I had spent the weekend communing with spirits, so I was a little more porous than usual.

It was just as I remembered it.

So many orchids. So many angels.

Here are just a few that I met:

What struck me wasn’t only the beauty.

It was the abundance.

Angels for everyone.

More than enough.

🕊️

SAM

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We spent a day at the Phillips Academy archive together, sorting through my grandfather’s personal papers. She was making her way through records of her sister’s illness. I was reading tributes published after his death.

The February 1972 edition of the Andover magazine was dedicated to him. His flag-draped coffin at the front of the chapel fills the cover. I can pick out my family members in the first few rows.

After reading the twenty-two pages of tribute to his service, followed, as per custom, by class notes for each graduating class, I for some reason kept flipping to the back.

And then I found it.

Page 48.

A photograph taken from exactly the same spot where I stood last Thursday — the edge of Rabbit Pond, the chapel steeple reflected in still water.

54 years apart. Same angle. Same reflection.

Makes me think someone is winking at me from a distance.

🕊️

SAM

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More on that soon.

Then today I found myself somewhere I’d never stood before — behind the Chapel, across Rabbit Pond, looking at a building I’ve known my whole life from an angle I’d never seen.

The water was so still.

There is so much we don’t see until we change our perspective.

Until we are still.

🕊️

SAM

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When we bought this house, I could see there was something in the front yard that might once have been a stream. A wetland. A suggestion of water. But it was buried — under downed trees and brambles and poison ivy and, of course, bittersweet.

Last spring and fall, I pulled the bittersweet.

In the winter, we hired a crew to chainsaw and cart off the logs that had been cut down years ago and just left there.

And a week ago, it finally got warm enough to go out with the clippers.

This time, I was looking for the stream.

It was in there. I could see it. Someone, years ago, had carefully placed rocks. A little riverbed, deliberately made. You could only catch glimpses — a few mossy rocks in a row, a group of others mostly buried.

I followed the rocks. Cut away what had grown up around them — weeds that had become trees. Over two days, I made four enormous brush piles.

Then my husband got into it.

“I have a hacksaw,” he said. “Do you want me to get that really thick one?”

Yes, please.

He hacked until the blade dulled, bought a crowbar, and set to work moving rocks.

You know me, yard work is never just yard work. I’m always processing something else in the background.

Even my husband is on to me now.

“So, what’s the message?” he asked over lunch.

What stands out to me is that the stream was always there.

The water never stopped flowing. It just got diffuse — bleeding out over the banks, spreading into the wetland, disappearing under brush and dead wood until you couldn’t hear it anymore.

That’s what happened to my intuition, too.

It never stopped, it just got covered up and spread so thin I couldn’t find the current.

What I’m doing with the clippers and the crowbar — and in my writing, in my coaching, and in the psychic medium workshop — is the same work.

Not creating something new.

Finding the thing that was always there.

Clearing away what had grown up over the top of it. Making space. Unblocking.

Channeling the flow so I can hear it again.

🕊️

SAM

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We’d already covered the big stuff — what she knew about the school, how to talk about her strengths, the kinds of questions to expect. We’d talked about the remarkable connection that had surfaced through my network, and how it had helped her understand what she was walking into.

Now we were down to logistics. What to wear.

She’s a mother of two, still nursing her youngest. She was holding up clothing options, unsure.

I don't know what made me ask. It wasn't in any coaching framework. It wasn't strategic. It came from the same place my dreams come from — somewhere below the planning, below the preparation. A knowing I've learned not to ignore.

“Do you have something that connects you with your ancestors or your family?”

I told her that I wear a piece of jade every day that my mother-in-law gave me. It’s empowering — almost like I’m carrying her with me.

Her eyes welled up immediately.

“I have Grammy’s pearls.”

Her grandmother had given her a set of pearls when she was seventeen. A woman ought to have a string of pearls.

“This is exactly why Grammy gave them to me. She would be so proud of me.”

I felt like I had known her Grammy. I’d heard about the crocheted blankets, one for each grandchild.

I’d walked beside her when her grandmother was dying, just as she had walked beside me when Caroline was dying. We’d held each other through the hardest things.

And here we were, choosing pearls.

She went to the interview dressed like a million bucks.

She got the job.

