I am soon coming to the end of my story. But we aren’t quite finished yet. This episode is full of ups and downs and scary moments. I left off from where Sean’s sister had just moved out, and we were on our way to new phases of life.
Finally, Just the Three of Us
When Sean’s sister moved out, it was just Sean, Austin, and me in our home for a while. This was definitely a new experience for me, seeing how I was always running around, taking care of everything, and maintaining our lives. Even though it felt freeing in a lot of ways, I started to feel a little lost without all of the added responsibility. It was just our little doxie Ginger and us.
Austin was growing up, and he was working graveyard shifts. So I never really sw him much. When he was home, he was asleep. So when Sean started traveling back and forth to Florida, he was like, “Well, why don’t you come with me?”
Florida Changed Everything
The company Sean was working for had a company apartment. It was so awesome because we were allowed to stay there. For the next two years, on and off, this is what we did. We went back and forth. We probably lived almost half the year in Florida and then half the year in Georgia.
Our time in Florida was really special to us. For the first time, Sean and I were spending time together alone. Just us. It created an opportunity for us to get to know each other in a way we hadn’t really done before. It had never just been him and me, even since the beginning.
When we got married, it was an instant family for him. Then we have lived with my family, and then his family living with us, it had always been a full house.
But life in Florida was a lot different. We were alone. And the environment there was so much different than what we were used to. Things are so much more laid back. People there take off work early every day. Everybody watches the sunset around 5:30 or 6 o’clock. They do their work and then enjoy life. Back home in Atlanta, nothing is laid back. Everything is crazy. Work, traffic, and it’s just go, go, go. I never felt a sense of peace or calm living in Atlanta at all, so it was no wonder that over time, we fell in love with Florida.
We started dreaming of living there. We talked about what kind of lifestyle change could be for us. We bought season passes to Universal. We went to Disney. We spent a lot of time just being on the water, going to the beach, eating wonderful food, exploring museums, and seeing plays. It really drew us together in our relationship in a way we never got the chance to do before, and we loved it.
The Inner Work Begins
During this time, Sean’s career was really expanding. He’s branching out, starting to speak nationally. So he had a lot of time where he was gone. And I’m like, okay, well, what do I do with myself?
One morning, I was sitting in the apartment in Florida while he was at work, and there was a lady I followed on Instagram who started this thing challenge of writing Morning Pages for 7 days, and I started doing that.
Morning pages are a stream of consciousness writing. You just write three pages of whatever comes out of your mind first thing in the morning. The point is to release anything you kind of hold inside, the stuff that sits dormant in your subconscious that we don’t really ever get rid of.
I was like, now’s the time for me, where I don’t have a focus on anybody else. Now’s the time to just focus on myself. I’m still dealing with things I haven’t healed from. I’m still dealing with past traumas, baggage, and stuff I’ve been carrying around.
Because Sean and I were doing so well, I felt safe there. I felt safe to explore those things. I read books, did exercises, trying to find what the right thing for me was. This is where my personal development and inner work became a full-time focus. It was late 2018 when I really started that journey for myself, actively and intentionally focused on this path.
Austin’s Accident
On one of the few weeks we were back home in Georgia, the Friday before Mother’s Day, I got an early phone call. My phone rang, and I was still asleep, but I knew that something was wrong. It was a lady from Austin’s job. She said, “I’m here with Austin. He’s been in a really bad accident. He’s not breathing, but the ambulance is on the way. I need you to get to the hospital.”
When we arrived at the hospital, they were telling us he hadn’t been brought in yet. I found myself outside, stalking the ER driveway, waiting to see any ambulance that could be his. I was absolutely losing my mind. We had no idea what had happened, if he was ok, or what kind of shape he was in. We didn’t even know what kind of accident he had been in.
Austin had recently changed jobs, walking away from graveyard shifts to day shifts working for a country club golf course. He had been working on the green in a golf cart and had been coming down a hill around a corner, and there was an older man walking his dog on the track where he wasn’t supposed to be. Austin didn’t want to hit them, so he swerved off the track onto the green, and the golf cart flipped. It threw Austin out, and the golf cart flipped over and landed on him.
