Last summer, on one of those my-life-will-never-be-the-same-after-this trips to Italy’s Amalfi Coast, I took a BIG ole risk and unbuttoned the way-too-tight-and-giving-me-a-muffin-top pair of jeans I had my soul squeezed into, and I put on the most comfortable pair of yoga pants ever. I had been trying to squeeze my booty into a pair of jeans that simply didn’t fit my soul, and when I finally set it free, I realized that those jeans had never been meant for me to begin with. They just simply weren’t my jeans! I had always needed the stretchy yoga pants that could move and grow with my ever-changing soul, and I didn’t even know it.

Guilt is a driving force. I feel it almost every day. Guilt for not liking it. Guilt for feeling all of this in the first place and talking about it.

What I wish someone had told me seems so simple: I am not my brother, I am not my mom, and I am not my daughter. But what I model will shape my daughter. I want to model self-sufficiency and totally falling in love with your own inner being so that one day she can light that fire for herself.

Something that I think it’s important for people to know, including myself, is that my grief is just as valid as your grief. It might hurt less than if my father had been a part of my life, but it still impacted me deeply.

You are not (NOT, NOT, NOT) responsible for the thoughts a man chooses to think about your body. You can feel proud of your curves and still be a good person. It is absolutely ok to embrace your sexiness AND love God at the same time. You can love your body as it is and still set goals. You can love your body as it is and still want better for it. You are imperfect but perfectly imperfect. It is ok to love your body, Molly, and it is ok to allow others to love it, too.

If I were to go back and sit down with the girl with the girl who practiced her first name with last names that were never hers, “you have no idea how great being single can be!” would take up the tiniest fraction of the conversation.

When do we get to the point where we are comfortable enough in our own skin to just talk about normal things like they are rather than hiding them? I’m cool with telling you about my chin hair if you are cool with telling your little ones that they’re still just as beautiful with a rouge chin hair as they are without.

My dad was a very kind, very gentle man who had a green thumb and a golden heart. He loved to make people laugh and made people feel at ease. He was very artistic, painting and making music often. He also wrote poetry that described the scenes that played in his head on repeat. I inherited his artistic abilities, his love of music, and the love of creating tapestries with words. I still am told by others that I remind them of him, and I think of it as an honor. He was, and is, my hero.

The exact degree of pain this kind of loss can bring isn’t something that anyone can truly prepare you for, no matter how much they tell you or try to prepare you. However, one thing I saw over and over in conversations I had with people who had encountered similarly difficult things was a desire for more conversation about difficult, taboo, or simply not-talked-about topics. We feel alone and unprepared because no one is sharing their experience with hard things. We are just expected to figure it out on our own.