Preparing for any event requires time and care. Research the audience. Prepare your talking points. Rehearse your opening.

But there’s another layer — one I’m learning to trust. It’s the willingness to notice that a string of pearls isn’t just an accessory. It’s lineage. It’s a woman saying to her granddaughter, across time, You’re ready.

🕊️

SAM

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I’ve known her since before she had kids. She’s a mother of two now, the youngest still nursing, and she was putting herself out there for a leadership role. I was proud of her. We set up some calls to prepare for the interview.

As we talked, something about the school's name rang a bell for me.

I checked LinkedIn. And there it was: another dear friend of mine from summer camp is a longtime teacher at this school.

I reached out. She agreed to talk immediately. And on the phone, she gave me exactly the kind of information you can’t get from a job description — the current climate, the leadership dynamics, what the role actually looks like from the inside.

Here’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.

Partway through the call, I realized why this connection felt so charged.

My camp friend’s first job out of college was at a school in Philadelphia where my dear friend Caroline’s mother, Gail, was the executive assistant to the head of school. The same role my client was applying for.

Gail and my camp friend worked together. They were close. And then Gail got sick. Cancer. She held it off for years, but eventually died too young. We all grieved.

And then Caroline got sick, too — brain cancer. Just months after giving birth to her second child.

When Caroline was dying, this camp friend became involved in our circle of care, in part because of her love for Caroline, and in part, I think, because of her loyalty to Gail. That’s how she and I became close. Through Caroline. Through Gail.

And now, years later, that very friendship — forged in grief and in love — was the reason I could pick up the phone and get trusted, insider perspective on a role that is, as it happens, the exact role Gail once held.

I sat with that for a long time after I hung up.

Caroline. Gail. A friendship born from losing them. A phone call that wouldn’t have happened without that loss. A role — Gail’s role — opening up at the exact moment someone I loved needed it.

I don’t need to assign credit or explain the mechanism. I just know what I felt — that something larger than my LinkedIn search was at work.

A little tap from Caroline and Gail, as if to say: we’re still here. Still helping.

🕊️

SAM

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I remember knowing things — having a sense about situations, about people, about what was coming — that I couldn’t explain.

Somewhere after high school, I lost touch with it. I went to Yale, then Columbia, became fluent in Mandarin.

I built a damn good front-of-house.

But it wasn’t the whole me.

It came back during a cognitive coaching course in Hong Kong. The facilitator guided me through a single session that unlocked an insight I had been holding deep inside.

I burst into tears.

It was like I had been cracked open. I could hear myself again. Even if only for a moment.

And it was all so professional. Legitimate. So many frameworks.

Throughout my years as a school leader, I used cognitive coaching to help people access their own inner authority, to hear what they already knew.

And when I found myself on sabbatical, I got credentialed in executive coaching.

And then, a few weeks later, I did something else.

I took a psychic medium course.

I had spent years by then receiving things I couldn’t explain — a dream about flying toward my grandmother’s yard, a wave of ancestral presence outside a chapel, a plane crash that turned out to be beautiful.

I’d always felt the porous boundaries between this world and whatever comes next.

I wasn’t hoping to learn something new. I was hoping to recover something I’d lost.

From the very first practice, I was bowled over. Not only by what other people seemed to understand about me (of course, they have the gift), but what I seemed to know about other people (wait, what? You’re actually an accountant?! That’s actually what your Dad looked like?!)

In one particularly poignant moment, I had a visit from my mother’s mother, the one who died when she was 13. She was so warm, so tender, so appreciative of me. And she told me clearly: you’re going to use all of your strengths.

I knew what she meant.

Not just the planning and organization and two decades of education leadership. But also the intuition. The knowing. The part of me that sits in a cemetery with a pad of paper and trusts what comes out of my pen.

But I got scared.

Having built this perfect resume of Yale and Columbia and twenty years of school leadership, was I going to blow it all up by admitting to being psychic? Or even more woo, a psychic medium?

Way too risky.

But then, it’s the damndest thing. I just keep having these dreams.

And in my coaching work, things come through. Not frameworks, not best practices. Directions I know to take a conversation without having to understand why. Scenarios I offer seemingly offhand that make people feel deeply seen.

In my training, that’s ascribed to coach’s intuition. Somewhere else, it would be called a psychic reading.

