2025: Lessons from the Valley
2025 was one for the books.
It was a year of long pauses and deep reflection, a year where many days were spent in the valley and far fewer on the mountaintop. A year filled with storms—some sudden, some slow-building—and not nearly as many victories as I would have liked. It wasn’t a year that offered easy answers or tidy endings. It was a year that asked me to sit with discomfort, uncertainty, and fear, and to learn what it truly means to endure.
Difficult seasons have a way of stripping life down to its essentials. When the noise fades and the days feel heavy, you learn quickly what matters and what doesn’t. You learn what you can cling to when there is nothing left to hold but hope—sometimes not even hope as we like to define it, but simply the decision to keep going.
There were moments this year when the darkness felt especially close. Moments when the questions came faster than the answers, when the weight of “what if” pressed hard against my chest. And one of those moments came under fluorescent lights, in a hospital room, as I prepared to undergo anesthesia for a heart catheterization.
Lying there, surrounded by beeping machines and hushed voices, my mind did not wander to all the things I still wanted to do or all the plans I hadn’t finished. It went straight to one thing—one moment I desperately wanted to reach.
My daughter’s wedding.
As the anesthesia began to take hold, fear crept in. Not the loud, panicked kind, but the quiet, sobering fear that asks: What if? What if I don’t wake up? What if I don’t get there? What if the moment I’ve been holding onto slips past me?
In that moment, I clung to prayer. I clung to love. I clung to the image of my daughter in a wedding dress, to the sound of laughter and music, to the sacred hope of being present for one of the most important days of her life. When everything else felt uncertain, that was my anchor.
And I made it.
I made it to the wedding.
And it was beautiful.
My daughter was beautiful—radiant in a way that goes far beyond appearances. There is something profoundly moving about watching your child step into a new chapter, about witnessing love take shape in front of you after all the years of raising, protecting, worrying, and praying. Standing there, heart full and eyes wet, I knew with absolute clarity that every storm, every valley, every fearful moment had led me to that sacred joy.
2025 taught me that difficult times don’t always come with immediate redemption. Sometimes the victory isn’t in the overcoming but in the surviving. Sometimes it’s in showing up—still breathing, still loving, still willing to hope even when hope feels fragile.
What do we cling to in the darkest moments?
We cling to love.
We cling to faith.
We cling to the people and moments that remind us why staying matters.
We cling to the belief that even in the valley, beauty can still be waiting ahead.
This year wasn’t easy. It wasn’t gentle. But it was meaningful. And if there is one lesson I will carry forward, it is this: even when the storms are many and the victories feel few, life can still surprise us with moments so beautiful they make the struggle worth it.
2025 may have been a year of hard lessons—but it was also a year that reminded me why I keep going.
Mothersense and Miscellaneous 