A collection of my Substack essays, written at the intersection of leadership and lived experience. This is a place for tender truths—where grief and grace coexist, and where we practice holding more than one thing at a time.
Leadership is often associated with certainty.
But the most powerful leaders I know don’t eliminate uncertainty — they learn how to remain steady inside it.
In this essay, Maria reflects on how parenting a complex child and leading in special education reshaped her understanding of leadership. The strongest leaders aren’t the ones with the clearest answers. They are the ones willing to stay present when the road ahead isn’t clear.
Two months ago, I watched my son walk through two metal doors and disappear from my sight.
This week, I watched him run back through them.
A reflection on separation, mother-knowing, fragile hope, and what it means to discover—against your own expectations—that your child is actually okay.
Before there were diagnoses. Before there were therapy schedules. Before there were words for what is and what would come. There was only love. In this essay, I write about the earliest flickers of knowing, the moments before language arrived, and the kind of love that forms long before understanding does. A story about first seizures, early intervention, and what it means to love your child fiercely — even when you don’t yet know the shape of the road ahead.
Radical acceptance keeps finding me—again and again. Not as a lightning bolt, but as a quiet practice of living inside what is. A reflection on grief and gratitude, relief and longing, loving fiercely, and learning to stop arguing with reality long enough to meet myself where I am.
After sharing one of the hardest moments our family has ever lived through, I needed space.
What I found when I returned wasn’t answers—it was gratitude. Not the shiny kind. The grounding kind. The kind that steadies me when depression whispers, when the future feels uncertain, and when joy and pain refuse to take turns.
This is a reflection on gratitude as practice, as anchor, and as a way to hold more than one truth at a time.
When my son stole my car, drove seventy-five miles, and survived what should have been unthinkable, I learned how thin the line is between chaos and grace—and how sometimes, survival itself is the miracle.
A Saturday morning errand turned into every parent’s worst fear when my sixteen-year-old son took my car and disappeared into the Colorado mountains. This is the story of terror, prayer, and the miracle that followed—when everything that could have ended differently somehow didn’t.
I used to believe leadership meant having answers. Now I know it means having presence—staying when things are uncertain, resisting the urge to fix, and remaining human when the tools stop working.
This is a story about foster care, full-circle moments, and the quiet courage of trusting others to hold your child when you can’t.
Hope doesn’t live in five-year plans anymore. It lives in small, steady choices—choosing safety, choosing love, choosing to keep going even when the future feels fragile.
A reflection on what it means to hold opposing emotions without resolving them.
An invitation to live honestly in the space where more than one truth is true.
A reflection on the moments that quietly shift a life from familiar to unrecognizable.
Written from the space between love, fear, and the question no one is prepared to answer.
Holding Both is a space for stories of grief and grace, leadership and lived experience.
Here, we tell the truth about hard moments while making room for hope, reflection, and quiet growth.