It all seems to be helping people.

In a few weeks, I’m going back for another course. It’s been more than two years since the first one.

I’m nervous. What if I don’t really have it? What if I’m bad at it? What if I don’t feel anything or see anything or get any messages? What if there’s nothing there?

But this time I’m nervous because I see how much this can help people. And I really want to help people.

Using all my strengths.

🕊️

SAM

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It’s in the garage. It holds several rinsed-out milk jugs for carrying water and a dish brush I intercepted on its way to the trash. A bottle of detergent, leftover from power washing the back patio. I’ve been building this collection since November, waiting for the weather to warm up.

I started at Christ Church, where my mother’s ancestors are buried. I didn’t know they were there until we’d lived in Andover for about a year. It turns out it’s also the church where I was baptized.

Their names go back to the 1850s. Some of our original ancestors who came here, and their children, and their children’s children, including two of my own much-loved great-aunts.

They had mostly existed as abstractions to me. Sepia faces in olden-day clothes.

To see their names carved in stone was something else entirely.

I started scrubbing. The moss had settled deep — not just on the surface but into it, little tendrils gripping the stone. Even if I scraped the top layer off, I could tell it would grow back.

I did my best. Got them looking better than they did.

Then I drove to my grandparents’ cemetery and set to work on the bittersweet.

I’ve written before about bittersweet — how I spent last fall ripping it from our yard, how I couldn’t stop once I started seeing it. When my dad and my aunt read that post, they both said the same thing: The bittersweet! That was the bane of your grandmother’s existence — it kept choking the laurel by your grandfather’s grave.

My dad added: Be careful of the poison ivy. Mom got a nasty case from fighting the bittersweet in the cemetery.

So here I was. Clippers, gloves, two lawn-and-leaf bags. Continuing my grandmother’s fight.

The roots were like ropes. They weren’t just around the laurel — as I pulled, they extended right up to the edge of my grandparents’ gravestones. I dug and pulled and pulled and dug. At one point, I unearthed a root mass that looked like something from the ocean — a cloud of capillaries branching out underground, quietly, invisibly, in every direction.

I filled two bags. My arms were scratched raw.

As I dug, I kept thinking: What am I really doing here?

Not the literal answer. Tending graves. Saying thank you.

But something about the work — being on my knees, pulling things out by the roots, deciding what stays and what goes — felt like more than yard work.

The older I get, the more I long to understand these ancestors as humans. I am getting closer to the age they were when I knew some of them. My grandmother was just a year older than me when she died. And I can see now that they had human achievements, yes — but also human struggles. They negotiated relationships with their children and their own parents. They made decisions and sacrifices.

I’m trying to access their struggle.

Not just the laurel they planted, but the bittersweet they fought. Not just the clean face of the stone, but the moss that kept growing back.

I hauled the two bags of bittersweet, shovel, clippers, gloves, detergent, scrub brushes, and empty milk jugs back to the car. My scratched-up arms told a story in themselves.

I’ll be back again soon.

🕊️

SAM

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But it was still light out. Still warm. I had packed a camping chair in the trunk and my writing bag — yellow pad, pens.

I found myself turning left at the chapel. Past the inn. Pulling over next to the cemetery.

When we buried my aunt and uncle, we brought camping chairs so the older guests wouldn’t have to stand. It occurred to me that I could bring one anytime.

So I did.

I unfolded the orange chair and set it near my grandparents.

All five of them are buried there, alongside my aunt and uncle. We already know where my mom’s spot will be.

I took out the yellow pad. Put my phone in the cup holder on the chair. Clicked a pen open.

And I asked:

Dear loved ones,

What do I need to know for the coming year?

What wise counsel do you have for me?

Then I tried to release control and let words move through my pen and onto the page.

Three things came.

The first two were specific: treasure your kids while you have them close. And go to the archives — read your grandfather’s papers, his personal correspondence, the story of how he managed with a sick daughter and a dying wife. Do it now while you’re close.

Then came the third.

Tell stories. You have some amazing stories. Tell them. People love stories. They will listen.

You will help people by sharing the stories that you have — not advice, but stories. No need to hit them over the head with it. Don't be pedantic. Let them make their own meaning. Each person needs a different lesson.

Your stories can help people. You don’t have to know how.