The man saw him and didn’t try to help. He got freaked out and walked off, leaving Austin disoriented. Austin had apparently tried to walk, passed out, and rolled down a hill into a ditch, and became unconscious. He wasn’t breathing.
By the grace of God, a woman who works at the golf course found him. She moonlighted as a paramedic. He couldn’t have been luckier in that moment. When she found Austin unconscious and not breathing, she was able to revive him.
Once the ambulance finally arrived with him, he was bung up and not in great shape, though he was alive and breathing now. He was in severe pain, and at this point, they thought he might have broken his back. After several scans to check for broken bones and internal bleeding, we found out that his back wasn’t broken, thank God. But it was very close. The way the cart fell, it broke three of his ribs very close to the spine. It damaged his lung and caused it to fill up with blood. It was a 2 day stay in the hospital and a four-month recovery.
Austin Chooses the Navy
After the accident, something shifted in Austin. Anytime anybody has a moment where they come to terms with their mortality, it can really shift everything in their life.
Austin was a really hard worker, but he never graduated from high school. He didn’t have a lot of ambition to do anything else. We always joked he was gonna be the basement troll until he was 40 years old.
But then one day, he came and said, “I’m thinking about joining the Navy.” And as soon as Austin realized he could have a GED and join the Navy, that was it. By the end of December, Austin had gotten his GED, and by January, he had seen a recruiter and enlisted.
He comes home with all these papers about wanting to be a rescue diver. Mama’s looking at it, and I’m freaking out. Last year, I felt like I almost lost him, and now you’re gonna go off and do something extremely dangerous.
Sean is trying to comfort me. He’s like, “This is gonna be the best thing that ever happened to him.” And I’m just like, oh my God. But at the same time, I wanted to be a good mother for him. There have been so many things in our life and the journey Austin has walked with me. Now is the time for me to step up and really be that full support for what he wants to do.
My 40th Birthday and the Painting That Changed Everything
I’m fixing to turn 40. My birthday’s coming up right after Austin had solidified all his stuff with the military. In my mind, my family had been talking it up, like it’s just gonna be this big thing. So I was very excited.
But then Sean informs me two days before, he’s like, “I’m not gonna be able to be here. I have to go to Florida.” And it turns out nothing happened. My family wasn’t planning a big thing after all. I was devastated. This only added to the anxiety I had started to feel once I realized Austin would be leaving soon. I was really starting to struggle.
On the night before my birthday, I was sitting on the couch, having severe anxiety. I needed to do something. Sean was gone, and it was just Ana, my daughter, and me at the house. For the past few months, I had the intention to write a journal about my life from the age of 20 to 40. I had yet to get around to it, so I decided that tonight I was going to start. As I began to write, I realized I felt like my 40th year was starting back where my 20th year had. I was pregnant with my second son at 20 and was preparing to give birth and give him up the eve of my 21st birthday. Twenty years ago, I was losing a son, and 20 years later, I am losing a son again. Though for two very different reasons, the trigger felt the same.
My body was going through the motions as if the trauma that had happened 20 years ago was happening all over again. And I sat down and wrote about that time. I wrote about the experience when I was pregnant, when I had to give my second son up for adoption. I had never sat down and written about it before.
I asked Ana, my daughter, if she would paint me a picture while I wrote. I wanted my chest cut open, like my rib cage being pulled open, with my heart visible and a hand grabbing my heart out of my chest. That picture, I felt, depicts the emotion I feel when I look back on this situation.
When she was finished, I was blown away. For the first time, to see my emotions on the outside of me was completely transformational. I felt like I had been carrying this around for 20 years. Feeling shame, judgment, regret, hurt, and pain. And when I saw what she had painted, it was almost instantaneous. I felt like I had lifted a thousand tons off of me.
I still have that picture today. I carry it because I never want to forget the possibility of healing. Sometimes we carry things so deeply, for so long, and we feel it’s the burden we have to carry. But the truth is, it doesn’t have to be like that.
There’s no greater gift I could have received for my birthday than healing.
