Hello again! Back in Texas amid a family health scare and...life is never what you think it will be.

Hi everyone… I know it’s been a crazy long time since I’ve checked in. I’m trying to stay positive about a fairly negative reason for being gone. One thing therapy has drilled into me over the past year is that everything that happens to us comes with unintended consequences—some good, some bad. The past few weeks have been a clear example of that.

The event that lit the fire under all the recent drama was my dad’s heart. I never want to leave people in suspense: he’s fine, he will be fine. For a man in his mid-60s, he’s in amazing shape—super active, super involved with his grandkids and his community. But at his age, reality sneaks in sometimes. I’ve mentioned before that he started having “wake-up calls” with his heart right around the time Bubs and I were trying to recover last year. I think I even said something vague about feeling guilty because my sisters were driving him to Houston while I was too wrapped up in my own stuff to go.

Well, things boiled over in mid-to-late August, and he had a minor heart attack. Again, he’s okay, recovering well, and he will be fine. But here’s the hard part: we live 12 hours away. My dad and Bubs still co-own a business that Bubs suddenly had to try to run from Tucson. And family wise, way too much of the day-to-day weight was falling on my mom and sisters. So when we got the news, we decided it was time to drive back to Texas and help. We’re lucky, Brian was able to shift his schedule and do research from Tucson, and Evie is basically already part of the family, so they stepped in as surrogate parents to Abby and TJ while Bubs and I packed up the SUV with Ashley and headed home.

The past few weeks have been a blur. Some big life decisions came out of that time, too. On the small side: my dad needs to stop drinking beer (sorry, Dad) and start doing mindfulness exercises (the image of him in loose linen meditating on a cushion cracks me up). The big one: my mom is insisting he sell the business.

I’m right there with her—and honestly wish one of us had spoken up three years ago. The truth is, my dad was working himself into the ground trying to build something from scratch in his 60s. I love both my dad and my husband's work ethic but the reality is the business was the match that lit the fire of me and Bubs problems,  time and energy away away from each other, and communication so bad that Bubs vented his frustration publicly instead of just talking to me. I won’t say “good riddance” because I know it’s been valuable for both of them, but holy shit, enough is enough.

To be fair, no one expected their little enterprise to become much. My dad took his ag knowledge and created what is basically a widget to help gardeners grow in small spaces (I’m being vague because I don't understand it at all and also because his face is all over the website—and with the business up for sale, I don’t want to cause problems). Bubs helped him figure out how to scale production locally. They thought it might bring in a couple hundred extra dollars a month. Then the pandemic hit, and suddenly everyone wanted to garden. Word spread, demand grew, and before they knew it, my dad and Bubs were running a full-time business with a warehouse, employees, and all the headaches that come with it.

While we were home, my job was to ease some of the pressure on my mom and sisters. Aside from desperately missing Abby and TJ, I was in heaven. I was with my people again, with purpose and a role. I got to nag my dad about doing too much too fast. I got to watch my mom bounce and coo with Ashley. I got to sleep in Jenn’s king bed, cuddling with her and Jess, gossiping about how men are annoying and how we should just buy a compound in the Hill Country, raise our kids together, and never again hear things like, “Do you really need that?” or “Don’t we already have enough throw pillows?”

Bubs, though, was on a very different mission. He had to gather the dozen or so employees and tell them that he and my dad were selling. He’s one of the most direct people I know, but when he came home that night he looked like he’d seen a ghost. Telling loyal, grateful employees that he had no idea what the future held—or how long it would take—gutted him. Two of the “bad eggs” quit on the spot (probably for the best), but the rest promised to stay on through the sale. The good news: their engineer sees the value in the company and wants to find loans or investors to keep it going. The bad news: deals like that rarely come together. For now, they’re waiting to see if it materializes. But with my dad’s health and Bubs fully committed to his other jobs, time is short. The next step would be working with a business broker and advertising nationally, which means the chances of the business staying local are slim. That’s weighing heavily on Bubs, and honestly—after 20 years of knowing him—I don’t know what to say to make it better.

We got back to Tucson on Friday and are just now finding our rhythm again. Life is funny that way. We were doing so well—and by all accounts, we still are. I just got two weeks with the people I love most, being with family. I have such great people in my life that I can leave my older two kids in their care, only to come back and hear, “Mom, it’s fine if you go away again—Evie is never late to school” (the not-so-subtle dig being that I always am). And while that’s happening, my husband is carrying the weight of a million things and facing the loss of something he helped create and disappoint the people who helped him out along the way.