I’ve been writing these posts — about dreams and ancestors and planes that land softly and rocking chairs in the rain — because of what came out of my pen that afternoon.

Tell stories. You don’t have to know how they’ll help. Just tell them.

And now I’m following where it leads.

These stories are becoming a book. I’m working on a proposal — a memoir in vignettes about dreams and ancestors, about leaving a career and finding my way back to the work that was mine all along. About what happens when you stop trying to figure it out and start listening instead.

If you know anyone in the publishing world — especially literary agents — I would be so grateful for an introduction.

And in the meantime, I’ve got a lot more stories. Even though I don’t understand yet how they are helping.

🕊️

SAM

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This town where my mother grew up, where my grandparents are buried, where I walked the bird sanctuary trails as a child — I had handed it over. She needed it more than I did. When I felt my grandparents at the chapel telling me we’ve got her, she’s safe here, I heard it as confirmation. This place was hers now. Not mine.

I carried that belief with me for over a year.

After the news of my departure was made public, after my last day, during a year-long sabbatical where my children stayed on at the school I had left, we started planning our move.

We thought we might move to Arlington, where my sister lives. We placed an offer on a house we loved. It wasn’t accepted.

One of my uncles, an architect, said: you should really consider Andover. Sidewalks, walkable, nice downtown.

We laughed. Absolutely not. My daughter would kill us for moving to the town where she went to school. The whole point was that she wanted to be away.

But we started looking anyway. And the same week we were up visiting houses, something happened.

We got a notification that the home my great-great-grandparents had built in 1895 was for sale. We took my mother to see it. She had grown up visiting her own grandfather there.

It was such a beautiful thing, walking through that house. Three generations of us standing in a place that held more than a century of our family. And also, it was clear: this wasn’t going to be our house.

Then another house came on the market. Built in 1914. Lovingly renovated. I walked in the front door and knew.

The wood. The light. The way it was designed. And there, off to one side — a corner office. A room of my own. With a door that closed.

This is it, I said. This is the house for us.

The real estate agent gave me a look. Yeah. You and everybody else.

As we left that house, on our way to see another, my husband pulled over. We were in two cars — he was ahead, I was behind. I didn’t understand why he’d stopped. We were in a rush.

He got out and walked back to me. Did you see the chair? Your grandmother’s chair?

I backed up the car.

On the curb was a little painted rocking chair. A child’s rocking chair. The kind my grandmother used to paint.

It was just sitting there on the side of the road. My husband had spotted it from the car ahead and pulled over because he recognized it — not the specific chair, but the type. The gesture. The hand of my grandmother in it.

Standing in the rain holding that little chair, something shifted.

I thought back to the flying dream — soaring toward my grandmother’s yard, her quiet oh good, you’ve come. The butterfly in the nature sanctuary. The wave of presence at the chapel. The plane that didn’t nosedive, the trees that slowed it down, the warm room that was waiting.

I had heard we’ve got her and believed it was only about my daughter.

But the ancestral house coming on the market the same week we were looking. The rocking chair — my grandmother’s kind of chair, on a curb, in the rain, spotted by my husband from a car ahead of me. The corner office behind a door that closed.

These were for me, too.

I had spent a year believing I had sacrificed this place. The way mothers do — instinctively, without discussion. You hand over the thing you love because your child needs it more than you do.

And I was right about part of it. I did give this place to my daughter. She is here. She is safe. My grandparents are looking after her.

But what I got wrong was the rest. I thought we’ve got her meant you’re on your own. I thought being released meant being left behind.

We got the house. It was in perfect condition. We moved in in June.

I sit in my corner office now and write to you from the town where my mother grew up, where my grandparents are buried, where my daughter goes to school, where a little painted rocking chair appeared on a rainy curb the moment I needed it most.

I didn’t give this place away after all.

I was just a little late to the game.

🕊️

SAM

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Not the kind of flying dream I normally have. Someone else was in charge. I didn’t have control.

I don’t remember where we were going. What I remember is the pilot telling us. The plane diving. Knowing.

I braced myself. Tensed my whole body. Squeezed my eyes shut.

My mother-in-law had died in December. The kids and I had been back and forth to Asia twice in six weeks. My husband had finally come home for the first time in two months.

