On Endings and Beginnings

The THING I Always Wanted

When I was a little girl, I played with dolls. Not because someone told me to, not because it was the only option (my sister made sure I had Tonka trucks also)— but because I genuinely, deeply wanted to be a mommy. It was the thing I pointed myself toward from as far back as I can remember. Other goals were not as clear as a kid, but that one?  Definitely.

So when people ask me how it feels to have both kids launched — Conman and Tbone, out in the world, building their lives — I want to be honest with you. It’s wonderful. And it’s hard. Sometimes in the same breath.

This Mother’s Day looks different than the ones before it.

Tbone just graduated from college, and Conman is working and starting his life.  They have both ended up close to home — a gift I do not take lightly. Their girlfriends have moved here and I must also acknowledge that THEIR moms are having a very different Mother’s Day as well (thank you both, truly). I find myself looking forward to the slow, sweet expansion of what our family becomes in the coming years:  more people around the table. More stories coming in from the outside world. More chances to open our home and our lives to the people they are choosing.

Himself made all of this possible in ways that don’t fit neatly into a paragraph. None of it — not the family we built, not the life we have, not who I am becoming — happened without him. I want to say that plainly.

Yet, there is something about this particular Mother’s Day that asks me to sit with the bittersweetness of it. Because the chapter I always wanted to write is, in a sense, complete. Not over — our kids don’t stop needing us, and I know that. However, the daily work of raising them, of being the gravitational center of their world, of motherhood as a full-time, full-contact, every-waking-thought endeavor? That part is done. If I’m being really honest, that sentence was hard to write as the “job title” of MOM has really changed.

Change is hard even when it’s good. I think we all know that and don’t say it enough.

What I’ve come to understand — slowly, imperfectly, in the way most true things arrive — is that the instinct that made me a mother was never only about my children.

It was about something deeper. A pull toward helping people find their way. A need to see potential in someone and refuse to let them stop short of it. A belief that the right support at the right moment can change everything.

When I worked with a marketing firm on my brand, they asked me what I wanted to be as a coach. I didn’t hesitate. I said I wanted to be the mentor — the support, the steady presence — that many of us missed growing up. The one who looks at you and sees what you actually are, what you’re capable of, and where you could go if someone just refused to stop believing in you. As a result, they designed my logo in a way that captured it all. That green M. Look at the bottom — it’s an embrace. Look at the top — it opens into wings. I didn’t design that. They saw it in what I was trying to say. And when they showed it to me, I understood something about myself that I hadn’t quite put into words yet.

In my 50s, recently diagnosed with ADHD and navigating the last of the pandemic, I went back to school. On my own. It wasn’t quick and it wasn’t easy, and yet there were more than a few moments where the little voice that sounded a lot like certain teachers from my past told me I was in over my head.

I finished anyway.

Last week I received my Master Coach Certification from InnerLifeSkills — certified in Enneagram Coaching, Life Coaching, Business Coaching, Systems Coaching, and Personal Power Coaching. And when it was done, I sat quietly and cried. Not tears of sadness, but rather the kind of tears that come when something you weren’t sure you could do turns out to be something you DID.

Perhaps I was drawn to coaching because I quietly anticipated a sense of grief when the kids launched.

Here is what I know now, standing at this particular intersection of endings and beginnings:

The love I have — the overage of wanting to help, to support, to see someone clearly and walk alongside them — doesn’t retire when your kids no longer need it in the same way. Instead, it just finds new people to pour itself into.

That’s what coaching is for me. It always was.

If you are in a season of transition — if something is ending and you don’t yet know what begins next — I want you to know that I understand that feeling from the inside. And I also know that the other side of it is real.

This Mother’s Day, I am grateful for Conman and Tbone and Himself and the life we built together. I am grateful for what’s coming — the expanding table, the new family we’re growing into.

And I am, maybe for the first time, fully ready for what’s next.

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