“I wasn’t supposed
to be here.”

Not in a dramatic way. Just — this wasn’t the plan.

The plan was to keep doing what I was doing. Working full time. Raising my three girls. Being a wife. Showing up for my family in California when I could. Managing it all, because that's what I do. That's what we do.

Then 2022 happened.

We were in Hawaii for Christmas — a makeup trip from 2020 that Covid had stolen from us. The weather was gorgeous. We were happy. The kind of happy you want to hold onto forever.

My phone rang.

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. My brother had pancreatic cancer.

What followed was the hardest season of my life. Flying back and forth between Texas and California. Doctor's appointments. Treatment decisions. Phone calls I wasn't ready for. And then, in the middle of all of it — another diagnosis. My mom. Progressive. Degenerative. The kind that takes someone from you slowly, piece by piece, in the cruelest and quietest way imaginable.

I cried in airport bathrooms. I cried on phone calls. I cried in my driveway before I walked inside and put my mom face back on for my girls.

I lost my dad to colon cancer when I was 13. I know what loss feels like. I know the particular silence it leaves behind.

In October 2024, I lost my brother too.

Six months later, I 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. My emotions were getting the best of me. The people who loved me could see I was breaking. But nobody knew what to do. And that silence — that well-meaning, heartbroken silence — was its own kind of ache.

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.

I couldn't find it.

So I built it.

I'm a mom of three girls — one in college, two in high school. I'm a wife. I'm a daughter. I'm a caregiver. And I am gloriously, ferociously winging it.

Gloriously winging it — ferociously flapping through the chaos, some days soaring, most days just trying not to crash.

Squeezed but Soaring is for the woman who is holding everything together while quietly falling apart. The one who is spread so thin she can't remember the last time she did anything just for herself. The one who loves fiercely and gives everything and still ends the day feeling like she failed.

You are not broken. You are not failing. You are in the hardest season most people never talk about.

And you found your people.