about

There was a season of my life where I was not sure the lights would stay on.

I was a single mother of three children doing what single mothers do – carrying everything, showing up for everyone, and running on a combination of love, exhaustion, and whatever government assistance program would help us make it through the month. I was not failing because I was not trying. I was trying harder than I had ever tried at anything. I just kept ending up in the same place.

There were dark times during those years that I do not share in detail. What I will tell you is that I came out of them with three kids depending on me and a decision that something had to fundamentally change. Not just my circumstances but who was in charge of my decisions.

I decided I was going to become a teacher.

To do that I had to pass the ABCTE certification exam. I studied. I failed. I studied harder. I failed again. I found every resource I could. I failed a third time. Most people would have stopped there. I understand why. But I had made a promise to my children – not out loud, not formally – just the quiet internal kind that a mother makes when she looks at her kids and decides they are going to watch her make it.

On the morning of my fourth attempt, my youngest son Zayden, stood outside his school and looked at me and said Mom, promise me you will make it.

I promised him.

When I got to the testing center I realized I had forgotten my ID. I drove home. I got it and I drove back. I ran across that parking lot. I sat down at that computer with my heart pounding and my hands shaking.

And I passed.

But I did not know it yet.

I was so overwhelmed walking out of that testing center that I crumpled the paper up and threw it in the trunk. I could not look at it. I drove home with it back there – folded up, crumpled, face down – because I was not sure I could handle what it said.

When I got home my three children were waiting at the door like they knew something had happened. They asked me if I passed.

I told them I was not sure. I went to the trunk and I handed them the paper.

They looked at it before I did. And they told me I passed.

I had to see it myself. I unfolded that paper and I looked at it and I broke down in tears right there. Everything I had been carrying – every failed attempt, every dark year, every morning I showed up when I had no business showing up – it all came out at once.

That moment did not just mean I had passed a test.

It meant the version of me that had been running my decisions – the one built for survival, the one that expected things to fall apart, the one shaped by every hard season and every dark year – that version no longer fit who I had become.

I had not just passed a certification exam. I had changed who was in charge.

Today I wake up in a life that would have felt completely out of reach from where I started. I teach. I write. I speak on stages. I coach women who are carrying the same weight I carried and showing up the same way I showed up and getting the same results I kept getting until I finally understood what actually had to change.

The lights stay on. The bills get paid. My children watch me build something.

And I get to spend my days helping other people do the same thing.