Squeezed but Soaring

We were in Hawaii for Christmas — my husband, my girls, and me. A makeup trip from 2020 that Covid had taken from us. The weather was gorgeous. We were happy. The kind of happy you want to hold onto forever.

My phone rang. It was my sister.

I moved to some lounge chairs on the grass of the resort, overlooking the ocean. I don't know why — maybe I needed the open sky above me for what was coming. And right there, in one of the most beautiful places I'd ever been, with the sound of the ocean in front of me and my family just steps away — everything changed.

I knew, before she even finished talking, that all the happiness I had in that moment would forever be different. My brother had cancer.

Pancreatic cancer. And just like that, we were going to war — me alongside my brother, fighting for his life while trying to hold mine together.

It was during one of those trips to California to care for my brother that we took my mom to the doctor. We came home with another diagnosis — one that would slowly take her from us in a different kind of way. Not all at once, but piece by piece, in the cruelest, quietest way imaginable.

My large extended family — mom, two sisters, two brothers, nieces, nephews, cousins — all live in California. I'm in Texas. So I became the one flying back and forth. Doctor's appointments, treatment decisions, phone calls I wasn't ready for. All while working full time, raising three daughters, being a wife, and trying not to disappear as a person.

I cried in airport bathrooms and on phone calls and sometimes just in the car in my own driveway — before I walked inside and put my mom face back on for my girls.

I know what it feels like to lose someone unexpectedly. I lost my dad to colon cancer when I was just 13 years old. I know the particular kind of shock that comes when someone you love is here one moment and gone the next — before you ever had the chance to be ready. Loss doesn't come with a manual — and it doesn't compare. Every single one leaves its own mark, its own silence, its own shape of missing.

In October 2024, my brother passed away.

After his death, someone in a position of authority actually said to me — everyone deals with loss and keeps going. As if grief had a timeline. As if it was reasonable to expect 110% from someone whose heart was broken and who just wanted to hide from everything and cry.

If you have ever been expected to keep performing, keep showing up, keep giving everything — while falling completely apart on the inside — this is for you. You deserved so much better than that.

Six months after losing my brother, we moved my mom to Texas to be close to us. And to give her the care she deserves, I resigned from my job.

One heavy life change after another.

I was juggling everything — and dropping things. And that's not me. My emotions were getting the best of me. Everyone around me could see I was breaking. But nobody knew what to do.

That loneliness — being surrounded by people who love you, watching them watch you fall apart, seeing the helplessness in their eyes. They wanted to fix it. They just didn't have the tools. Nobody does, really. Grief doesn't come with instructions for the person living it or the people loving them through it. And that silence — that well-meaning, heartbroken silence — is its own kind of ache.

That's what finally broke me open.

I looked for a community of women who truly got it. Women in the same impossible season — raising kids who still need them, caring for parents who need them more, grieving losses nobody prepared them for, all while trying not to lose themselves completely. And then I realized — if I was searching for this, so were thousands of other women just like me.

So I'm building it. Gloriously winging it, just like everything else — but building it nonetheless.

Squeezed but Soaring is for the woman attempting to do it all — knowing full well she can't, but showing up every single day anyway. Gloriously, ferociously, imperfectly. Some days soaring. Most days just trying not to crash. But always, always still in the air.

You are not broken. You are not failing. You are in the hardest season most women never talk about — and you are still showing up every single day. That's not weakness. That's the most extraordinary kind of strength there is.

Welcome to Squeezed but Soaring. You found your people.