Welcome!

Welcome to my website! I’m so excited to have you here, taking a peek at the many things that have been in motion for the last four years. Really, the story has been in motion for more than twenty years, but four years ago is when I finally realized it was time to give my story to the world.

It is a scary thing…revealing such intimate details of my life. I’ve never been one to crave attention, so being this vulnerable has been a work in progress. The transparency required to launch a memoir of my personal journey around a public and national tragedy makes me feel somewhat uneasy, but none of this has been about me anyway.

For several years I’ve been asked to write a book. I’m a busy mom with four kids, and wasn’t sure I had the time, courage or abilities to write a book. However, on an August day in 2014, my friend Karen Booker Schelhaas and I were on a walk together when I had an overwhelming feeling that this book needed to be written. Not so much for me, but for the message of hope others might find in reading it. So it began. Karen agreed to help me put my story into words, and we began the adventure of writing. What an adventure it has been. She and I could write another book about writing this book.

The journey to completion of Over My Shoulder has been healing, emotional, grueling and wildly unpredictable. Clearly, I had no idea what was required to package my story into a book! Along the way, I have grown in to a public speaker. The idea that I, a private introvert, stand in front of crowds and speak still makes me giggle. However, I believe there is healing in sharing our stories. Healing for the storytellers and the listeners.

Join me on my blog. I want to share the journey with you. Here, I will have the opportunity to walk you through my adventure as an author and speaker, and share more in-depth details of moments of growth, setbacks, joys, heartbreaks, triumphs and laughable mishaps. Though there have been many difficult events in my life, I have learned that owning my story is the only way I can make the choice about how it ends. Realizing that I get to choose what to do with the ‘hard stuff’ has allowed me to take control of my life and how I want to use those things for good. But, getting to that point is a story all in itself…

“It is important that we share our experiences with other people. Your story will heal you and will heal someone else. When you tell your story, you free yourself and give other people permission to acknowledge their own story” – Iyanla Vanzant