If you’re skimming:
Someone you know is about to post a beautiful graduation photo. What you won’t see is the decade and a half behind it.
This piece is about the messy middle, the part no one talks about. What it actually costs to get somewhere hard. And three things that helped, none of which are what you’d expect.
The zigzag is not evidence that you’re doing it wrong. It might be the path.
In a few weeks, my son Trey will walk across a stage at Loyola University Maryland to receive his BA. That moment is deeply personal for both of us. And as I’ve been sitting with what it took to get here, I keep coming back to the same thing: it matters to give voice to the effort it required.
There will be beautiful pictures. There will be posts that capture the outcome cleanly and neatly. But when we only show the outcome and don’t honor the process, it quietly tells a story that strips the outcome of the weight it actually carries. It makes it seem like achieving something in the face of poor decisions, limited resources, isolation, and real physical, emotional, even cognitive challenges was somehow easier than it actually was.
That messy middle rarely gets named. And that omission has a cost. Because somewhere, someone is in the middle of their own hard thing. And when no one talks about the process, it’s easy to believe the struggle is theirs alone. That everyone else is managing just fine. That the difficulty they feel must mean something is wrong with them and that their win won’t come.
It is not them. The thing is just hard.
Trey and I have shared countless “never forget” moments. The kind you carry. Some beautiful, some hard, most of them sitting right next to each other. I think about the time we went to a wrestling match and Trey completely lost his mind when John Cena came out. Pure joy. I will never forget it.
And then there were the moments that asked everything of us. Like when I made the decision to close a private practice I had spent ten years building because my son needed something I could not give him in New York. Or when I moved us to Maryland after spending three years homeschooling him during the day and working in my practice at night.
It was not easy for Trey either. Spending three to four days a week, two to three hours a night, with a tutor after school from elementary through our homeschooling years. First trying to get his brain to work the way traditional education demanded, and then trying to go back and learn what had been missed when we shifted in homeschooling from our earlier goals of trying to pass annual exams to actually mastering the basics. That is a lot for a kid to carry. I am sure it hit his confidence at times. And still, he kept going.
But that is Trey. He might complain, but he is going to dig in and keep going. He is tough.
It has been a test of our stamina, our relationship, our ingenuity and creativity, and our faith. It was hard. The new math alone almost took us out.
I’m sure the chronic stress has had some impact on my body. That’s not to say, as I’ve said before, that it wasn’t worth it. It was. But it came at a cost. And if I’m being honest, I think it’s a cost we will both feel for years to come.
A few things got me through. Not grit, though there was plenty of that. Not clinical training, though it helped. Something else.
The first was faith. I want to be careful here because I know that word carries damage for a lot of people. Religious trauma is real, and I am not going to talk around that. What I can tell you is that I had to sit down and get intentional about what faith actually meant for me, separate from anything I had inherited. What I came to was this: I needed to believe that something larger than me had me. Despite my errors. Not after I got it right. Just had me, period.
My job was to do the next important thing as well as I could and to stay open to the soft places when they arrived. To let help in when it came, even through unexpected people or unexpected doors. It did not come naturally. I had to be intentional about trusting that those soft spots were real.
That belief had to be paired with something that took me much longer to learn.
The second was forgiving myself for the zigzag nature of my growth. Because knowing what to do and being able to do it are two entirely different things. For a long time I experienced that gap as a flaw in my character. And maybe it was. It was where I was underdeveloped. But that is okay. It is what it is until it is not.
I worked in therapy. Honesty with myself about who I actually was, not who I thought I should be. Giving myself room to be in process, which is harder than it sounds when you are also the one holding everything together.
And even with all of that, I could not have done it alone, not in the way that actually mattered.
The third thing was having someone in my life who held compassion for me when I could not hold it for myself. Who kept the faith in me while I was still finding my footing in it. Thank you, E. I would not have moved through some of what I moved through without you holding that particular piece.
There are not many pictures of Trey and me together from those years. There was no one to take them. But we were there. Both of us, showing up with all of our imperfections, doing what we were supposed to do when it mattered.
Now humor the proud mom.
Trey is graduating in May. He held his scholarship for four years, wrote eight novels, and walked into Montgomery County Public Schools out of homeschool, reading above grade level. He became, quietly and on his own terms, exactly who I believed he could be.
I might cry at that graduation. After a lifetime of keeping it together, of there being no time for anything else, my body might decide that May is finally safe enough to feel all of it.
If it does, those tears will have been a long time coming.
If you are in the middle of something hard right now, I want you to know that the cost is real. You are not the only one. And you might not be doing it wrong — the zigzag might be part of the path to your win. What got me through probably will not be what gets you through. Make time to sit down and figure out what that is. I am a little biased, but that conversation might start in therapy.
Stay open. Do the next right thing. Let the soft places land.
