ve been in and spent a long time thinking it was my fault. Then I dated enough different types of men to finally see the pattern clearly.

You either get older or you grow older. It’s very easy to spot the two.

The ones who got older are texting 22 year olds with a wife and two kids at home. Sometimes even paying them for a conversation.

Or

Cheating on their fiancée of eight years with the neighbor — passing that information along within the first five minutes of meeting me to set the precedence for how serious I should take that commitment.

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Thank you for allowing me to grow, thank you for guiding me while doing so.

Thank you for quietly championing me, calling me a winner at 20 and telling me you’ll never have to worry much about me.

Unknowingly, you instilled traits in me you knew were there and set them up for success when I would be ready.

Thats not to say you didn’t test me along the way.

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You tested my ability to take life into my own hands and see what i can do with it, only to back me when I failed.

You tested my faith by proving how well your life can go when you stay true to yours.

You tested my patience as I watched you grow through the heartache of watching the woman you once loved and created a family with slowly dissipate.

You tested the version of me that I always knew existed, but wasn’t sure of how to bring her out as you encourage me to pursue my dream of creating, publishing, storytelling.

You’ve both silently and loudly backed me, I recall all the times you listened to me rant about how Thomas and I’s company can take off and explaining to you business tactics you’ve not only known since you’re half your age but mastered by mine.

You’ve become a person I admire and aspire to be.

You are the same comfort now that you were as you sung me “ my little julia” song and I thank you for showing me the world through the lense you do.