At 7:00 AM Monday morning, my phone rang.

I was still sound asleep, but as soon as I saw my cousin’s name on the screen, I knew I had to answer. My heart was in my throat before I even answered.

He had just gotten home after spending the weekend down at the Jersey shore, a staple in my family, and had stopped at my grandparents’ house to drop off the fudge he brought back for my mom mom. I am not sure if he woke my aunt up or if she had already just gotten up and I’m not really sure that detail matters anyway. But it’s important to understand that my aunt had slept on the floor next to my mom mom’s bed in the back room of their house every night since she had come home from the hospital a few weeks earlier. She wanted to be close to her in case she needed anything in the middle of the night. It was also the shortest path to a bathroom when she needed it.

On Monday morning, my aunt woke up. My mom mom didn’t.

There are moments in life when your brain seems to understand what is happening before the rest of your body is willing to accept it. I don’t remember exactly what my cousin said after that. I don’t know if he had even finished saying it before I was out of bed, hysterical. For some reason I ran into my bathroom, screaming through a flood of tears that had started pouring out of my eyes.

“No. No. No. No she didn’t. I just talked to her yesterday. She sounded good.”

And then I started screaming fuck. Over and over again.

I wasn’t thinking about whether it was an appropriate word for the moment. I wasn’t thinking about anything. It was as if my body needed somewhere to put the shock, and that was the only word big enough to hold it.

Because I had just talked to her yesterday.

On Sunday afternoon, I was sitting in chair in my pool reading a book. It was a beautiful day, the kind that makes you want to stay outside just a little longer, and I thought about my mom mom.

She never swam. She was afraid of drowning. But she loved sitting in her lounge chair at the community pool with a great book to read. Danielle Steel was her favorite, and I don’t think there was a single book that woman wrote that my mom mom didn’t read cover to cover s soon as it hit the shelves.

Something in my gut was pulling at me to call me. So I did.

The moment she answered, I could hear something in her voice that I hadn’t heard in a while.

“Oh, hey, there you are. It’s been a while since I’ve heard you sound like yourself.”

She told me she was feeling better. The swelling in her legs from all the fluid she had been retaining had started to go down. We talked for a little while about nothing particularly important. It was one of those ordinary conversations we have with the people we love because we assume there will be hundreds more of them.

I told her I would check in again soon.

She told me she loved me.

I told her I loved her too.

We hung up.

I can still hear her saying, “I love you hun,” on repeat in my head as I write this.

There was no pause afterward. No strange feeling in my stomach. No voice telling me to call her back and say something more. I didn’t memorize the sound of her voice or ask her questions I had wanted to ask. I didn’t tell her everything she had meant to me or thank her for all the ways she had shaped my life.

Why would I?

I knew in my heart that she was aging and had been slowly declining for years. But I had convinced myself that when the time came, losing her would be a slow process. There would be a moment when it was just the two of us, and I could tell her what a profound impact she had on my life.

Twenty-four hours later, she was gone.

As you’re reading this Friday morning, I’m somewhere on the road to New Jersey. I’m on my way to my mom mom’s funeral, trying to understand how I went from sitting in a pool talking to her on Sunday afternoon to driving to say my last goodbye five days later.

I’m going to stand beside my family and watch my Pop Pop say goodbye to the woman he has loved for 63 years. Sixty-three years of building a life beside another person, and then somehow waking up one morning and having to figure out how to live in that same life without them.

I’m going to have to say goodbye too.

And I don’t want to.

Not yet.

Maybe that’s why the emotion I keep returning to isn’t only sadness.

I’m angry.

Really angry.

I’m angry at the doctors. I’m angry that they put a defibrillator in her heart and when we needed it to save her, it didn’t. I’m angry that she had been through so much and had finally come home. I’m angry that the swelling seemed to be going down. I’m angry that she sounded like herself on Sunday afternoon. I’m angry that for one stupid, hopeful moment, I believed all of those things meant we were getting her back and had more time.

I’ve spent the past few days looking for somewhere to put that anger. Doctors are an easy place. Medical devices are an easy place. Circumstances and timing and the incredible unfairness of death are easy places.

But grief has a way of stripping away all the places we hide.

Because underneath all of it is another truth I don’t particularly want to admit.

I’m the most angry with myself.

I thought I had more time.

There were things I wanted to tell my mom mom. Things I always assumed I eventually would. I knew intellectually that she wasn’t going to live forever, but knowing someone won’t live forever and believing they might actually leave you are two very different things. Somewhere in my mind, I had written an ending for us.

I would tell her how much she meant to me. I would tell her what an enormous part of my childhood she was. I would thank her for every time she and my Pop Pop stepped in without hesitation when I needed them.

I would tell her that when I look at the woman I became, I can find pieces of her everywhere. I just thought I would tell her later.

Life has a funny way of making later feel guaranteed.

As I got older, life got bigger. I grew up. I moved away. I got married and built a career and had children. Life filled itself with all the things life fills itself with. Work and school and softball games and appointments and laundry and dinners and holidays and schedules and all the small things that feel incredibly important while we’re living them.

The calls became fewer and farther between. Visits became attached to holidays, birthdays and special occasions. I didn’t stop loving her. I didn’t stop thinking about her. I simply stopped making as much space for her.

That sentence hurts deeply to write.

Because this was a woman who had made space for me my entire life.

She was woven through my childhood so completely that sometimes I don’t even recognize something came from her until I stop long enough to look.

I can still picture her sitting in her recliner with a book nearby, her nails always polished some perfectly neutral shade. Nothing bright or flashy. Just neat, manicured hands with a soft neutral polish. I have carried that into adulthood without ever really thinking about why. Look at my hands on almost any given day and you’ll find the same thing.

She was incredible with finances, another trait I know I got from her. She loved Disney, Tweety Bird, and Elvis Presley. She had a love of sweets that mostly skipped me and landed directly in Bella, although she and I shared a weakness for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup sundaes from Friendly’s. Although she didn’t like to fly, she loved a long road trip across the country. We all know how passionate I am about travel too. And while we preferred different genres, we shared a love of country music.

She didn’t swim, but she loved sitting by the pool and the ocean, which makes it feel even more meaningful to me now that our last conversation happened while I was sitting in the water.

But most of all she loved to read.

Which makes this next part particularly hard for me.

She was excited about the release of my book.

She was supposed to get a copy.

I had imagined handing it to her. I don’t know exactly when I started carrying that little scene around in my head, but I did. My mom mom, who spent so much of her life with books in her hands, would eventually hold mine.

I thought I had time for that too.

Now she never will.

There are probably people reading this who want to tell me not to do this to myself. She knew you loved her. You were a good granddaughter. You had decades together. Life gets busy. You can’t possibly know when the last conversation will be the last conversation.

I know.

If you were sitting across from me telling me this story about someone you loved, I know exactly what I would say to you.

I just can’t seem to say it to myself yet.

Maybe that’s another strange thing about grief. We can understand something rationally and still feel something entirely different. We can know we were loved and still wish we had loved better. We can know we couldn’t have predicted the ending and still replay every choice that came before it. We can be profoundly grateful for the years we had and absolutely furious that there weren’t more.

Grief doesn’t seem particularly interested in consistency.

Over the past few days, I have laughed until suddenly I was crying. I have looked through pictures that made me smile and that sat in a puddle of tears because somehow 82 years of a full life had culminated in one poster board of photographs. We’ve told stories and made plans and figured out details because death somehow arrives with an administrative checklist even when your heart has stopped functioning normally.

One minute I feel almost like myself.

The next, I remember, she’s gone, and an emptiness follows that I don’t know how to explain yet.

I think maybe part of what makes grief so enormous is that we aren’t only grieving the person who existed. We’re grieving all the moments with them that now never will.

The next Christmas. The next birthday. The next phone call. The next afternoon by the pool. The question you never thought to ask. The story you wanted to hear one more time. The book you thought they would hold.

The conversation you were saving for later.

Maybe that is why loss has a way of making us inventory our lives. Not because every death needs to become a lesson, but because suddenly we can see how casually we spend something we can never get back.

Time.

We know people die. We know parents get older. We know grandparents won’t be here forever. We know there are no guarantees that the person we say goodbye to today will be there tomorrow.

We know all of it.

And still, we live as though there will always be a soon.

I’ll call soon. I’ll visit soon. We’ll talk about that someday. I’ll tell her when I see her.

There will be another holiday. Another summer. Another conversation.

Until there isn’t.

I don’t know what grief is supposed to teach me yet. Maybe that’s because I’m too close to it. Right now I don’t want to package my mom mom’s death into some beautiful lesson about appreciating the people we love. I don’t want to rush toward acceptance because acceptance makes for a more comfortable ending.

I am not comfortable.

I’m devastated. I’m angry. I have regrets. I miss her.

And as you read this, I’m on my way to do something every part of me wishes I didn’t have to do.

Say goodbye.

Maybe someday I’ll be able to forgive myself for all the ordinary days when I assumed there would be another one. Maybe someday the guilt will soften and leave behind only gratitude. Maybe someday I’ll hold my book in my hands and feel her there instead of thinking about the hands that were supposed to hold it.

But not yet.

Today, I wish I could call her one more time.

Not because I have some profound speech prepared now that she’s gone.

I just want her to answer.

I want to hear her voice. “Hi, hun” she’d say every time.

I want to say, “Oh, hey. There you are.”

And this time, before we hang up, I want to tell her everything.

Everything I thought I still had time to say.

This, my friends, is the real messy middle of life.

See you next Friday,

Mel 🤍

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I lived in that house for the first five years of my life, but even after we moved out so much of my childhood happened there. I know every room. I can picture myself there at five years old playing in the backyard on the swing set just as easily as I can see myself there now at forty.

But this time, I was bracing myself for the what I might see sitting in the recliner on the other side of the door. The same chair my Mom Mom has sat in, ticked into the corner between the front and side windows, since I was a child.

Two days before we left for Hawaii, I got a call that they thought she had suffered a massive heart attack. Her heart had completely stopped. She wasn’t home when it happened and by some incredible stroke of luck, there were retired firefighters nearby who immediately started CPR. Had she been home alone, had they not been there, had any one of those circumstances been different, I don’t know that I would have been walking through that door to see her.

But there she was.

My Mom Mom has always been fiercely strong in my eyes. She was stubborn and opinionated. She never held back what she was thinking. She was never overly affectionate and yet I always knew she loved me. The kind of woman who takes care of herself and doesn’t need anyone fussing over her. And now she was sitting in that chair, scared.

Scared that she couldn’t take care of herself anymore. Scared about what came next. I saw a vulnerability in her that I never had before. Maybe it had always been there, and this was just the first time she let her walls down enough for me to see it.

I sat there looking at her, in the same spot where I had looked at her thousands of times throughout my life, except now I was forty and she was getting older and neither one of us could do a damn thing about it. I left that house with a feeling I haven’t been able to shake.

But if I’m being truthful, I think that feeling started before I ever walked through her door.

It started in Hawaii.

Toward the end of our trip, John and I managed to sneak away for a few hours. My mom took the kids to the pool, and we went to a nice restaurant for dinner the night before his birthday.

It was one of those nights you wish you could stretch out a little longer. The food was delicious. The vibe was great. We were in Hawaii, for God’s sake. We were sitting across from each other without someone asking us to cut their food or telling us they needed to go to the bathroom.

The waiter had just come over to collect our empty dinner plates when John looked at me and said something I haven’t stopped thinking about since.

“This time next year, I’ll be fifty. And it’s really hitting me that more than half of my life will have already gone by and I’ll be closer to death than being young.”

Jesus.

Happy birthday.

We laughed a little because what the hell else are you supposed to do with that over dinner in Hawaii?

But I haven’t let it go.

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We spend so much of our lives assuming there will be time later. Keep reading for what this week made me realize abut getting older…

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It’s Thursday. I just got home from Hawaii. My body has absolutely no idea what time it is. My brain feels like it’s operating somewhere between Maui and Philadelphia, and despite repeatedly explaining to myself that we are now six hours ahead, I apparently cannot convince the rest of my body to get on board.

I’m exhausted. I’m foggy. I have approximately zero motivation to write anything profound and I don’t want to let my readers down. So, that’s where I’m at.

But there’s a story from Hawaii that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Actually, there are a few stories, and when I started putting them together, I realized maybe this is exactly what I’m supposed to write about this week.

I believe there are angels all around us.

I know that sentence will mean different things to different people. Maybe you believe in angels. Maybe you believe the people we love stay with us after they’re gone. Maybe you believe in God, the universe, energy, intuition, coincidence, divine timing, or absolutely none of the above.

That’s okay.

I’m not here to convince you of anything. I’m just asking you to pay attention. Because sometimes I think we’re so busy looking for proof that we miss what’s right in front of us.

Years ago, when John and I had just started dating, I was sleeping at his house when something woke me up in the middle of the night.

Someone was pulling on my big toe.

Not kidding.

I shot straight up in bed and looked toward the foot of it. Standing there, or at least what my half-asleep brain believed was standing there, was the shadow of a tall man.

I was fucking horrified.

I woke John out of a dead sleep and told him someone had just pulled my toe and that I swore I had seen a man standing at the edge of the bed.

John barely hesitated.

“It was probably my dad.”

His father had passed away only a few short years before. He proceeded to tell me something I didn’t know.

When John was growing up, his dad used to wake him in the morning by pulling on his big toe.

Well. Great.

Very sweet, sir. Nice to meet you. Perhaps next time we could do this during daylight hours.

It never happened again. Not once. Until Hawaii…

All these years later, I woke up on our vacation because I could feel someone pulling on my big toe. Another night, it felt like someone was tickling my feet.

And this time, I wasn’t scared.

When John woke up the next morning, I told him what had happened. We looked at each other, smiled, and said it at almost exactly the same time.

“Your dad.”

“My dad.”

