Before pinball.
Before the walks.
Before the coffee and the thought that changed everything.
There was a whole life.
I became a mom young. My oldest was born just before I turned 20, and in a lot of ways, we grew up together. Then more kids came along — four in total — and suddenly my life had a compass. They pointed me forward, even when the directions were messy or unclear.
Sometimes we got lost.
Sometimes the map made no sense.
But we always found our way back.
Long before that, though, there was my husband.
We met in seventh-grade math class — just friends. Best friends, really. We stayed that way through high school. Life threw us rocks, lemons, and a few other things before we ever became “us,” but somewhere along the way we realized something important:
Together, life made more sense.
When we finally did get together, my oldest daughter was just five months old, and his oldest son was about to be born. We didn’t start with an easy story — we started with a real one. And from the very beginning, we were a team.
He is my rock.
My best friend.
My partner.
Hands down, the most important person in my life.
The kids came next — and they became my compass. They led me into adulthood, taught me responsibility, humility, pride, fear, and joy. They showed me what love actually looks like when it’s inconvenient and exhausting and still worth everything.
I’ve always loved kids. I started babysitting when I was 11 years old, for God’s sake. So working in schools felt natural. I spent years — honestly, probably 20-plus when I really count it — working in childcare, before-and-after care, instructional assistant roles. I was always there. Always helping. Always giving.
At the same time, I was chasing a degree.
It took me 22 years to earn my bachelor’s degree in education.
Twenty-two years of struggling, fighting, kicking, screaming, stopping, starting, and starting again. My kids watched all of it. They saw me exhausted. They saw me frustrated. They saw me refuse to quit.
And eventually, I did it.
I became a teacher.
And then… my heart broke.
I loved the kids. I will always love the kids.
But teaching — the actual job — nearly destroyed me.
Eighty-hour weeks. No time to eat. No time to sleep. Endless meetings, paperwork, pressure, and peripheral demands that made it feel impossible to actually teach. Every day I went home feeling like I had failed the kids — not because I didn’t care, but because the system made caring unsustainable.
I tried for two years. I really did.
And then I had to walk away.
Letting go of teaching crushed me. It felt like giving up a piece of myself. But I also knew something deep down: that was not the way to live.
When all was said and done, I was nearly $100,000 in debt from college — loans, interest, all of it. If nothing else, my kids learned something important from watching me:
Education matters.
But how you pursue it matters too.
They learned to be smart. To be intentional. To find their own paths.
And then… they flew the nest.
With pride. With fanfare. With dreams that carried them across the country — college, military, life.
That’s when the ground shifted again.
And that’s when pinball found me.
My pinball community became my support system. My cheerleaders. My people. They didn’t fix me. They didn’t push me. They simply stood with me while I remembered how to stand on my own again.
My husband cheered me on — and then stepped back, trusting me to find my strength.
Pinball gave me my footing.
Wellness would come later — as my stride.
But this?
This was the foundation.
Because you don’t trip into wellness.
I didn’t trip into wellness.
I walked into it — after I learned how to stand again through pinball. 💜 What keeps me moving are the signs I notice along the way. Still going. 👣🪶