What Comes Next

The boys

I'm raising two sons. They are the reason the survival years had to be survived, and the reason the building years have a deadline: I am building the childhood home they'll come back to at thirty.

That's most of what I'll say about them here. They didn't choose a mother who publishes things, so their stories stay theirs until they're old enough to give them away.

Home

The house is still being repaired — plaster, patience, one room at a time. So is everything the house stands for. Both kinds of work are slow, and both are the good kind of slow: the kind you get to keep.

The town

Titusville gave me somewhere to land, and I intend to be useful to it. The plan is simple to say and long to do: help its local businesses become more visible, more connected, and more digitally capable — until being small and local stops meaning being invisible online.

The work ahead

The unfinished list, in no particular order except the last item, which is first:

• Growing Forever Still Studio, one local business at a time
• Developing House Booker for the venues that deserve it
• Teaching Vale to be a better steward
• Strengthening Titusville Square as the town grows into it
• Deepening Fortress, and continuing to teach Wren how to carry context without losing the person inside it
• Growing Liam's Storyland carefully around Liam's imagination
• Building Reflections and Architecture of Us — two different doors into the shared work of understanding one another
• More songs, including Architecture of Us, and the visual stories that go with them
• A durable, ordinary, unremarkable life for my family — the most ambitious item on this list

Still Home

The love I didn't think was coming

I spent most of my life believing love would ask me to disappear — that it would arrive loudly, take up all the room, and leave me carrying whatever was left.

So I stopped waiting for it. I learned how to survive. I built a home. I raised my boys. I was finally learning who I was when no one else was telling me who to be.

That is the woman Mark met. He didn't save me — he recognized me. The mother. The veteran. The builder of strange, beautiful things. The person still becoming. And he chose to stand beside her.

Mark is a builder in every sense of the word — an Army veteran, a fourth-generation carpenter who restores old houses for a living. So he understands, better than most, that the strongest things are not replaced just because they've endured damage. You meet them where they are. You honor what survived. You build forward, carefully.

He did not step into a finished life. He stepped into a house still being restored, a family already in motion, and a woman who had learned to carry everything herself. He did not take over the life I had built. He began building beside me. He is restoring this house, room by room, with his own hands. He shows up for the boys in the ordinary ways that make a family. And with me, he brings his hands to the work without asking me to put mine down.

For the first time, love doesn't feel like surrender.

I was already still here. He made here feel like home.

See what we are building together · His room in this house — The Workshop