There was something comforting about it. Like an old inside joke between people who aren’t technically supposed to be able to have inside jokes anymore.

And maybe I could have left it there.

Except then we got on a boat…

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We’re on our way to Maui. A trip that has been ten years in the making.

It’s funny how perspective works. Sometimes you have to get 35,000 feet away from something before you can finally see it clearly.

My dad has wanted to go to Hawaii for as long as I can remember. Every year around his birthday he’d make the same joke. “I want to see the hula girls before I die.” We’d laugh, tell him we’d get there someday, and then life would get in the way.

When he turned fifty, John and I hadn’t even been married for a year. We were expecting our first baby, trying to move into our first home, and working as hard as we could to build careers and a future. Then Roe decided she wasn’t interested in waiting another four weeks and arrived two days before my dad’s birthday.

Hawaii would have to wait. The next year there was another reason. Then another. And another.

Isn’t that how life goes? We convince ourselves there will always be another year. Another opportunity. Another chance to do the things we’ve been talking about forever. And in the midst of those ten years, my dad quietly put his own life on hold.

When Roe was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, he came to Pennsylvania and spent every week Qliving at our house. We were terrified. We barely knew how to keep our three-year-old alive, let alone leave her with anyone else. He learned alongside us. Blood sugar checks. Carb counts. Insulin. Middle-of-the-night alarms. The endless mental math that became part of our daily lives overnight.

When Roe started school, he was the one sitting with teachers and nurses, helping them understand how to care for her. He showed up every time we needed him without ever making it feel like a sacrifice. Part of it was because she’s his granddaughter. The other part was because he wanted me to keep chasing my dreams.

He gave us something you can never get back. His time. So this year felt different. It felt like it was finally our turn.

I spent months planning every detail of this trip. I researched hotels, compared excursions, watched airfare, built itineraries, and saved every extra dollar I could. I wanted this to be more than a vacation. I wanted it to be a thank you to the man who had spent years making sure I never had to choose between being a mom and chasing the life I wanted to build.

And then Saturday morning finally arrived.

Suitcases were lined up by the garage door. The girls were buzzing with excitement. Our ride to the airport was only minutes away.

I ran upstairs to grab one last thing.

Then I heard screaming.

Not the kind of crying that happens when sisters argue or someone doesn’t get their way. It was the kind of scream that makes your heart stop before your brain has time to catch up. I flew down the stairs so fast I honestly don’t remember touching every step.

Bella was on the kitchen floor.

Paisley, our sweet golden retriever, was backing away with that guilty look dogs somehow master without saying a word. And blood was pouring down Bella’s face. For one terrifying moment, I couldn’t even tell where it was coming from.

As quickly as Bella had fallen from the kitchen stool, Paisley had jumped to get out of the way. One of her nails caught Bella across the face at exactly the wrong moment.

The bleeding stopped within a minute. The scratch was another story.

It started near the middle of her forehead, crossed the bridge of her nose, and looked so much worse than I wanted to believe. We grabbed ice packs, Neosporin and bandages. I cleaned it as gently as I could while trying not to let Bella see the panic written all over my face.

My mind was already racing.

Do we still go?

Do I cancel the trip?

Should John take everyone without me?

What if she needs stitches?

What if this leaves a scar?

How could I have walked upstairs and left her alone for even a minute?

By the time our ride pulled into the driveway, Bella was smiling. She climbed into the van with a brown bandage running straight down the middle of her forehead and over the bridge of her nose like nothing had happened.

She was excited and I was unraveling.

The entire drive to the airport my stomach was in knots. On the plane I couldn’t stop looking at her face. I kept imagining what would happen when we took the bandage off. I convinced myself the bruise was going to spread. That the cut was deeper than I thought. That I should have taken her to the emergency room before we ever boarded the flight.

She played Roblox. She laughed. She talked about Disneyland.

I sat right beside her, but mentally I was somewhere else.

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The moment we landed in California, I barely let our driver finish loading the luggage before asking if we could stop at a pharmacy.

I rushed through the aisles grabbing everything that looked remotely helpful. Waterproof bandages. Antiseptic. Liquid bandage. Second skin. If there was something that might help her heal faster, I had it in my hands.

Back at the hotel, John carefully cleaned the scratch, applied everything I had just bought, and waited. I couldn’t even bring myself to look at first.

And do you know what happened? Nothing. She smiled and asked if we could go swimming.

An hour later she was splashing in the pool with Roe. She was all giggles and couldn’t wait to show me her underwater “routine.”

The next morning we spent the entire day at Disneyland. She raced from ride to ride, hugged every character she could find, and proudly showed everyone her “battle wound.” Each night we changed the bandage and each morning the scratch looked a little better.

Life kept moving. So did she. And somewhere along the way, I realized I was the only one still living inside that moment in my kitchen.

Now here I am. Thirty-five thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean.

My dad is finally on his way to the place he’s dreamed about for ten years. Bella is excitedly talking about swimming sea turtles and meeting the real Stitch & Angel. The scratch that consumed my thoughts for hours is already fading. And all I can think about is how much of the beginning of this trip I almost missed.

Not because of what happened. But because of the story I told myself after it happened. I had convinced myself that if I worried enough, I could somehow protect her. That if I imagined every possible outcome, I would be prepared for whatever came next. That if I stared at her face with the brown Bandaid on it long enough, the wound would miraculously heal itself before we ever even landed.

But that’s the funny thing about catastrophizing.

It tricks us into believing we’re solving a problem when we’re really just sacrificing the present to a future that may never come.

How often do we do that?

We replay conversations before they happen. We mourn endings that haven’t arrived. We carry tomorrow’s fears into today’s joys until we can’t fully experience either one.

Sometimes preparation is wise and caution is necessary. But sometimes fear disguises itself as responsibility, and we mistake anxiety for love.

The truth is, Bella didn’t need me to spend hours imagining the worst. She needed me to clean her wound, hold her hand, kiss her forehead, and then go make memories with her.

Maybe that’s true for more of life than we’d like to admit.

There will always be reasons to worry. There will always be things we can’t control. There will always be another “what if” waiting just around the corner.

But if we’re not careful, we’ll spend so much time preparing for the worst that we forget to experience the best.

This trip has been ten years in the making. I don’t want to remember it through the lens of fear. I want to remember my dad seeing Hawaii for the first time. The girls laughing in the ocean. John beside me. The sunsets. The memories we’ll tell for years after we get home.

So for the next week, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

I’m going to put down my phone.

Close my laptop.

Be fully present with the people I love most in this world.

Because not every worst-case scenario deserves our best moments.

See you next Friday.

Mel 🤍

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Hope.

I hope people like it. I hope the book is received well. I hope people continue reading MelThinks. I hope they understand what I am trying to create. I hope businesses want to work with me. I hope all these pieces somehow come together the way I can already see them coming together in my mind.

I hope. I hope. I hope.

Hope is a beautiful thing. It has carried me through some of the most uncertain chapters of my life. It has kept me moving when I could not see the outcome and reminded me that possibility still existed when very little felt certain.

But lately, I have started to wonder if I am always talking about hope because hope feels safer than belief.

Hope allows me to want something without fully claiming it. It lets me tell you about the dream while leaving myself an escape route if it does not work. If I say I hope people will like what I am building, I never have to say the much scarier thing: I believe in what I am building. I believe it matters. I believe I can help people. I believe it deserves to take up space in the world.

Those words feel different when I write them. They feel heavier. More exposed. Almost arrogant, if I am being completely honest, although I know they should not.

There is a yellow Post-it taped to the monitor on my desk. In black marker, I wrote two words: Be uncomfortable.

I put it there after a conversation with my executive coach in January. She told me to choose a word that would become my grounding point for the year. I chose uncomfortable, and turned it into an instruction.

I look at that note almost every day and remind myself that discomfort is often evidence that I am growing. Saying “I believe” is uncomfortable. Believing in myself is uncomfortable. Talking openly about what I am building, asking people to join it, and admitting how much I want it to succeed are all deeply uncomfortable.

I have spent most of my life believing that ambition should be softened. You can work hard, but do not talk too much about what you want. You can be proud, but not so proud that anyone thinks you believe you are special. You can dream, but make sure you laugh a little when you say the dream out loud so everyone knows you understand how unlikely it is.

I learned that from my dad. Always be humble. And if he ever thought my head was getting a little too big, do not worry, he would bring me right back down to earth.

Humility was the goal. But somewhere along the way, humility started to look a lot like hiding.

When I launched MelThinks, calling it a hobby made it easier to explain. I was writing because I loved it. I was working through my own experiences on the page. I was finding my voice after leaving the version of my life I had known for years. There was no pressure in calling it a hobby because hobbies are allowed to remain small. They do not need a business plan or a growth strategy. They do not require you to ask people to subscribe, share your work, hire you, buy your book, or believe in a vision that does not fully exist yet.

But this has never felt like a hobby to me.

I pour my soul into these stories. They are therapy for me, but they are also something more. Every time I tell the truth about the parts of my life I would rather hide, I hope someone else feels permission to tell the truth about theirs. Every time I write about fear, motherhood, leadership, marriage, reinvention, failure, faith, or the strange in-between space where an old life has ended but a new one has not fully begun, I am trying to help someone feel less alone inside their own messy middle.

That is not casual to me. It is not something I do to pass the time.

It is the heartbeat of everything I am building.

This is the moment when hope has to become action, for me and perhaps for you, too. If you want to read the rest of this story and be part of the community we are building in the messy middle, become a paid subscriber to continue.

For years, I helped people navigate change from inside companies. I built teams, guided leaders, untangled complicated organizations, and stood beside people through mergers, growth, uncertainty, and transformation. I loved that work because I could see what others sometimes could not. I could walk into the middle of something messy and begin imagining what it could become.

I am still doing that work. I still want to help companies grow and help leaders build organizations where people can do the best work of their lives. That part of me has not disappeared.

I have simply realized that the room can be much bigger.

What if I took everything I learned about helping people navigate change and brought it beyond the walls of one company? What if I put it on the page, built a framework around it, wrote a book about it, and created a community where people could come when they were trying to make sense of what was ending and decide what they wanted to build next?

For a while, even I treated those things as separate projects. There was the writing. There was the book. There was the MELT Method. There was the consulting. There were all these different ideas fighting for space in an already full life.

But they are not disconnected. They are all expressions of the same thing.

MelThinks is the heartbeat. It is the place where we tell the truth about life in the messy middle and remind one another that we are not the only ones still figuring it out. The MELT Method is the transformation. It is how we meet ourselves honestly, examine what shaped us, let go of what no longer fits, and transform with intention. My consulting work brings that same thinking into businesses, helping people and organizations navigate growth without losing themselves along the way. The book will carry the message farther than I ever could on my own.

I am building something that helps people navigate life and business through change.

There. I said it without following it with “I hope.”

The truth is, I do hope it reaches millions of people. I hope the book sits on nightstands instead of ending up in a discount bin. I hope MelThinks becomes a community people turn to when they feel lost, stuck, or alone. I hope leaders call me when the business they built is growing faster than the organization holding it together. I hope MELT becomes something people use to change their lives.

But hope cannot be the whole strategy.

At some point, I have to behave like I believe in the thing I am building. I have to stop whispering about it, stop waiting for someone else to validate it, and stop pretending I do not care how far it goes. I have to ask people to read, subscribe, share, hire me, and come build this community with me.

That is the part no one tells you about pursuing something meaningful. The work itself is not always the scariest part. Sometimes the scariest part is allowing yourself to be seen wanting it.

Because once you say what you want out loud, people can judge it. They can think you are doing too much. They can roll their eyes at your ambition. They can watch you try and see it fail. They can decide you are too vulnerable, too promotional, too confident, or simply too much.

So we protect ourselves. We call the business a side project. We call the writing a hobby. We say we are “just trying something.” We shrink the dream before anyone else has the chance to shrink it for us.

Maybe you do it, too.

Maybe there is something you have been quietly building while pretending it does not matter that much. Maybe there is a story you have rewritten a hundred times but still cannot bring yourself to publish. Maybe there is a potential client you know you can help, but you keep waiting for them to come to you because asking for the sale feels too bold. Maybe there is a job you want, a business you want to start, a relationship you need to leave, a boundary you need to set, or a version of yourself you are desperate to become.

Maybe you keep hoping someone will notice. Hoping someone will ask. Hoping someone will tell you that you are ready, qualified, talented, brave, or allowed.

No one is coming with the permission slip.

I wish they were. I wish there were a moment when someone knocked on the door and handed us official confirmation that the dream was worth pursuing. I wish there were guarantees that the risk would pay off, the work would be received, and no one would misunderstand us along the way.

But transformation does not begin when the fear disappears. It begins when we stop letting fear make every decision.

That thing you are afraid to do? Go do it.

That story you are scared to write? Go write it. That potential client you are afraid to ask for the sale? Go ask. That opportunity you keep convincing yourself you are not ready for? Apply. That conversation you have rehearsed a hundred times? Have it. That dream you keep shrinking because you are afraid someone will think you want too much? Let it take up some damn space.

Do not wait until you are certain. Do not wait until everyone understands. Do not wait until someone else believes in it enough for you to believe in it yourself.

Meet yourself honestly. Admit what you want, even if saying it makes your voice shake. Examine the fear that taught you it was safer to stay small. Let go of the belief that humility requires you to hide. Then transform with intention, one brave and imperfect decision at a time.

This is my decision.

I am building something here. I believe it matters, and I believe it can help people. MelThinks is not a hobby. It is a community for people navigating life in the messy middle. It is the heartbeat of a much bigger vision, and I am no longer going to apologize for wanting it to grow.

If these stories have ever made you feel seen, understood, or a little less alone, I am asking you to help me build it. Subscribe. Become a paid member. Share MelThinks with someone standing in their own messy middle. Send them the story that made you think of them and invite them into this community.

