After hitting rock bottom as a foster mom, the right therapist changed everything. Here is what five years of real therapy taught me and why I believe every foster and adoptive parent needs one.

Born to two teenagers, one in foster care, raised by grandparents who did not both want me, called stupid for years. The statistics said I was not going to make it. Here is what happened instead.

In a world of diagnoses, what have you questioned?

After my aunt passed, my plants became the place she still lives. What I learned about grief, healing, and why self-care is a daily act, like gardening.

Healing doesn’t always happen in dramatic moments. Sometimes it arrives quietly through small choices, joy, movement, and self-care.

There is a kind of dying nobody talks about. The slow, quiet kind that happens when we stop taking care of ourselves while waiting for someone else to finally show up for us. This is the story of how I spent most of my life waiting to be seen and what happened when I finally realized I was the one I had been waiting for.

There are songs you know. And then there are songs that find you when you need them most. Landslide found me on the way to work one morning and cracked something open. What followed was a playlist called Nicks Mix, a healing room I built with my own hands, and the slow, messy, beautiful release of everything I had been holding inside my body for years. This is that story.

How I was taught therapy = crazy. How those lies kept me from help during foster care crisis. What actually happened when I finally went. Part 2 of 2.

So what is self care really?

It is the things you do to keep yourself functional, present, and whole.

Sometimes it is a massage. Sometimes it is a vacation. Sometimes it is a long bath with candles and a glass of wine.

And sometimes it is standing in a hot shower at 9pm after a day that tried to take everything from you and just letting the water do what water does.

Wash it off. Start again tomorrow.

That is enough. That has always been enough.

They are just kids. How hard can it be?" If you have ever said something honest about how hard this is and been made to feel ashamed for it, this essay is about that. The comments that land wrong. The guilt layered on top of an already impossible situation. And what the people on the outside of your life are not seeing.

Foster parents carry one of the heaviest emotional loads of any caregiver group and almost nobody is studying what it does to them. While research shows foster children develop PTSD at twice the rate of war veterans, there is no equivalent data on the parents absorbing that trauma daily. This essay is about that gap, and the years I spent angry, isolated, and losing myself inside a system that was better at recruiting families than sustaining them.

Feeling Called Isn’t the Same as Being Ready. A hard truth about foster care: good intentions and a calling are not always enough. Sometimes understanding the reality is the most important step.

The Day the Ocean Held My Broken Pieces. A quiet moment by the ocean became the beginning of healing, where broken pieces of the past slowly washed away with the tide.

Why did you Leave? I thought he was the one. A quiet reflection on the words that once tried to define me, the silence that followed, and the strength it took to rebuild a life on my own terms.