Growing Up

I grew up in a two-parent household. My father was in the Navy, so he wasn’t home often. I attended parochial school from first through twelfth grade. We lived in the same house from the time I was six years old. From the outside, we might have been considered middle class for that time. But I remember something different. I remember a quiet strain.

I can still see my father sitting at the kitchen table with his green ledger book, carefully writing out what was owed — line by line, dollar by dollar. Even as a child, I could sense the weight of it. There was always this underlying tension, this unspoken awareness that money didn’t stretch far enough.

My mother used to say he would “rob Peter to pay Paul.” I didn’t fully understand the phrase back then, but I understood the feeling. I felt it in the room, in the silence, in the way every dollar already had a place before it even arrived.

And without realizing it, I started learning. I learned how to pay attention. I learned how to read what wasn’t being said. I learned that stability on the outside doesn’t always mean peace on the inside.

That awareness followed me into adulthood. I became responsible, careful, and observant. The one who thinks ahead, who prepares, who feels the shift before it happens. But if I’m honest, which I am, part of me was also living in survival mode. I was always calculating, always making sure things didn’t fall apart.

I know I’m not the only one. So many of us were shaped in environments where we learned to hold things together, to carry more than we should have, to stay strong even when things felt uncertain underneath.

That’s why I’m speaking now. Because power isn’t something we earn after we’ve struggled enough. It’s something we already hold — even in the moments when we felt uncertain, even when we were just trying to make sense of what we were living through.

This space, this blog, is for the women who learned early how to survive, but are now ready to live differently.

To move from constant awareness… to intentional peace. From holding it all together… to finally feeling heard. From survival… to power.

Because we don’t just come from our past, we get to choose what we carry forward. And even now, I can trace parts of who I am back to that kitchen table — to that green ledger book that I have to this day, to those quiet moments of figuring things out.