Then turn back toward the thing that has been calling you and take one step toward it.

This is not only my declaration. It is yours.

Stop calling it “just a hobby.” Stop softening your ambition so other people can feel more comfortable holding it. Stop hiding behind hope when you already know what you believe.

Go build the thing.

I’ll meet you in the messy middle.

See you next Friday. I’ll be writing from Hawaii.

Mel 🤍

Tell Me What You’re Ready to Stop Shrinking

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A few nights ago, John and I laid in bed talking for almost an hour. It started with one question: “What if we bought another investment property?” By the time the conversation was over, we had somehow managed to map out the next few years of our lives. Another rental. Another flip. My consulting business. The book. MelThinks. The home renovation estimates we’re waiting to hear back on. Every dream eventually turned into the same question: how do we make the numbers work?

I was doing what I always do, trying to solve tomorrow before it got here. John was doing what he always does, dreaming. He sees possibility long before I do. I see spreadsheets. I see risk. I see every way something could fall apart before I allow myself to imagine how beautifully it might come together.

He reached over, squeezed my hand, smiled, and said the same words I’ve heard a thousand times before: “You just have to have faith, Melissa.”

The room got quiet. Because suddenly I wasn’t in our bedroom anymore. I was sitting beside our pool, exactly one year earlier. The girls were asleep. The water was perfectly still. The lights beneath the surface made it glow that impossible shade of crystal blue that only exists after dark.

I remember staring into the water because I couldn’t bring myself to look at John. Tears rolled down my face. For months, I had been pretending I was okay. I told everyone I could handle it: one more meeting, one more fire, one more impossible expectation, one more day becoming someone I barely recognized.

Then, finally: “I don’t think I can do this anymore.” The words barely made it above a whisper. Once they were out in the open, there was no taking them back.

I wasn’t talking about our marriage. Or motherhood. I was talking about the career I had spent years building. Walking away meant walking away from certainty. From a paycheck. From the identity I had worked so hard to earn.

My mind immediately did what it always does. How would we replace my income? What if I failed? What if I couldn’t build something on my own? What if I was making the biggest mistake of my life?

John never answered any of those questions. Instead, he answered the one I hadn’t asked. “You should leave.” I looked at him like he had completely lost his mind. “You should build something that’s yours.” I just stared at him. Then he smiled. “You just have to have faith, Melissa.”

We sat there for hours, sometimes by the pool, sometimes in the hot tub, then back to the pool again. We talked. I cried. He dreamed. There was no grand plan when we finally went inside. No roadmap. No guarantees.

There wasn’t a consulting business that night. There wasn’t this blog. There wasn’t a book. There wasn’t even a plan.

There was just a husband who believed in me before I knew how to believe in myself.

Looking back now, I realize that conversation wasn’t really about leaving a job. Paid subscribers get what came after: what I've learned in the year since, and what I'd tell myself if I could go back to that night.

If this kind of honesty is something you want more of, paid subscriptions are what keep MelThinks going every week.

A year later, we’re back in the dark. Just with different dreams in a different room. Same two people. Today it’s investment properties instead of paychecks. Consulting clients instead of corporate meetings. Book chapters instead of board presentations. MelThinks instead of quarterly goals. The details have changed. The conversation hasn’t.

I’m still trying to make the numbers work. John is still reminding me to have faith. I’ve started to realize that’s who we’ve always been. He’s the dreamer, the serial entrepreneur who sees possibility everywhere. I’m the practical one, the planner, the one trying to carry the responsibility of my family’s future by thinking ten steps ahead.

Maybe that’s why we’ve always worked. His faith has carried me on the days my fear was louder. My planning has steadied us when the dreams needed a foundation. Somewhere between the two of us, we’ve built a life.

But if I’m honest, there’s something this period of my life has quietly shown me. Somewhere along the way, I became so good at preparing for our life that I forgot how to simply be in it. I’m packing for vacation before we’ve left. Counting diabetes supplies before we’re out the door. Making lists for softball tournaments before we’ve loaded the car. Thinking about next week while this week is still happening.

A friend sent me a reel a few days ago that said we spend so much time preparing for the moment that, by the time it arrives, we’ve already missed most of it. I watched it twice. Because it felt like someone had been quietly watching my life.

Maybe that’s the messy middle. Not simply wondering what comes next, but constantly standing between faith and fear. Between dreaming and calculating. Between living today and trying to protect tomorrow.

I don’t have a lesson for you this week. I’m still learning how to live inside those spaces myself. I just know that somewhere tonight, after the dishes are done and the kids are asleep, someone else will lie awake beside the person they’re building a life with, staring into the dark, trying to figure out tomorrow.

And maybe that’s what building a life really looks like. Not the highlight reel. The conversation after everyone else goes to bed.

And if I know John, somewhere in the middle of that conversation he’ll look at me, smile, and remind me one more time...

“You just have to have faith, Melissa.”

See you next Friday,

Mel 🤍

Where are you right now: dreaming, calculating, or somewhere in the messy middle? Let me know below. I’d really love to hear from you.

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I usually roll my eyes when he says that because, in my mind, I’m just getting things done. There’s always another email to answer, another idea to chase, another project to move forward. My brain doesn’t really know what “done” feels like because the moment one thing gets crossed off the list, three more take its place.

He’s watched me answer Slack notifications from the beach. He’s watched me open my laptop on vacation because there was one email I just couldn’t leave sitting in my inbox. He’s watched me promise that I was “almost finished” on an emergency work call while everyone else had already made it down to the water.

The funny thing is, nobody was asking me to do any of it. The companies survived. The emails could have waited. The world would have kept spinning. But somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that taking my foot off the gas meant I was falling behind.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately wondering where that came from. Is it because my brain never really shuts off? Is it the never-ending checklist that seems to follow me everywhere I go? Is it the fear that if I’m sitting still, I’m somehow wasting time? Or is it something much deeper than that?

This week marked seven years since Roe’s Type 1 diabetes diagnosis.

Seven years.

Every July 9th, even when I think I’m okay, my body remembers before my mind does. This entire week I’ve felt heavier. Less focused. More emotional. Like I was carrying something I couldn’t quite name. When John was trying to get me to relax and float in the pool one afternoon, I looked over at him and asked, "Do you ever feel like you're on the verge of crying, but the tears just won't come?" I don’t think it’s a coincidence anymore. A fact that didn’t hit me until the night before her Diaversary.

I can still see myself running through the emergency department at CHOP with my almost three-year-old in my arms. Her urine had soaked through my shirt because her kidneys had started failing. She was almost lifeless. White as a ghost. So impossibly thin and fragile that I was afraid if I held her too tightly, I might break her.

There are moments that change your life. And then there are moments that change your nervous system.

Seven years ago, our lives changed forever. Diabetes teaches you that life can change in an instant. It teaches you to pay attention. To listen for alarms. To watch numbers. To always be thinking one step ahead because there is no pause button when your child’s pancreas decides it’s not going to work anymore.

You don’t really come back from that. You just get better at carrying it.

What I’ve started realizing is that my nervous system never learned the difference between diabetes and everything else. Every notification feels urgent. Every email feels important. Every problem feels like it needs to be solved immediately. Not because it actually does. Because somewhere deep inside me, staying vigilant became synonymous with keeping the people I love safe.

When you’ve spent years believing that missing something could have real consequences, it’s hard to convince your brain that it’s okay to miss anything.

I think that’s why I’ve never really taken a vacation. Anyone who knows me is probably reading this thinking, "Wait...she goes on vacation all the time." Sure, I’ve gone away. I’ve packed the suitcase. Sat on the beach. Walked the boardwalk.

But mentally?

I was still sitting in my office. Still thinking about work. Still solving problems. Still refreshing my inbox. Still carrying everything with me.

As I’ve been on this journey of reinvention and healing the past few months, I’ve started to understand that rest isn’t the opposite of productivity. It’s part of it. Rest isn’t laziness. It isn’t falling behind. It isn’t giving up. It’s trusting that everything doesn’t depend on me every second of every day.

I need to continue reminding myself of this every single day. I don’t know if the rewiring of my central nervous system will ever go away. What happened that day seven years ago changed the way my brain experiences the world. I might always be a work in progress. Maybe that’s okay.

Next week, we’re heading down the shore. Roe will celebrate another birthday while we’re there. Ten years old. That sentence feels almost as impossible as seven years with diabetes.

And for the first time in a very long time, I’m going to do something that feels incredibly uncomfortable. I’m taking the week off. No MelThinks next Friday. No writing. No wondering if I should be posting something. No guilt that I’m somehow losing momentum. Just my family. The beach. The sound of waves instead of notifications. The kind of memories that only happen when you’re fully there to experience them.

Seven years ago, I ran into a hospital bathroom, looked in the mirror, and screamed one word at the top of my lungs.

“Why?”

Then I wiped away my tears, opened the door, and walked back into Roe’s room because my little girl needed her mom.

I’ve gotten very good at pulling myself together. At pushing through. At carrying the weight. At convincing myself that I can rest later.

But I’m starting to wonder if strength isn’t always found in holding everything together. Strength might look like trusting that it’s okay to let go for a little while.

The emergency is over. Roe is healthy and strong. She is funny and kind and stubborn and almost ten years old. She has lived with diabetes for seven years, but she has never let it stop her from living. She’s writing her own story. She isn’t letting her diagnosis define the joy in her life.

The vigilance I have for my daughter will always be part of who I am. But I'm learning that the rest of the world doesn't have to be met with that same level of urgency.

I’m sure there will be moments next week when I reach for my phone out of habit. Moments when my brain tells me I should just check one thing. Old habits don’t disappear overnight. But healing rarely happens overnight either.

Sometimes healing looks like therapy. Sometimes it looks like forgiveness. And sometimes, it looks like sitting in a beach chair while your daughters run toward the ocean, trusting that whatever is waiting for you can wait just a little bit longer.

Maybe success isn’t measured only by everything we build. Maybe it’s also measured by whether we were present enough to enjoy it once we got there.

See you in two Fridays.

Hopefully a little more sun-tanned, a little more rested, and with sand still hiding somewhere in my beach bag.

Mel 🤍

P.S. If you happen to see me answering emails from a beach chair, kindly remind me I wrote this story and while I’m gone, I hope you find a little time to take your own foot off the gas. 🤍

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I don’t even remember which one yelled first. One minute I was sitting at my desk trying to answer emails. The next, my oldest had decided she wanted to surprise me by washing my car. Which would have been incredibly sweet... if my SUV wasn’t roughly the size of a submarine.

She couldn’t get the hose off the rack, so she recruited Bops, who somehow managed to slice both of his hands open trying to unravel it. I heard the commotion from my office, abandoned what I was working on, rescued the hose, and by the time I got outside she had already started.

She could reach the doors. She could reach the mirrors. She could even reach most of the hood. She could not, however, reach the roof.

By the time I finally wrestled the hose into submission and stopped the geyser of water spraying across the driveway because the connection wasn’t sealed properly, the entire SUV was covered in soap. She looked at me with complete panic and said, “I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s okay,” I laughed. “We’ll figure it out.”

Instead of heading back inside to finish the work waiting on my computer, I grabbed the hose and started rinsing. Then I dried the entire car—which, for the record, is no small feat when you’re 5’2” and the vehicle you’re washing could double as a submarine. Step stools were involved. More than once.

She had wanted to do something nice for me. Somewhere along the way, I ended up doing most of the work. But I didn’t mind (well maybe I did just a little).

Because it was never really about the car.

I had barely walked back into my office when I smelled burning rubber. You know that smell that immediately makes your stomach drop? The one that says, something isn’t right. I searched the kitchen. Opened the dishwasher. Took every cleaning supply out of the cabinet under the sink. Until I finally found it: a cell phone charger. Nothing plugged into it. Somehow it had overheated and started melting on the kitchen floor. My youngest screaming, “Mommy! There’s smoke!”

I unplugged it, ran it outside, took a deep breath... and that’s when I heard the next scream.

“Mommmmm!”

This time it was Roe…again. Somehow (and I still don’t fully understand how) the curtains in my office had just mysteriously come crashing down on the floor. The rob ripped right out of the wall.

Just another ordinary Tuesday.

Somewhere between untangling hoses, drying the roof of my car, investigating the smell of burning rubber, and rehanging curtain rods, I caught myself thinking something I never expected.

I hope I remember this.

Not because it was peaceful. It wasn’t. Not because it was productive. It definitely wasn’t. But because one day this house will be quiet. One day there won’t be little voices yelling “Mom!” from opposite ends of the house every twelve seconds. One day the curtains will stay exactly where I hung them. The charger won’t mysteriously catch fire. The hose will stay neatly rolled up.

And my SUV... well, it will probably stay dirty a little longer.

Nobody really prepares you for the ache of motherhood…

The rest of this week’s story is waiting just below.

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People warn you about the sleepless nights when they’re babies. The diapers. The tantrums. The hormones. The teenage years. They tell you all about the hard parts.

What they don’t tell you is that nothing has to be wrong for your heart to hurt. Sometimes it hurts simply because you love someone so completely that your own heart no longer feels like it belongs entirely to you. It walks around outside your body now. In two little girls. And that's the cruelest, most beautiful thing about becoming a mother. Your heart doesn't belong to you anymore.

You spend your days wanting everything for them. You pray over decisions they don’t even know you’re making. You wonder if you’re saying yes too often. Or no too often. You silently ask God to please let today’s parenting decision not become tomorrow’s therapy session. You do your best. Then you lie awake wondering if your best was enough.

Earlier this week, I had to tell one of my girls no.

It wasn’t one of those life-changing parenting moments. It was an ordinary Tuesday kind of “no.” The kind parents say every single day.

Except this one didn’t feel ordinary.

She was frustrated she wasn’t getting her way. That I was saying no when she is used to hearing yes. She looked at me and did what every pre-teen girl does to their mom- she used words to cut me. To make me hurt because she was hurt.