When Austin Left
Austin was supposed to leave in June. But in late April, we got a phone call. Austin comes upstairs, and he’s like, “My recruiter called.” I looked at him and said, “You’re leaving.” He goes, “I’m leaving in two days.”
I felt unprepared. I felt caught off guard. I felt like I didn’t have enough time. I immediately started grasping for time and realizing it’s gone.
I wasn’t crying because I was sad, though I was. Austin leaving home was absolutely the best thing that ever happened to him. He has a beautiful life he’s created for himself. But the moment of watching your firstborn, and the whole life you have worked to create for him, to teach him, to grow him up, knowing how many mistakes I have made—and then to watch him despite those mistakes take the beautiful parts of who I am and grow into this man…was beautiful and very hard to do.
A few days after he was gone, a box came with all his belongings. His sunglasses, hat, jeans, shoes, wallet, and cell phone. It felt as if he had passed away, and they gave you the bag of all their stuff. You open it and think, the life that he once lived is over. And he is living a new one. I wrote him every single day when he was in boot camp.
The Artist’s Way
My saving grace. Right before Austin left, I had been researching morning pages, and I found out the lady who came up with the creative exercise is Julia Cameron. They call her the “Queen of Change”. She has written a book called The Artist’s Way. It’s a 12-week program, written for a creative journey. But the truth is, it’s really a step-by-step path to finding yourself again, to finding your true, authentic self, and helping you walk through a lot of the things you have trauma around. It has been one of the single-handedly most transformational books I’ve ever read outside of the Bible. It was my saving grace during the time Austin was gone. It gave me a true focus.
Halfway through the program, Austin’s gone in boot camp, Ana’s doing her thing, and I’m coming to this place where I realize this is what I want to do. I want to help other people. I’ve walked such a journey, experienced so much, already had so much healing, and I’m still on this new journey that’s going to bring me to a whole new place.
I knew then that this was what I was gonna do. I didn’t know how, what, or when, but I knew that one day my life, my story, the journey I have walked, would help someone.
Renovating the House and Our Marriage
Austin made it through boot camp and got shipped off to California. Ana moved out and started living her life. And then COVID happened.
Sean lost his job during COVID. So we were kind of just all there, spending time together as a family. We got to spend a lot of time with Andrew, too. He had been home on Spring Break when they shut the world down, and we got lucky he got to stay. Then we focused on the house.
If you have never renovated a home with your husband, let me tell you, it will change you. We fought so much about everything. When we fought about the cabinets, I was like, this is it. This is going to be the thing that breaks us. You thought it was all this other stuff in the past, but oh no, it’s definitely going to be these cabinets.
And then we got to paint colors. There must have been a hundred swatches of paint on the wall. He doesn’t like anything that I like, and I don’t like anything that he likes. I primed all of it because I couldn’t look at the swatches anymore.
Then I remembered a color I’d been trying to get him to paint another room for three years, a certain color. He always said, “No, it’s too dark.” But it was the only paint sample I had that we hadn’t looked at yet. I painted it on the wall. And by some miraculous intervention. He was like, “I love that.” After that, we were on a roll. We weren’t compromising; we were collaborating, finally.
We spent the next three or four months completely remodeling the home all by ourselves. We did all of the work. It was exhausting. We would get up in the morning and go until three o’clock in the morning.
The time Sean and I spent doing that together created this other bond between us. We learned that we create well together, and that was a very exciting thing.
Key Takeaways
✨ Sometimes the seasons that feel empty are the ones where you finally have space to heal.
✨ Writing and creative expression can release what we’ve been carrying for decades.
✨ Watching your children grow into who they’re meant to be is both beautiful and heartbreaking.
✨ The hardest collaborations, even over cabinets and paint, can become the things that bond you most deeply.
✨ Your story, your pain, and your journey can become the very thing that helps someone else find freedom.
Final Thoughts
I’m gonna stop there because I want to talk about this whole next part with Sean. I don’t want to just share it all by myself because I think it takes him to really bring the full conversation and the full story together.
Come back next week for the conclusion to my story.