I don’t think she meant them the way they landed. Children have an incredible ability to reach directly into the center of your heart without realizing they’re holding the map.

She moved on. I didn’t.

Because that’s motherhood too. Being the safe place for someone who doesn’t yet know how much their words can weigh.

I spend so much of my life on the sidelines these days. Softball fields. School events. Cheering louder than they ask me to. Watching every pitch. Every swing. Every little glance toward the stands to make sure Mom is still there.

I’m their biggest advocate. Their loudest cheerleader. The person who wants to fix every disappointment while knowing that part of loving them well is letting them experience some of it.

That’s one of motherhood’s cruel little contradictions. You spend years wanting to protect them from every hurt, while knowing some hurts are how they grow.

Then this week, they asked if we could have a sleepover. My oldest was upset over a disagreement she had with a friend. She didn’t want advice. She didn’t want me to fix it.

She just wanted her mom.

It was the kind of night that, a few years ago, happened without asking. Now it feels like a gift.

Because they’re growing. Friends are becoming more exciting. Schedules are getting fuller. Their world is slowly expanding beyond mine. And that’s exactly what it’s supposed to do. So when they still ask if we can all sleep together for one night, I don’t hesitate.

The funny thing about childhood is that it never announces its endings. One day you pick them up because they’re too tired to walk. Then one day you don’t.

One day they ask you to check for monsters. Then one day they stop.

One day they ask for one more sleepover with Mom. Then, without either of you realizing it, they don’t. There won’t be a final one circled on the calendar. It will simply happen, and I won’t realize it until years later.

Nobody tells you that the hardest part of motherhood isn’t keeping them alive. It’s surviving how much you love them.

Motherhood is watching tiny versions of yourself slowly become entirely themselves. It's spending your entire life teaching someone to leave you while secretly hoping they'll sit beside you just a little longer.

This weekend we’ll celebrate 250 years of independence as a country. Flags will wave. Fireworks will fill the sky. We’ll celebrate freedom. We’ll celebrate independence. And we should.

As everyone celebrates independence this weekend, I've found myself thinking about a different kind of independence. The kind we quietly spend eighteen years preparing our children for.

We spend eighteen years teaching them independence. And every time they become a little more independent, a little piece of us quietly misses who they were yesterday.

Maybe that’s the strange, beautiful paradox of being a mother. The very thing we’re trying to accomplish is also the thing that slowly breaks our hearts.

So if my girls ask for another sleepover tonight...I’ll probably say yes. The emails can wait. The car can stay dirty. Childhood won’t.

Happy Independence Day, friends. Hold your people close.

Because I have a feeling that someday, I’d give anything to dry the roof of that car one more time.

Back when the biggest problem in her world was a car covered in soap, and she still looked at me with complete confidence and said,

“Mom...I don’t know what to do.”

See you next Friday,

Mel 🤍

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Only this time, the “somebody else” was my daughters.

It was one of those sibling arguments that started small and somehow grew legs. One was crying. One was defensive. Both were convinced they were right. Both were trying to talk over the other to make sure I understood their side first. And somewhere in the middle of who said what and who got more and who felt left out and who felt more loved, I realized I wasn’t really refereeing a fight at all. I was doing what I always do. Listening for the thing underneath the thing.

Because it usually isn’t about the thing on the surface. Not really.

It’s not about who was complaining more or who got to go first or who was mean first or who got more of Mom’s attention that day. It’s about the feeling underneath it. The fear that someone else is getting more than you. The panic that maybe you are not as seen. The sting of being misunderstood. The need to know that your place is still secure, your people are still your people, and your feelings still count even if they are messy and badly timed and wrapped in the emotional regulation skills of a child who is still learning how to be a person.

So I sat there and did what I always do. I let one talk. I let the other interrupt. I made her stop interrupting. I asked the first one to say it again in a way her sister could actually hear. I translated tears into language. I translated defensiveness into hurt. I pulled the real issue out from underneath the pile of accusations and dramatic declarations and sibling theatrics and tried to hold it up so both of them could see it clearly.

And in the middle of all of it, I had a thought that made me laugh a little.

My office followed me home.

For years, my office had a chair in it that I jokingly called the therapy chair. Not because I was anyone’s therapist, and certainly not because that was my actual job description, but because somehow the hardest people in the company always ended up in it.

The rest of this week’s MelThinks is for paid subscribers. If you’ve ever been the one everyone comes to with the hard feelings, the hard conversations, or the mess underneath the mess, I’d love to have you keep reading. Paid subscribers get the full Friday letters each week, and this one goes deeper into the role I seem to play in every room of my life🤍 Unlock the full article now…

Not the loudest people. Not the most emotional people. Not even always the people with the most obvious problems.

The toughest ones.

The deeply logical engineer who lived in black-and-white thinking and could turn any conversation into a spreadsheet if you let him. The founder moving at a speed that made everyone else dizzy. The leader who prided himself on being objective, rational, data-driven, impossible to rattle. The ones everyone else assumed were immune to the human mess because they looked so steady from the outside.

And then they would shut my office door, drop into that chair, and within five minutes we were no longer talking about headcount or compensation or performance reviews or org charts. We were talking about fear. Or resentment. Or insecurity. Or pressure. Or the exhausting weight of being the person everyone else expected to have the answers.

Sometimes it was a conflict with a peer that had somehow become about much more than a disagreement over strategy. Sometimes it was frustration with a team member that, after enough questions, turned out to be disappointment in themselves. Sometimes it was a founder who wanted to talk about a reorg and ended up talking about trust. Sometimes it was a leader insisting that the data supported one decision while their body language was screaming that what they really wanted was certainty. Proof. Control. A way to make the human part of leadership feel as clean and predictable as a spreadsheet.

I spent years learning that the problem people bring you is almost never the real problem.

The missed deadline is usually not about the missed deadline. The conflict over priorities is rarely about the priorities. The leader who wants everyone to like them is often afraid to disappoint people. The one who insists on hard facts and black-and-white answers is often trying to create certainty in a situation that feels anything but certain. One person is driven by harmony. Another is driven by control. One wants peace. One wants proof. Both are trying to protect something.

I have always been fascinated by that part.

Not just what people do, but why they do it. Not just the decision itself, but the pattern underneath it. The way two leaders can walk into the exact same situation and respond in completely opposite ways because they are not actually reacting to the situation in front of them. They are reacting through the lens of who they are, what they fear, what they value, what they need, and what has always worked for them before.

Some leaders ground every decision in data and objectivity. Some lead from intuition and emotion and spend half their lives trying to make sure everyone around them feels okay. Some want the black and white. Some live in the gray. Some will bulldoze right through conflict if it means getting to the answer faster. Some will avoid conflict for so long that the answer becomes impossible to find underneath all the unspoken tension.

A company needs both. It really does. It needs the people who can zoom out and make the hard call. It also needs the people who can feel the ripple effect of that call before it hits the rest of the room. It needs people who can challenge assumptions with data and people who can challenge them with instinct. It needs builders and stabilizers and pushers and translators and people who can sit in the discomfort long enough to ask, “What is this actually about?”

I have spent most of my career being that last person.

The translator.

The one sitting in the middle of the room trying to make one person’s language legible to another. The one helping the objective leader understand that the numbers may be right but the delivery still matters. The one helping the relational leader understand that caring deeply about people does not exempt you from making hard decisions. The one who can zoom out far enough to see the business problem and zoom in close enough to see the human one sitting underneath it.

It is probably why I have always been the person people bring things to. In companies. In friendships. In marriage. In motherhood.

Not because I have some magical ability to fix everyone’s problems. I do not. And the older I get, the less interested I am in pretending that I do. But I do know how to sit in the middle of emotional chaos without immediately needing to run from it. I know how to hear what someone is saying and also hear what they are not saying. I know how to pull apart the practical problem from the emotional one, which usually means I know where to start.

I think that is why I ended up in People leadership in the first place, if I am being honest. Yes, I love the strategy of it. I love building. I love diagnosing what is broken in a business and figuring out what people, structure, systems, or leadership shifts need to happen to get it moving in the right direction again. I love the puzzle of it. I love sitting with a founder’s vision and figuring out how to actually build the thing on the box.

But I have never been under the illusion that the work is just about people and process.

It is about translation.

It is about helping a founder understand why their team is exhausted even though the company is growing. It is about helping a brilliant leader see that being right and being effective are not always the same thing. It is about helping someone say the thing underneath the thing before it turns into resentment, disengagement, turnover, or a meeting where everyone nods politely and then vents in Slack afterwards.

And apparently, it is also about helping two little girls understand that being loved equally does not always feel the same in every moment.

That is the part that got me this week.

Because as I sat there with them, trying to help one daughter explain why she felt overlooked and the other explain why she felt unfairly blamed, I realized how familiar it all felt. Not because sibling fights and leadership conflict are the same thing. They are not. But because the work underneath them is surprisingly similar. Someone wants to be understood. Someone wants to be chosen. Someone wants proof that they matter. Someone is reacting to the story they are telling themselves about what just happened, and somebody has to slow it down long enough to separate the facts from the fear.

I have spent so much of my life in that chair.

In offices with the door closed. In kitchens after bedtime. In the front seat of my car. In hard conversations with people I love. In conference rooms where everyone is pretending the conversation is about strategy when it is very obviously about trust. In the middle of teams that cannot move forward because nobody is saying the actual thing out loud. In my own home, trying to teach my daughters how to name what hurts before it turns into something bigger, and occasionally translating pre-adolescent drama, feelings, and emotional whiplash to my middle-aged husband who would very much prefer everyone just calm down and stop crying. That last part is a very special use of my gifts.

Maybe that is all the therapy chair ever really was.

Not a chair at all.

Just a role.

A place I seem to find myself in, over and over again, in every room of my life. The place where people bring the mess underneath the mess. The place where facts and feelings collide. The place where somebody has to listen long enough to figure out what is actually going on.

I used to think that was just a funny side effect of working in HR. A running joke. Of course the leaders end up in my office. Of course the hard conversations land here. Of course I am somehow mediating feelings in between compensation reviews and organizational charts.

Now I think it is something else.

I think some of us are wired to be translators.

To sit in the middle of the chaos without looking away. To hold the practical and the emotional at the same time. To help people say the thing under the thing. To make one person’s hurt legible to another. To remind the black-and-white thinkers that human beings do not fit neatly into cells on a spreadsheet. To remind the people-feelers that clarity is not cruelty. To remind everyone, including two little girls arguing in the next room, that being understood and being agreed with are not the same thing, but both matter.

So yes, my office followed me home.

Or maybe the truth is that it was never in my office to begin with.

Maybe the therapy chair has been me all along.

See you next Friday,

Mel 🤍

If this sounds like your kind of conversation, come hang with me each Friday. MelThinks Weekly is where I write about motherhood, work, marriage, identity, and the beautifully complicated middle of it all.

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Like most families, we were looking for ways to fill long days that suddenly felt very different from the ones we had known before. We started with a small set spread across the kitchen counter one night after dinner. Then another. Then another. As the years passed, the sets got larger, more complicated, and significantly more ambitious.

Somewhere along the way, she stopped needing my help.

Now she’ll sit for hours with thousands of tiny pieces scattered across the table, completely locked in. The rest of the world seems to disappear around her. While everyone else moves in and out of the room, she studies the instructions, sorts pieces into neat little piles, and methodically works her way through the build. A few hours later, she’ll proudly place another completed masterpiece on one of the shelves in her bedroom that are now filling up so fast with castles, mansions, and movie landmarks, she’ll be requesting her dad install more.

Most people look at the finished product.

I find myself fascinated by the pile of pieces she started with.

The possibility. The vision required to look at hundreds or thousands of disconnected parts and somehow know they belong together.

Lately, I’ve realized that tendency shows up everywhere in my life.

A few months ago, my husband and I purchased another flip property that most people would have run from.

The smell hit before we even made it through the front door. There was mold. Water damage in nearly every room. Holes in the floors (seriously, a quarter of the master bedroom floor was disintegrated). Sections of walls that looked ready to collapse. Years of neglect seemed to hang in every room. Even wearing a mask, it was difficult to spend much time inside.

My youngest daughter took one look around and immediately panicked.

“Mommy, please don’t make us live here.”

To be fair, she had a valid concern. The house was awful. It was the kind of property most people walk through once before quickly deciding it isn’t worth the trouble. The kind where all anyone can see is what is wrong.

But standing there in the middle of all that damage, I wasn’t thinking about mold or demolition costs or how much work stood between us and a finished product (Well. Maybe I was just a little bit).

I was imagining the kitchen.

I was picturing the walls that would come down. I could see sunlight coming through windows that hadn’t been installed yet. I could see a family gathered around an island that didn’t exist. I could see children running through rooms that were currently full of debris.

Some people see a disaster. Some people see a blueprint.

Three and a half months later, the house barely resembles the one we purchased. It was taken completely down to the studs. Walls were removed to create an open floor plan. New electrical has been installed. New plumbing. Custom interior doors were made. The entire exterior has been gutted and is being rebuilt. Soon the kitchen will go in. Then the bathrooms. The siding. The windows. The decks.

Every week, a little more of the vision becomes visible.

Every week, it becomes easier for everyone else to see what we saw from the beginning.

And somewhere between demolition and drywall, I had one of those moments where two seemingly unrelated parts of my life suddenly made sense.

Because this wasn’t the first time I’d walked into something that looked overwhelming to everyone else.

I’ve spent most of my career doing exactly that.

Over the years, I’ve walked into organizations where growth had outpaced infrastructure. Companies where leaders were exhausted. Teams frustrated by processes that no longer worked. Businesses filled with talented people but lacking the systems needed to support where they were trying to go. Desperate for headcount but no idea how to source the right talent without spending thousands on external recruiters.

I once joined a company where confidential employee paperwork was literally stored in a bin in a hallway. And there are some of you reading this that know exactly what I am talking about.

I’ve worked with organizations trying to scale faster than their foundation could support. I’ve sat across from founders carrying the weight of every decision themselves because they hadn’t yet built the structure needed to grow beyond them. I've sat with leaders who were brilliant at their craft but had never had to think about the organization around them until suddenly, they had to.

To some people, those environments feel chaotic.

To me, they feel familiar. Like walking into a house with good bones.

The funny thing is, none of it scares me. The house didn’t scare me. The startups didn’t scare me. The blank page I’m writing this on doesn’t scare me. (The renovation budget, on the other hand. The possibility that nobody reads this newsletter. The very real chance that I'm pouring my heart into a book that ends up in a discount bin somewhere. Those things? Those keep me up at night. But the work itself, the building, never has.)

If anything, those are the moments that make me lean in.

And standing in the middle of that renovation, I finally understood why.

It’s not houses. And it isn’t business. It’s building.

If you've ever looked at a mess and felt something light up instead of shut down then what comes next in this article is for you. It's where I get into what I've actually learned from building and I’d love to share it with you…

Become a paid subscriber and enjoy the rest.

For most of my life, I thought those were separate interests.

There was professional Melissa, the Chief People Officer who loved helping companies scale through growth, change, mergers, and transformation.

Then there was personal Melissa, who spent weekends walking through distressed properties, pinning renovation ideas on digital boards, and helping her husband imagine what a house could become.

It never occurred to me that they were actually the same person doing the same thing.

I am a builder.

Not in the literal sense. Lord knows nobody wants me wiring electrical panels or framing walls. But in the sense that I am deeply energized by possibility. I love standing in the middle of something unfinished and helping create the vision for what comes next. I love diagnosing problems and then charging at them head on. I love looking at something that isn’t working and figuring out how to make it stronger.

What I enjoy far less is maintenance.

Once the systems are built, the structure is stable, and everything is running smoothly, my brain naturally starts looking for the next challenge. The next puzzle. The next opportunity to create.

For years, I thought that was a flaw.

I thought maybe I should want to stay longer. Maybe I should enjoy maintaining something as much as I enjoyed building it.

But the older I get, the more I realize that not everyone is wired the same way. The real magic happens when we finally recognize which one we are.

Some people are incredible caretakers. Some people are operators. Some people are refiners.

Some people are builders.

That realization has quietly shaped almost every major decision I’ve made over the past year.

It’s why becoming a fractional Chief People Officer feels so aligned with who I am. I get to walk into companies during some of their most important moments of growth, help diagnose what needs to be built, create the foundation, and set leaders up for long-term success.

It’s why I’ve spent so much time over the past six months trying to articulate not just what I do, but why I do it.

It’s why I’m writing a book that explores what happens when the life you built no longer feels like the life you’re meant to live.

It’s why I’m building a methodology designed to help other people navigate transformation when they find themselves standing in their own version of the messy middle.

It’s why I can spend a morning helping a founder think through organizational design, an afternoon coordinating contractors at a renovation project, and an evening writing essays for this newsletter without feeling like any of those things are disconnected.

Because they aren’t.

They’re all building.

Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about that every time I watch my daughter sitting at the dining room table surrounded by thousands of Lego pieces.

She studies the instructions. She trusts the process. She knows that the pile in front of her won’t stay a pile forever.

Maybe she inherited that instinct. Maybe she didn’t.

But I hope she always keeps the ability to see possibility where other people see problems. The willingness to start before everything is figured out. The confidence to trust a vision before anyone else can see it.

Because whether we’re building a Lego set, a house, a company, a book, or an entirely new version of ourselves, the principle remains the same.

Everything beautiful starts as a mess.

A pile of pieces. A house full of mold. A struggling business. A blank page.

The builders understand something the rest of the world often forgets.

The studs are never the end of the story. They’re just the beginning…

See you next Friday,

Mel 🤍

Are you a builder? Do you see the possibility in the chaos? I would genuinely love to hear your stories and feedback on the article. Be sure to comment.

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Every Friday I write about the things that don't fit anywhere else. The mental load, the messy middle, the moments that only make sense in hindsight. Grab a coffee, take a breath, and come along for the ride🤍

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the way my brain works.

About the racing thoughts. The overstimulation. The empathy. The way my mind can take in so much information at once that sometimes it feels like there are a hundred browser tabs open in my head, all playing different videos at full volume.

I haven’t figured out how to make it stop and maybe I never will. But I have learned something about what brings me peace and it turned out to be exactly what I needed this week.

What I didn’t write about is what happens when someone who loves you decides to do something about it.

This week was supposed to be all about District All Stars. The practices. The team events. The weather forecasts. The anticipation and lead up.

If you’ve ever had a child involved in youth sports, you know the feeling. You spend days emotionally preparing for an event that hasn’t even happened yet.

I’ve done some version of that my entire life.

As a Chief People Officer, every quarter I knew exactly what the business results looked like before walking into a board meeting. I knew the questions that were coming. I knew where the pressure points were. I knew which slides would get extra attention and which conversations might be uncomfortable.

The meeting wasn’t until Thursday. But mentally, I’d been sitting in that boardroom since Monday.

This week felt familiar. The game wasn’t until Wednesday. But my brain had already played it a hundred times.

And somewhere between the practices, the planning, the weather apps, and the general chaos of life, my husband noticed something before I did.

I was wound tight. Not in a dramatic way. In a Melissa way. The kind that looks a lot like cleaning things that don’t need to be cleaned. Reorganizing things that don’t need to be reorganized. Trying to create order in all the little places when life feels uncertain in the bigger ones.

So on Sunday afternoon, after another morning softball practice, he did what ten years of marriage years teaches you to do.

He didn’t give me advice. He didn’t tell me to relax. He didn’t remind me everything would be fine.

He told me to grab my helmet. We were going for a ride.

As soon as the buckle clicked beneath my chin and the engine came to life beneath us, something started to shift.

At first, I was still carrying the week with me. The anticipation of the tournament. The weather. The schedules. The endless mental checklist that follows me around more often than I’d like to admit.

Then the miles started passing and the road opened up. The warm June air pushed against my shoulders. The sun found its way through my tank top. And little by little, the noise in my head got quieter.

One of the things I love most about riding on the motorcycle is that nobody can reach me. There is no way to answer texts or emails. The notifications have to sit, unacknowledged. All of my responsibilities are on pause. No one, not even my husband, can ask me questions. And if someone needs me for something, they have to wait. It’s just the road, the wind, and whatever is waiting at the other end.

And on this day, what was waiting was my church. Not the kind with pews. The kind Maren Morris was singing about all along.

The kind with water. The kind where boats rock gently against docks. Where the air smells like sunscreen, salt, fuel, and summer. The kind that has been restoring me for as long as I can remember.

As we rode into town, I started noticing all the familiar landmarks. The gas station where we’d stop before weekends at the marina. The liquor store where we’d run in for drinks and snacks before heading to the boat. The little ice cream shop where sticky toddler fingers once reached for one more bite. The shops we wandered through when the girls were little. The streets that somehow seem frozen in time.

Every turn held a memory. And with each one, I wasn’t just remembering a place. I was remembering a version of myself. The youthful girl in her twenties who traded in the Jersey shore weekends to become a river rat. The pregnant newlywed floating in a tube all day anticipating how much her life was about to be flipped upside down. The woman trying to build a career while simultaneously building her family. The exhausted executive. The woman sitting on the back of a motorcycle realizing how long it had been since she’d taken a deep breath.

People talk about places like they’re locations. But some places become chapters. Northeast, MD, holds so many of mine.

By the time we sat down for lunch by the water, I could feel something I hadn’t realized was missing.

Space.

Not in my calendar. In my mind.

The kind of space that allows you to hear yourself think again. The kind of space that reminds you who you are underneath all the responsibilities, expectations, deadlines, games, and obligations. The kind of space that reminds you life is happening while you’re busy preparing for it.

Three days later, we loaded up the car and headed to the tournament. The girls were excited and families were ready. The coaches had taken 12 individually talented girls from different teams and had 10 days to form a new, all start team, that would gel perfectly to get us the district win. The anticipation had finally reached its destination.

And then the skies opened and the game was called before it even started. Everyone decked out in their team gear and swag. Standing there in the parking lot. Just like that. Ten days of preparation postponed by something none of us could control.

As we turned around and headed home, I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony of it all.

I thought the tournament would be the thing filling my cup this week.

It wasn’t.

It turned out to be the motorcycle ride three days earlier. The ride to my church. The place where so many versions of my life still live. The place where my husband knew I needed to go before I knew it myself.

The place that reminded me that peace was never waiting at the end of the game.

It was waiting in the ride there all along.

The tournament got rained out.

The reminder of what matters didn’t.

See you next Friday,

Mel 🤍

If this is the kind of thing you needed to read today, there’s more where that came from.

Every Friday I show up in your inbox with something honest about the mental load, the messy middle, the moments that only make sense in hindsight. No fluff. No performance. Just real life, written down.

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It was one of those games that reminds you why youth sports are so special in the first place.

The girls battled through extra innings. They dug deep. They picked each other up after mistakes. They fought for every run, every out, every opportunity to keep playing together a little longer.

When the final out was recorded, their season was over.

They had lost.

Nobody was happy about it.

Some girls cried. Others just stood there quietly trying to process it. You could see the disappointment written all over their faces. Not because they had played poorly, but because they weren’t ready for it to be over.

As parents and coaches, we did what parents and coaches do. We hugged them. We told them how proud we were. We handed out goodie bags. We shared pizza. We took pictures. We reminded them of how far they had come since the beginning of the season.

Because the truth was obvious to everyone standing there.

Nobody watching that game would have said they failed.

Not a single person.

We had all witnessed the growth. We had watched confidence develop. We had watched skills improve. We had watched friendships deepen. We had watched resilience emerge.

The scoreboard showed a loss. But everyone knew they had won something much bigger.

What struck me later wasn’t the game itself. It was how easy it was for all of us to see the growth in those girls. And how difficult it can be to see it in ourselves.

The very next morning, I found myself doing something I wish I could tell you I don’t do. I was refreshing statistics.

Subscriber numbers.
Open rates.
Social media engagement.
Website traffic.
All the little metrics that tell me whether the things I’m building are working.

And somewhere between refreshing dashboards and checking numbers, a thought slipped into my head that I haven’t been able to shake all week.

Because lately, that question feels like it’s everywhere. I see incredible Fractional CPOs sharing their expertise every day. I see brilliant writers publishing essays every week. I see founders building businesses. Creators building audiences. Women talking about burnout.

Leadership.
Motherhood.
Reinvention.
Purpose.
Healing.

All of it is good. All of it matters. And yet sometimes I find myself staring at the screen wondering where exactly I fit into all of it.

What makes my voice different?

What makes my perspective worth reading?

What makes someone choose my words when there are thousands of others they could read instead?

It’s not a question I’m particularly proud of. But it’s an honest one.

And if MelThinks has become anything over the last few months, it’s a place where honesty wins over polish every single time.

The truth is that I’ve spent most of my life in environments where success was measurable. There was always a scoreboard.

A promotion.
A title.
A bigger team.
A compensation increase.
A company milestone.
A metric that told you whether you were moving forward.

But this chapter of my life feels different.

I’m building a consulting business. Helping run a growing contracting company. Writing a book. Building a personal & professional brand. Writing this newsletter every single week.

And somehow the thing that feels most vulnerable isn’t any of those things. It’s pressing publish.

It’s pouring my thoughts onto a page and sending them into the world with absolutely no guarantee that they’ll matter to anyone besides me.

Because underneath all the strategy, all the branding, all the websites and businesses and projects is a much simpler fear.

For paid subscribers: the rest of this essay explores the uncomfortable reality of building something meaningful in a crowded world, why impact rarely comes with immediate validation, and the subtle voice that keeps telling me to keep going anyway.

The part I don’t talk about very often is how uncomfortable this transition has been for me.

For most of my career, I knew exactly how success was measured. There were promotions to chase, titles to earn, compensation increases to celebrate, and company milestones that signaled progress. Even when things were hard, there was usually evidence that the work was paying off. You could point to a result, a number, or an outcome and say, See? It’s working.

This part of my life feels entirely different.

The consulting business is growing, but not overnight. The contracting company is thriving, but it requires constant attention. The book is progressing, chapter by chapter, conversation by conversation. And then there is MelThinks…the most personal thing I have ever built and, strangely, the thing that makes me feel the most exposed.

Every Friday, I sit down and publish something that came from somewhere deep inside me. Sometimes it’s a story about motherhood. Sometimes it’s leadership. Sometimes it’s Type 1 diabetes, burnout, anxiety, reinvention, or the messy process of becoming a different version of yourself. I hit publish feeling proud of what I’ve created, and then I do exactly what I tell myself I won’t do.

I watch.

I check subscriber numbers.

I look at open rates.

I refresh statistics.

I tell myself not to care, but if I’m being honest, I do care.

I care because the writing matters to me.

I care because I want it to reach people.

What makes it harder is that we live in a world where there is no shortage of voices. Every day I open LinkedIn and see incredible Fractional CPOs sharing thoughtful insights. I see talented writers publishing essays that stop me in my tracks. I see founders building businesses, creators building audiences, and women talking openly about burnout, motherhood, leadership, reinvention, and purpose.

Most days I find it inspiring. Some days I find it intimidating.

Because in the quieter moments, a question starts creeping into my head.

What makes my voice any different?

It’s not a question I’m particularly proud of, but it’s an honest one. Sometimes I wonder if there is anything left to say. Sometimes I wonder if the world really needs another writer talking about personal growth. Another woman talking about burnout. Another leader talking about authenticity. Another consultant talking about culture.

I think that’s the trap so many of us fall into when we create something that matters to us. We start believing that our value comes from saying something completely new.

But maybe that’s never been the point.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that none of the things I write about are actually new. Leadership isn’t new. Motherhood isn’t new. Anxiety isn’t new. Grief isn’t new. Reinvention isn’t new. Human beings have been wrestling with these same experiences for generations.

And yet we continue reading stories about them.

Not because we’re looking for new information.

Because we’re looking for ourselves.

We’re looking for someone who can put words around something we’ve felt but haven’t been able to articulate. We’re looking for proof that we aren’t the only ones carrying a particular fear, frustration, dream, or heartbreak. We’re looking for connection.

That’s why the moments that keep me going are never the moments I can measure.

They happen in grocery stores.

At softball fields.

In random conversations.

Inside messages that arrive unexpectedly.

They’re the woman who tells me she cried while reading a piece. The parent who reaches out after a diabetes story. The leader who says they finally felt understood. The friend who forwards an article to someone they love because it captured exactly what they were trying to say.

And almost every one of those conversations contains some version of the same sentence.

“I thought I was the only one.”

Not, “I’ve never heard this before.”

Not, “Nobody has ever said this.”

Just, “I thought I was the only one.”

That sentence has become one of the greatest gifts writing has given me.

Because it reminds me that impact and originality are not the same thing.

Maybe they need me to say the thing they’re thinking but haven’t said out loud yet. Maybe they need to hear it from a mother navigating Type 1 diabetes. Or a former Chief People Officer trying to reinvent herself at forty. Or a woman who willingly kicked the ladder out from underneath her own career because something inside her kept whispering that there was another path.

Maybe the value isn’t in being different.

Maybe the value is in being honest.

The more I sit with that thought, the more I realize I’ve been looking for a scoreboard in places where scoreboards don’t exist.

I’ve been trying to measure things that were never meant to be measured.

The most meaningful work in our lives rarely comes with immediate validation. You plant seeds and trust that something is happening underground long before anything breaks through the surface. You keep showing up. You keep building. You keep writing. You keep sharing. Not because you’re certain of the outcome, but because something inside of you believes the work itself matters.

I’ve felt that pull for months now. It’s difficult to describe because it isn’t loud. It doesn’t arrive with certainty or a five-year plan or some dramatic sign from the universe.

It’s much quieter than that.

It’s a gentle voice that keeps saying the same thing.

Keep going.

Keep writing.

Keep building.

Keep trusting.

Keep sharing.

Not because you’ve figured it all out.

Not because success is guaranteed.

Not because you know exactly where any of this leads.

Just because you’re not finished yet.

A few days ago, a group of girls walked off a softball field after a loss. The scoreboard said one thing, but every parent, coach, and spectator standing there saw something completely different. We saw growth. We saw confidence. We saw resilience. We saw young girls becoming stronger versions of themselves.

The scoreboard couldn’t measure any of that.

Maybe that’s true for the rest of us, too.

Maybe the reason there is no scoreboard for this part of life is because the things that matter most were never meant to be measured that way.

See you next Friday,

Mel 🤍

MelThinks is a weekly reminder that you don’t have to have everything figured out to keep moving forward.

We’re not chasing perfection here.

We’re learning, growing, failing, rebuilding, and becoming.

Together.

Come join me in the messy middle. 🤍

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Which honestly tracks for her. My youngest is a whole vibe.

She wanted her hair perfect. She wanted pictures. She wanted the full experience. She smiled at herself in the mirror like she was heading to a red carpet event instead of elementary school. And this morning for graduation, she already picked the sparkliest purple glitter dress she could possibly find because subtle has never really been an option for The Richardsons. We are very much a go big or go home family.

As I brushed through her hair yesterday morning, she talked nonstop while practicing her graduation songs, and suddenly I got hit with one of those parenting moments that feels almost physically impossible to explain.

Because in my mind, she was still sitting on my lap.

Still blonde curly tendrils
Still tiny enough to fit against my chest
Still watching her big sister strut across a kindergarten graduation stage in the puffiest blue dress known to mankind because apparently both of my daughters were born believing every life event deserves main character energy.

And today, Bella will stand on that same stage singing “First grade, first grade” to the tune of Sinatra just like Roe Roe did years ago. The exact same songs. The exact same excitement. The exact same proud little smile.

Only somehow… completely different.

Because this time I know how fast it goes.

That’s the thing nobody really prepares you for about parenthood. The milestones don’t arrive slowly. They overlap.

You’re still mourning the baby version of one child while helping another zip up a graduation gown. You’re packing away toddler clothes while buying bigger sneakers. One minute you’re cutting grapes into microscopic pieces and the next you’re having fully developed conversations with tiny humans who suddenly have opinions about everything from skincare routines to whether your music is “actually good or just old.”

And the craziest part is that while it’s happening, it somehow still feels ordinary.

The mornings are chaotic. Someone can’t find a shoe. Someone forgot they needed poster board at 9 p.m. Someone is crying because the blue cup is dirty even though there are seventeen identical blue cups in the cabinet. There are snacks to pack, forms to sign, practices to drive to, dinners to make, laundry multiplying like it pays taxes in this house.

You don’t realize you’re living inside the memories while you’re making them.

That’s the trick of parenting. The days feel unbelievably long right up until suddenly they aren’t.

I think that’s why graduation season hits parents so hard no matter how old their kids are.

Kindergarten.
Middle school.
High school.
College.

Every graduation quietly says the same thing:

That version of your child is over now. Not gone. Just gone forward.

And if you’re lucky, you got to witness it.

Lately I’ve noticed Roe Roe talking to me less like I’m just “mom” and more like I’m one of her trusted people. One of her safe places. We laugh about things now. She tells me stories differently. She has opinions and sarcasm and confidence and independence in ways that sometimes catch me completely off guard because wasn’t she literally just singing Sinatra in a giant blue dress?

And Bella, my child full of personality and sass, is now stepping into the same chapter her sister once did while Paisley somehow trails behind them both collecting snacks and chaos like a tiny feral emotional support mascot.

Our house still feels loud and messy and busy in all the ways family life usually does. But every once in a while, time slows down just enough for me to see it clearly.

The missing teeth.
The little voices getting deeper.
The way they don’t reach for your hand quite as automatically anymore.
The way they still do sometimes.

Parenthood is strange because every chapter arrives disguised as the normal Tuesday you think you’ll always have again. Until suddenly it isn’t.

So over these next few weeks, while your kids cross stages and sing songs slightly off-key and wave awkwardly from folding chairs in cafeterias and football stadiums, take a second to really look at them. Not just who they are right now. But all the versions of them that got them there.

The baby.
The toddler.
The kid who needed you for everything.
The version you were convinced would stay little forever.

Hold tight to the moments while they still reach for your hand.
Take the pictures even when everyone complains.
Cry through the songs.
Cheer embarrassingly loud.

Because one day you’ll blink and another little voice will be standing in front of the mirror asking for a blowout so she can look like a super model for kindergarten graduation.

And somehow your heart will break and burst open at the exact same time.

The rest of this letter is for paid subscribers.

If this story resonated with you, I’d love to have you stick around. You can subscribe for free and get a new Melthinks delivered to your inbox every Friday.

And if you’d like access to the full letters each week, a paid subscription is $8/month. It’s the best way to support my writing and unlock the full stories, deeper reflections, and the parts I don’t always share publicly.

Thank you for being here, whether you’ve been reading since the beginning or just found your way here today. 🤍

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I was struggling all week with what to write.

Which, if you know me, usually means something is sitting heavy somewhere.

Because let’s be honest…the last few months have been life months.

Transition months. Emotional months. Deep-thought, cry-in-the-shower, journal-entry months.

But this week?

Nothing felt heavy.

Nothing was weighing on me.

And then it was 96 degrees.

My weather.

Float in the pool all day, pineapple High Noon in hand, country music on the speaker, family hanging around, Sunday Funday kind of weather.

The kind of weather that makes me remember that underneath the responsibilities and schedules and laundry piles… I am, in fact, a summer person with a pool float and questionable dance moves.

Except there was no floating.

Because it’s May.

Or as moms everywhere know it…

“May-cember”

A month where every day feels like December but somehow sweatier.

Class trips. Graduations. Sports games. Playoff softball. Field day. Camp forms. Teacher gifts. Sign Up Genius links. End-of-year projects your child casually mentions at 9:38 PM.
One kid needs cupcakes.
One kid needs cleats.
One kid needs poster board.
You need a clone.
Your calendar looks like a hostage situation.

And I was on my third trip back to the girls’ school that day, because of course I was, this time to pick them up and head straight to a playoff softball game. My back was sweating just walking from the car. My Yeti was already warm.

And all I could think about was how the weather forecast for Memorial Day weekend had somehow gone from this glorious 96-degree preview of pool season…to rain. And 60s. For four straight days.

Rude.

And somewhere between sweating through pickup line chaos and mentally mourning my MDW pool float plans…I went down a rabbit hole. Somewhere fun. Somewhere ridiculous. Somewhere that smells faintly like sunscreen and Bath & Body Works body spray.

Because lately, I keep seeing those viral videos which are the modern-day equivalent of the nonsense we used to log onto MySpace hoping to find.

“Melissa, I’m drunk and outside…”

—and I cannot tell you how many people have sent that to me over the last week. Friends. College friends. And one from a teenager I absolutely adore who apparently likes to keep me humble and occasionally remind me that my cool factor is…debatable.

But it got me thinking…

“An analog childhood. A digital adulthood.”

There is something wildly specific about being a millennial woman. We really are a weird little generation.

Raised by parents who told us to go outside and not come back until the streetlights came on…but also somehow expected us to know how to program the VCR.

We memorized phone numbers. Actual phone numbers.
We called boys’ houses and immediately blacked out when their dad answered.
We used AIM away messages like passive aggressive emotional warfare.

You knew someone was in a fight if the away message suddenly had song lyrics. And if the font changed color? Oh, it was serious.

We printed MapQuest directions and prayed for the best.
We carried digital cameras with exactly 14 photos on them and didn’t know what anyone looked like until three days later when they got developed.
Delia’s catalogs were basically sacred literature.
Body glitter was a lifestyle.
Low-rise jeans were an act of terrorism.
Giant belts worn for absolutely no reason directly under our chest were somehow… fashion? And for reasons I still cannot explain, we all thought tanning with baby oil seemed like a reasonable life choice.

· · ·

We learned dances in bedroom mirrors before going out. We pregamed with warm beer in basements. Flip cup and beer pong were not games…they were organized sports.

We knew every word to every song and screamed them like our lives depended on it.

And now? Now Baby Got Back comes on while I’m unloading the dishwasher and suddenly I’m dropping it in the kitchen with a spatula in my hand like it’s 2004. Drop It Like It’s Hot comes on in the grocery store and no one even blinks because apparently songs that once played at parties until 2 AM are now considered background music while buying strawberries and paper towels.

Songs we once danced to in crop tops and platform sandals now hit while we’re wiping counters and yelling,

“WHO LEFT THIS WET TOWEL ON THE FLOOR?”

Flip cup used to be our competitive sport. Now competition is trying to make it to school drop off before the car line wraps around the building.

Shots used to mean tequila. Now it means espresso.

Pregaming used to mean going out. Now it means taking Advil before a birthday party at a trampoline park.

A wild Friday used to involve a bar. Now it’s falling asleep during a Netflix intro and calling it self-care.

And yet…the second Nelly comes on? We know every word. Not some of the words. Every word. Our bodies may hurt. Our knees may crack.

But if Yeah! comes on at a wedding? We are legally obligated to hit the dance floor like rent is due.

Because underneath all the carpools and calendar invites and sports schedules…that girl is still in there.

The one with wet curly hair filled with product, music blasting, too much vanilla scented body spray on, laughing with her friends like summer would last forever.

A reminder of who we were before mortgages, group texts about sports schedules, anxiety medication, calendar invites, and remembering to thaw chicken.

Before life got so…life-y.

· · ·

Millennials are such a weird little generation. Raised to work hard. Push through. Figure it out. Don’t complain. Show up anyway.

And somehow we became adults who can send a Slack message, decode childhood trauma, make dinner, use sarcasm as a coping mechanism, and still know every word to songs we haven’t heard in 20 years.

Iconic, honestly.

~THAT’S THE WHOLE THESIS

So this Memorial Day weekend…

🤍 Do something that reminds you of what it felt like to be young and free.
🤍Turn the music up too loud.
🤍Pull out the old dance moves.
🤍Laugh until your stomach hurts.
🤍Stay by the pool a little too long…even if it’s raining.
🤍Be ridiculous.
🤍Be nostalgic.
🤍Live your best millennial life.

Because somewhere under all the responsibility…that girl is still in there.

And I think she’d like to come out this weekend.

See ya next Friday,

~Mel

Not normal cleaning. Rage cleaning.

The kind where I’m aggressively wiping down already clean countertops at 10:30 at night because something earlier in the day is still sitting wrong in my chest. The kind where every cabinet suddenly closes a little louder, every blanket in the house needs to be folded immediately, and the dishwasher somehow becomes the most urgent task on earth. It’s the kind of cleaning where my husband quietly decides it’s probably best to just give me space for a little while because everyone in the house can feel that I’m trying to work through something I cannot mentally let go of.

To people who know me well, the signs are obvious.

To everyone else, I probably just look productive. Organized. High energy. Maybe even a little intense.

What most people don’t realize is that for some of us, control isn’t really about control at all.

It’s about relief. It’s about trying to quiet something internally that feels loud, chaotic, overwhelming, or emotionally unresolved. And when my brain gets loud, my environment suddenly needs to get quiet.

I have OCD. I’ve talked before about the “DJ” that constantly plays in my head. The nonstop flood of thoughts, reminders, worries, conversations, pressure, ideas, responsibilities, guilt, over-analysis, and anxiousness that can make it almost impossible to fully rest mentally. If I lose something, I cannot casually “look for it later.” My brain latches onto it until it’s found. If there are dirty dishes in the sink before bed, it physically nags at me. If the counters aren’t wiped down, I can feel myself becoming irrationally agitated.

Over time, I learned how to joke about it publicly because humor makes people more comfortable than honesty does.

During the summer, we constantly have people over. Pool parties, kids running around, friends in and out of the house, towels everywhere, drinks everywhere, chaos everywhere. And at some point during almost every gathering, I inevitably start cleaning while everyone else relaxes. I’ll laugh and say, “Don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s me,” while picking up plates or wiping down counters for the fifteenth time.

People usually laugh back.

But what they don’t see is that most of the time I’m not cleaning because things are dirty. I’m cleaning because my mind is overstimulated and searching for relief.

That’s the hard thing about mental health struggles that present as “high functioning.” A lot of them are socially rewarded before they’re ever understood.

What people don’t see is that when my internal world feels chaotic, I instinctively try to control my external one. And the more stress I carry emotionally, the louder the obsession gets.

The person with anxiety gets praised for being prepared. The person who overthinks becomes “detail oriented.” The empath who absorbs everyone’s emotions becomes a great leader. The person who struggles with obsessive tendencies gets complimented for being organized, driven, productive, disciplined.

And sometimes those strengths are real strengths.

But sometimes they are also survival strategies.

I’ve always been an empath. I feel people deeply. I feel tension deeply. I feel sadness, pressure, disappointment, excitement, celebration, conflict. I feel all of it as if it belongs to me too. For a long time, that ability served me incredibly well in leadership because I genuinely care about people with my whole heart. I’ve always led human first.

But being an empath with OCD is complicated because the more stress I absorb emotionally, the more intense my need becomes to fix, solve, organize, control, or mentally work through whatever feels unresolved. My brain becomes relentless in its pursuit of resolution. It is exhausting.

And this week, in the middle of one of those moments, my daughter unintentionally taught me something meaningful.

We were in the car and I was frustrated because I felt like I had repeated myself twelve times already and she still wandered off and forgot to do the thing I asked. I remember finally saying something along the lines of, “I don’t understand how I can say the same thing over and over and it still doesn’t register.”

And she looked at me so calmly, maturely, and so matter-of-factly and said:

“It’s called ADHD, Mom. Me and Dad have it. You and Bella don’t. You can say the same thing over and over and our brains still won’t process it sometimes. It’s not on purpose. Sorry.”

And something in me softened instantly. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Because she was right.

Not just about ADHD. About all of it.

The behavior we judge most quickly is often connected to a battle we cannot see.

And please, if you get nothing else from this today, let that sink in and truly sit with you.

Because the coworker who seems distracted, the spouse who shuts down under stress, the friend who cancels plans at the last minute, the kid who genuinely cannot process what you’re saying no matter how many times you repeat it, the woman rage cleaning her kitchen while everyone else is enjoying the party may all be carrying something internally that you cannot see, fully understand, or even begin to relate to.

We spend so much time judging behavior before ever considering the possibility that someone is simply trying to survive their own mind.

And maybe that’s what Mental Health Awareness Month is actually supposed to remind us.

Not just awareness.

Understanding.

Because every single person you know is managing something internally while simultaneously trying to appear functional externally. Some people are just better at disguising it than others. I am one of those people.

I think the world would become a much gentler place if we stopped assuming people are intentionally difficult and started considering the possibility that they may just be carrying something heavy that we cannot see.

See you next Friday,

Mel 🤍

This week, while putting together an Instagram reel for my best friend of 28 years turning 40, I found myself scrolling through decades of photos. And I had to keep stopping.

Because hidden between all the country concerts, bad eyebrows, bar nights, weddings, and chaos was the slow evolution of me becoming a mother.

And honestly? I barely recognize the girl I used to be.

· · ·

The truth is…I never wanted kids.

I didn’t grow up dreaming about being a mom. I didn’t fantasize about baby names or nurseries or family photos in matching pajamas. I didn’t have the kind of childhood that made motherhood feel warm and safe and natural to me.

My mom wasn’t overly affectionate. I spent a lot of my childhood mothering my younger brother instead. Cooking dinners. Doing laundry. Decorating for holidays. Cleaning the house.

To me, motherhood looked exhausting.

So I decided I’d be different. I’d be the girl who broke the mold. The first to graduate college. The one who climbed the ladder. The one who shattered the glass ceiling.

And then I met a guy. Because somehow…it always starts with that.

Ironically, he didn’t want kids either. But we fell in love. We got married. And a few weeks after our cruise wedding, I woke up at 5am on Thanksgiving morning, took a pregnancy test, and just stared at it.

Positive.

Our forever souvenir.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it between the fear, the joy, the complete identity crisis of becoming someone’s mother, there was a woman on the other end of the phone every single night. My mother-in-law. The Queen of Pennsylvania. Big Nanny, to everyone who loved her.

If my phone didn’t ring by 5:01pm, hers was already calling mine.

“You can desperately love your child and still be absolutely terrified to become someone’s mother.”

That first pregnancy humbled me. There wasn’t a single part of me that didn’t feel pregnant. Physically, emotionally, mentally. And the self-doubt? Deafening.

• I can’t do this.

• What if I screw her up?

• What if she hates me someday?

• What if I become everything I needed but never had?

The Queen never let me stay in that spiral for long. She was the one who pushed me to leave big corporate and take the leap into a startup when I was convinced I wasn't ready.

And then she arrived. And somehow this tiny little girl cracked open parts of me I didn’t even know existed.

She made me softer.

Stronger.

More patient.

More exhausted.

More terrified.

More alive.

She made me understand that motherhood isn’t perfection. It’s presence.

And then, somehow, the girl who never wanted children suddenly wanted another one.

Enter daughter number two. A human tornado wrapped in glitter and attitude. My greatest challenge and one of my greatest gifts all at once.

The Queen never got to meet her. And that's a grief I carry quietly because if she had, she would have recognized her immediately. That second daughter doesn't just look like her. Every time she opens her mouth, it is her. The spitfire. The certainty. The way she takes up a room like she was always supposed to be the center of it.

Some souls don't leave. They just come back smaller and louder and completely unaware of the miracle they are.

· · ·

And somewhere along the way, motherhood stopped looking like the version I feared growing up. It became bedtime giggles. Dance parties in the kitchen. Sideline screaming at softball games. Middle-of-the-night low blood sugars that make your eyes burn so badly from exhaustion you think they might bleed but you get up anyway because diabetes doesn’t care if you’re tired.

It became carrying the stress so they don’t have to. Making magic out of ordinary days. Celebrating tiny victories like they’re Olympic gold medals just so your kids grow up knowing they are deeply loved.

Motherhood is being the chef, maid, nurse, therapist, Uber driver, teacher, party planner, referee, personal assistant, snack bitch, and emotional support human all in the same 24-hour period.

It’s needing a full-time translator just to communicate with your kids because apparently Gen Alpha speaks an entirely different language. The other day my daughter said something was “bussin” and I almost told her that in my day, bussin was just how we got to school.

It’s pretending you know what “ate,” “mid,” and “no cap” mean while silently praying nobody asks you to use them in a sentence.

It’s losing your mind because someone touched your Stanley cup after you specifically said not to and then feeling overwhelming guilt 14 seconds later because they looked sad.

It’s saying “because I said so” immediately after swearing you’d never become that parent.

It’s realizing your children are watching how you love yourself, how you handle stress, how you speak to others, how you recover after hard days. And suddenly the stakes feel impossibly high because little eyes are learning how to become humans from you.

· · ·

But motherhood also taught me something else this week while looking through all those old photos.

Not every woman arrives here the same way.

Some women become mothers unexpectedly. Some spend years praying to become one.

That same best friend I was making the reel for? The one who has loved me through every version of myself for 28 years? She walked through years of IVF, heartbreak, hope, disappointment, grief, and waiting because she wanted to be a mother so badly.

And now watching her love her rainbow babies with every single piece of her soul…it makes me emotional in a way I can’t even explain.

Because motherhood isn’t something everyone gets handed easily. For some women, it is a battle. A heartbreak. A prayer whispered over and over again.

And for the women aching to become mothers… I see you too.

Motherhood isn’t only defined by biology.
It’s love. It’s nurturing. It’s sacrifice.
It’s showing up.

This Sunday, I hope we celebrate all of it.

• The moms in the thick of it.

• The stepmoms.

• The grandmoms.

• The women grieving mothers.

• The women longing to become them.

• The single moms carrying everything.

• The bonus moms.

• The exhausted moms.

• The scared moms.

• The IVF warriors silently carrying heartbreak while showing up to baby showers with a smile anyway.

• The moms trying to break generations of hurt while raising generations of healing.

• And the ones we’re missing this year. The mothers who shaped us, who believed in us, who left too soon.

Some days motherhood feels beautiful. Some days it feels impossibly heavy. Some days you hide in the pantry eating snacks you told your kids you didn’t have. Some days you stare at sleeping faces and wonder how your heart physically fits inside your chest.

The children aren’t the only ones growing up.
The mothers are too.

Happy Mother’s Day. To every version of motherhood, and every woman we’re carrying with us into it - this one’s for you.

See you next Friday,

Mel

If this resonated with you, I’d love for you to stay close here with me.
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“How do you all know each other?”

And here’s the thing about that question when you’re in your forties - the answer is never simple. It’s never “we went to school together.” It’s a whole archaeology project with layers, timelines, and stories you can’t tell in one sentence.

“Well, we met when we were twelve. She pushed me into a locker.”

That last one is me. I did that. I still cannot tell you why. What I can tell you is that 28 years later, that same person was sitting next to me pulling up Google Images trying to convince a guy from Indiana that we are basically the real Snooki and JWOWW.

Which, honestly, isn’t not true.

There’s the friend I found on a stoop my first day of college, both of us with a cigarette we probably shouldn’t have been smoking. She became my sorority sister, my roommate, my travel partner. The person who has seen me in every city and every state I’ve ever been a mess in.

There’s the friend who always made sure my makeup was right before we went out, and quietly made sure I got home okay once we got there. You know the one.

And then there are the friends who came later. The ones yelling on the sidelines of a softball field, completely unsuspecting, who became the kind of friends you call every time you want to have fun.

Different entry points. Different chapters. Same thread running through all of it.

We spent four days in Nashville for a 40th birthday trip. Left the kids. Left the responsibilities. Sang Mariah and Celine on a rooftop at brunch. Danced on a tractor up and down Broadway. Closed down bars owned by Morgan Wallen, Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean, Miranda Lambert, and somewhere in all of it, every part of me felt deeply, thoroughly, undeniably 40.

But here’s the thing no one tells you about a trip like that.

It’s not really about the trip.

At some point, sometime after the round of drinks you swore you weren’t going to have, you stop performing vacation and you just…exist with each other. The real kind. The kind where nobody’s pretending to have it all together. Where the hard stuff comes out, the funny stuff, the things you’ve been carrying for months and haven’t said out loud to anyone.

And that’s when I looked around and realized: these women don’t just know me. They know versions of me that don’t exist anymore. They were there for chapters of my life that are closed. And somehow, they still showed up to this city, to this bar, to this exact moment, carrying all of it with them.

Here’s what I don’t think we say enough about female friendship in our forties:

Some of your friendships feel like an entire lifetime wrapped up in one person. Someone who knew you at your worst, watched you become something better, and still texts you memes at 2am like no time has passed.

Some hold one specific period in your life. The college years. The new-mom survival era. The early-career chaos. They were exactly who you needed for exactly that chapter, and that’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.

Some you grow with. Some you quietly grow apart from. Some you circle back to after years and pick up the exact conversation you left off because the best connections don’t require maintenance. They just require honesty when you find each other again.

And some of them have receipts. Literal documentation. Photographic evidence of choices you made between 18 and 23 that you would prefer never see the light of day.

These are the people you take to Nashville.

No questions asked.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how everything in my life has arrived exactly when it was supposed to. The friendships. The opportunities. The hard lessons that didn’t feel like gifts until years later. Nothing has ever happened on my timeline and every single thing has landed at precisely the right moment.

I started writing because I was drowning in a corporate job and needed somewhere to put it all. Someone told me I was giving away my best thinking for free. So I started Melthinks. And through that, I found people I never would have found otherwise -including some of you reading this right now.

We are all so much more connected than we remember to notice.

This week I got to spend four days in a city full of music with the women who have carried pieces of me through every version of who I’ve been. Some have known me so long they remember things I’ve forgotten about myself. Some are newer but they fit like they were always supposed to be there.

That’s the thing about the right people. They don’t always arrive with fanfare. Sometimes they’re sitting on a stoop. Sometimes they’re on the sidelines of a softball field. Sometimes they’re on the receiving end of a locker shove you still can’t explain.

But they show up. And they stay. And at some point you look around a bar in Nashville at 8pm on a Monday and realize you are surrounded by every chapter of your life - all singing the same song.

That’s not something you plan.

That’s just grace.

(Currently recovering. Full time. No further questions.)

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And the response was immediate. Almost overwhelming. The kind of validation that makes you pause and think, wait, was I sitting on this the whole time?

Oh and I had a conversation this week about writing a book.

A book.

Even typing that feels a little out-of-body.

Because the version of me sitting here right now? She didn’t exist a year ago.

Last summer, I was at my lowest point. And almost no one knew.

Not the mom.
Not the wife.
Not the leader people looked to for steadiness and answers.

And the truth is, I wasn’t entirely alone in it.

John saw more of it than I ever said out loud.

He’s been my biggest fan since day one.
The one who looks at me and says “you’re a badass” like it’s not even up for debate.
The one who believed I’d get here long before I did.

I think he always knew I would bet on myself eventually…I just needed time to catch up to who he already saw in me.

Still, I was living two lives.

One where I showed up polished, composed, “good.”
And another where I felt like I was slowly unraveling in real time.

I was in Austin one week every month, sitting in back-to-back conversations that carried real consequences for real people.

Reorganizations.
Leadership turnover.
Layoffs.

And I was the one in the middle of it all.

Holding the weight.
Absorbing the emotion.
Delivering the news that would change someone’s life in a single sentence.

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from that.

Not physical.
Not even just mental.

It’s emotional depletion.

The kind that sits in your chest.
The kind you can’t shake.
The kind you carry home with you, even when you’re physically there.

I remember closing my laptop after days like that and just sitting.

Staring.

Trying to come back to myself before I walked back into my life as a mom, as a wife.

And if I’m being really honest, there were nights I couldn’t fall asleep without that glass of prosecco.

Not to celebrate.

To quiet everything I had absorbed that day.

To take the edge off just enough so I could rest. So I could wake up and do it all again.

Because I kept telling myself:

This is the job.
This is what you signed up for.
This is what provides for your family.

And underneath all of it, there was a voice.

My gut.

Not subtle.
Not quiet.

Loud enough that I could feel it in my body.

Something has to change.
This isn’t it anymore.
You’re not okay.

And I ignored it.

Not because I didn’t believe it. But because acting on it would mean unraveling everything I had worked so hard to build.

If you're someone who holds everything together for everyone else while quietly falling apart inside then this next part is for you.

So I did what I’ve always done.

I pushed.

I stayed.

I told myself I’d get through it.

My dad has always said my middle name is relentless and for a long time, I wore that like a badge of honor.

But somewhere along the way, relentless stopped looking like strength.

And started looking like self-abandonment.

And then something happened I never could have planned.

Our CEO left.
An interim stepped in.

And almost overnight, everything shifted.

The work I do, the real work, the human work, the strategic work, was reduced to checklists and compliance.

The seat I had earned wasn’t really a seat anymore.

And for the first time in a long time, the noise cleared just enough for me to hear the truth:

This isn’t yours to fix.

This is your moment to leave.

It didn’t feel triumphant.

It felt terrifying.

But it also felt right.

Fast forward five months.

And I can say this now with honesty I didn’t have then:

I didn’t just walk away from a job.

I walked back toward myself.

And that hasn’t been pretty.

Healing isn’t linear.
It’s not clean.
It’s not a checklist you complete and move on from.

It’s noticing the patterns you’ve lived in for years and choosing, sometimes daily, not to repeat them.

It’s sitting in discomfort instead of numbing it.

It’s letting yourself rest without guilt.

It’s learning how to feel joy again without waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I’ve met people who have expanded the way I think about what’s possible.

I’ve had conversations that reminded me who I am outside of a title.

I’ve started showing up differently in my relationships with more presence, more intention, more honesty.

And slowly, I started to remember.

I built my career.

No one handed it to me.
No one mapped it out for me.

I did that.

And if I could do it once…

Why not again?

But this time, it’s aligned.
This time, it’s intentional.
And this time, it’s mine.

That’s what this week represents.

Not just a business launch.

A reclamation.

Of my energy.
Of my time.
Of my identity.

Of the version of me I almost lost in the process of holding everything else together.

If you’ve been following along these past few weeks, you’ve seen pieces of this unfold:

Week 1: I’m betting on myself, even though I don’t know what’s next
Week 6: I realized I forgot my value
Week 8: I chose to move like I believe in myself, even when I don’t fully yet
Week 9: I pulled the trigger

This is the moment where all of that becomes real.

Not perfect.
Not finished.

But real.

So if you’re reading this and you feel it in your chest…

If you’re tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix…

If your gut has been trying to get your attention and you keep pushing it down…

I want you to hear this:

You’re not stuck.

You’re being called.

And it might not look clean.
It might not make sense to anyone else.
It might feel like you’re about to blow up everything you’ve built.

But sometimes…that’s exactly what leads you back to yourself.

And this time, I’m not looking back.

See you next Friday,

~Mel

If this resonates with you, I’d love to have you here each week as I keep sharing what I’m learning in real time. I don’t have this all figured out but I’m sharing the journey as it unfolds.

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Because almost seven years later, and we found ourselves right back on the diabetes struggle bus.

And if you know us, you know this story.

You know the diagnosis. You know the journey.

So this isn’t about what happened.

It’s about what still happens.

Just days before her third birthday, Roe was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes.

And before I go any further, let me clear something up:
No, it’s not genetic.
No, it’s not because she ate too much sugar.

Type 1 is an autoimmune disease. Which means we never saw it coming. It showed up uninvited and has never left.

It started with water. So much water it didn’t make sense.

Then bedwetting. A few nights in a row and I thought it has to be a UTI.

I called the doctor. She said, “Bring her in immediately.”

And just like that, everything split into a before and an after.

You’ve had one of those moments too, haven’t you?

The phone call.
The diagnosis.
The instant where life as you knew it…ends.

And a new version begins whether you’re ready or not.

Within hours, we were admitted to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. My baby was in DKA. Her kidneys were starting to fail.

I was terrified.

And underneath that?

I was furious.

At the world.
At the unfairness of it.
At the fact that this was happening to her.

And because life doesn’t ease you in gently, 24 hours later, I started bleeding.

Shortly after that, I found out I was pregnant with our second daughter.

Real talk?

There were moments I sat there thinking, How are we supposed to do this? A newborn and a child with a 24/7 disease with no cure?

Also real talk?

I didn’t sleep for two years.

Finger sticks.
Syringes.
Alarms.
A baby who only slept if she was held.
A global pandemic swirling around us.

It was survival. That’s it.

And the part I don’t say out loud very often?

Was what it did to me.

The nights I hid in the garage so no one could hear me cry.
The times I stood in the bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror yelling, “Why?!”

And at my lowest point…

I was sitting on the bathroom floor, in a puddle of tears, drinking a glass of Prosecco, on the phone with one of my oldest friends, begging her to explain why this was happening to my daughter. Begging for answers that don’t exist.

(Side note: she never told a soul about that night. Never exposed that I broke. The strong one. The steady one. The one who holds it together.

She just held it for me.

That’s the definition of a real friend.)

Fast forward almost seven years.

We have the tools now.
The experience.
The rhythm.

Until…we don’t.

Because Type 1 doesn’t care how long you’ve been doing this.

And this week?

This week reminded me of that…

This week looked like:

No sleep.

Alarms going off all night because she’s dropping low. Hard low. The kind that makes your heart race before your feet even hit the floor.

One night I gave her six packs of fruit snacks over four hours trying to bring her up.

Six.

102 carbs just to stabilize.

And still sitting there watching the numbers like they might betray you again.

Layer in a full-blown insurance nightmare because someone accidentally added a different primary insurance to her file.

So I couldn’t get her Dexcom sensors refilled.

Hours of my life calling back and forth while the pharmacy says one thing and insurance says another. Each one pointing fingers at the other like it’s a sport.

No resolution. Just noise.

Some days I swear I hate insurance more than the diagnosis.

And then, because the universe has impeccable comedic timing-

I’m holding hot laundry straight out of the dryer. Feeling productive for about 10 seconds…

And the low alarm goes off. Double arrows down.

Outside, Bella is crying. I drop everything and run.

Bella is stuck hanging from the monkey bars.
Roe is upside down on a swing.
There is somehow a pool float on TOP of the monkey bars.

And I just stand there like, Is this real life?

Get Roe inside. Treat the low. And then I see it. An infection at her last pod site. Because two days earlier she slid into home at softball and dirt got into the insertion site. So now we’re managing blood sugars and fighting an infection under her arm.

Because with Type 1 it’s never just one thing.

It’s layers.

Always layers.

And in between all of this?

She’s growing up.

Her body is changing.
Her hormones are starting to shift.

Which means every spike, every drop, every number, is harder to control.

Adrenaline from games sends her soaring.

So I dose her.

And then later?

The crash.

Every time.

And no matter how many years you’ve done this, it still takes you down with it.

So why tell this story again?

Because I think people assume that time makes hard things easier.

That eventually you “figure it out.” That you arrive at some version of steady.

But the truth is…

some things don’t get easier.

You just get more practiced at carrying them.

And every once in a while…

something reminds you how heavy it actually is.

And maybe your story isn’t diabetes.

But I know you have one.

That moment that split your life into before and after.

That thing you learned how to carry, while the rest of the world kept moving like nothing changed.

And maybe this week?

It felt heavy again.

Heavier than it has in a long time.

So here’s what I want to say without wrapping it up in something pretty:

Strength isn’t found in the moments where you “handle it well.”

It’s found in the moments where everything falls apart…

and you still stay.

You stay in it.
You stay for them.
You stay for yourself.

Even when you’re exhausted.
Even when you’re angry.
Even when you’re standing in the middle of your life thinking:

I cannot believe this is still this hard.

Because the truth is, you don’t outgrow the hard parts of your story.

You grow alongside them.

And some weeks,

they catch up to you.

See you next Friday.

~Mel

If you’ve ever had a week that took you back to the beginning, then you get it.

That’s what this space is for.

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Refer a friend

Not in a surface-level, “I’m a little unsure” kind of way.

I mean the kind of self-doubt that’s always running in the background. It’s
quiet, constant, and loud enough to shape your every move.

Because when you don’t trust yourself, everything becomes a question.

Every decision.
Every risk.
Every opportunity.

You hesitate.
You overanalyze.
You replay conversations that haven’t even happened yet.

And the worst part?

The voice in your head starts to sound like the truth.

The one that says:
You’re doing too much.
You’re not doing enough.
You’re getting it wrong.
People are noticing.

Fear of what other people think doesn’t just visit…it settles in.

And if I’m being honest?

I live there more than I’d like to admit.

I’ve realized something about myself this week that didn’t feel great to say out loud:

When other people believe in me, I’m usually the last one to catch up.

I question myself constantly, with no real evidence, just a long-standing habit of assuming I’m falling short. And if I trace it back, it makes sense.

I was the kid who was terrified to bring home a B. Not because of the grade, but because of what it meant about me.

Somewhere along the way, I learned that anything less than perfect
was a problem to solve.

And that belief doesn’t go away as you grow up. It just gets smarter.

It follows you into your career.
Your choices.
Your risks.
Your ability to bet on yourself.

It shows up even when you’ve built a life you once dreamed about, and whispers that it could all disappear at any moment.

Because here’s the part I don’t say enough:

I’ve worked really hard for everything I have. No one gave it to me. No handouts. No family money I could fall back on.

And I still live with this underlying fear that I could lose it all…

I left corporate to create space.

More time.
More freedom.
More room to focus on what actually makes me happy.

And somehow, I feel more stretched now than I ever did before.

I’m pouring into our contracting business, trying things we’ve never done before. Marketing. Promotions. Sponsorships. Taking real swings.

And when the phone doesn’t ring right away?

I spiral.

Was it wrong?
Did I miss something?
Am I not cut out for this?

At the same time, I’ve fallen in love with writing Melthinks.

This space. These words. This outlet.

It matters to me.

But every time I hit publish, I wait.

Did it land?
Did anyone feel it?
Does it matter?
Will anyone new subscribe this week?

And when growth doesn’t happen as fast as I hoped…

I start questioning that too.

Maybe it’s not good enough.
Maybe I’m not good enough.
Maybe this isn’t worth continuing.

And right on cue, another voice steps in-

Go back to what you know.

The safe path.
The proven path.
The version of me that built a career as a CPO.

Because that version feels secure.

Predictable.

Certain.

This week, the noise got so loud I could barely hear anything else.

One morning, I didn’t even want to get out of bed.

Not because I was tired, but because I felt defeated before the day even started.

But I got up anyway.

I sent the emails.
I posted.
I kept going.

Not perfectly. Not confidently. But forward.

And life kept piling on.

A house we were days away from closing on fell through.
The buyer lost their mortgage.

Our tax bill hit, and it felt crushing in the moment.

And in between all of it…

I was trying to be present. A mom. A coach. A volunteer.

Holding all the pieces. Feeling like I’m dropping some of them.

And then something shifted.

Not outside of me.

Inside.

Nothing actually changed.

The facts stayed the same.

But the way I chose to see them didn’t.

This shift didn’t come out of nowhere.

It came during a weekly check-in with someone whose perspective I’ve come to deeply trust. Someone who has a way of cutting through the noise I create in my own head.

And in a matter of minutes…everything felt different.

The house that didn’t close?

It’s not a loss.
It’s timing.

The right person just hasn’t walked through the door yet.

And instead of panic, I felt gratitude.

Because we get to do this.
We know how to do this.

That’s not luck. That’s capability.

The tax bill that felt overwhelming?

It exists because our business is growing.

Because something is working.

Same situation.
Different meaning.

Here’s what I’m starting to understand:

Self-trust isn’t something you suddenly have one day.

It’s something you build, moment by moment, every time you choose not to abandon yourself.

Even when the doubt is loud.
Even when the outcome is unclear.
Even when fear is making a very convincing argument.

Because the truth is…

That voice in your head?

It’s not always right.

It’s just familiar.

And if you don’t challenge it,
it will keep making decisions for you.

Decisions rooted in fear.
In protection.
In playing small.

And I don’t know about you, but I didn’t leave comfort just to recreate it in a different form.

So here’s the shift:

I’m not waiting to fully believe in myself anymore.

I’m choosing to move like I do.

Because maybe confidence doesn’t come first.

Maybe it follows.

And if you’re at a point in your life where the noise feels overwhelming, where you’re questioning everything, and where you’re quietly wondering if you should just go back…

Don’t.

Not yet.

Not because it’s easy.
But because the version of you on the other side of this?

That future version of you is built on every moment you didn’t quit.

Even the ones no one else sees.

See you next Friday,

Mel

If this resonated with you, or if you felt even a small part of your own story in this, that’s exactly why I write.

There’s more of this. The real stuff. The unfiltered stuff.
The things we don’t always say out loud, but probably should.