I had signed a separation agreement with the school. It was still confidential. I was still showing up every day, leading, holding it together for the teachers and students, and my own children. The only person at work who knew was my assistant.

And then I had this dream.

The airplane had landing cameras — the kind you get on some international flights, where you can watch a live feed of the ground beneath you.

As we dove, something prompted me to unclench my eyes. I looked out the window. I looked at the landing camera.

It was so beautiful.

And also, we were crashing.

And it was so beautiful.

I held both of those things at the same time. The beauty and the impending devastation. The view and the descent. My open eyes and my braced body.

The plane landed in a forest. It didn’t nosedive. The trees slowed it down, and it skidded to a halt.

Every single person walked off.

We were taken to a gym — some kind of community center. There were people there to help us. We were safe and warm. And shortly after, a bus came and took us where we had been planning to go.

By the time I was even able to call my husband, it was over. I’m going to be a little late. I’ll see you later. That was it.

My whole body relaxed. Unclenched.

I went to work and told my assistant about the dream. She was one of the only people who knew what was happening. I needed to say it out loud to someone.

Yes, I’m losing my job. Everything is tense. Everything is uncertain.

And also, what would happen if I opened my eyes? Unclenched? Is there beauty here, too?

That's the part I keep coming back to. Not the crash. Not the landing. The unclenching.

I didn't steer the plane.

I opened my eyes.

And it wasn't as bad as I feared.

There were trees that slowed us down. A warm room to shelter in. A bus that came.

🕊️

SAM

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My two younger kids were still enrolled at the school. Their tuition was part of my compensation. Which meant this wasn’t just a job loss — it was, most likely, a full uprooting.

My mother-in-law was dying of pancreatic cancer. My husband had been gone much of the summer and would be gone much of the winter. She would die in December.

I was still showing up to work every day. Still leading. Still holding it together.

It was the lowest moment of my adult life.

And then it was parents’ weekend.

We drove to Andover. We saw our daughter’s dorm, sat in on her classes, did all the requisite visiting. She was happy. She was thriving. She was exactly where she was supposed to be.

We said goodbye to her near the chapel. The Phillips Academy chapel.

This building is sacred to me. Nearly every wedding and funeral I attended as a child was held there. In the basement, there is a small room dedicated to my grandmother Sylvia Pratt Kemper, who died when my mother was thirteen, when my grandfather was head of school. Her name is on the door.

I was walking down the sidewalk, in sight of that basement entrance, when it hit me.

Not a thought. A wave. An overwhelming sense of presence.

All of them. My Grandma Sylvia. My Grandpa Johnny. My Grandma Abby, his second wife. My Granny, Martha. My Pa, Don.

I felt them all, together.

We’ve got her. She’s safe here.

My grandparents were going to look after her. All of them. The ones I’d known and the ones I hadn’t. The ones whose funerals I’d attended in that chapel, and the one whose name was on the basement door.

I was overcome with gratitude.

And also grief. Not for them, but for me.

This town, where my mother grew up, where my grandparents lived, where I walked the bird sanctuary trails with my grandmother — I had given it to my daughter. It was going to be her place now.

I couldn’t have it. That’s how it felt. I had sacrificed it. The way mothers do — instinctively, without discussion, without even realizing it’s happening until it’s done. You hand over the thing you love because your child needs it more than you do.

And I was glad. I was deeply, cellularly glad that she was safe there. I knew she was.

I went back to New Jersey. My husband flew to Asia. I kept showing up to work. Legal agreements were negotiated. The lowest season of my life continued for months.

And I carried that moment with me — the peace and the grief, braided together. The gratitude and the loss. The deep comfort of knowing my daughter was held, and the quiet ache of believing I had given away the place that held me.

🕊️

SAM

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In this one, I was walking along a ridge with two people — the head of school where I worked and the board chair. I was adjacent to their conversation. Not quite in it.

At a certain point, I just touched my feet off the ground. And took off.

Hovered just above them. Then gently separated and glided off to the right.

It was the spring of 2022. My oldest had applied to boarding schools and been admitted to two. I was struggling at work, but things hadn’t reached a breaking point yet. My kids were enrolled at the school where I worked — their tuition was part of my compensation. I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to disrupt them.

I was stuck.

As I soared away from the ridge, I looked down and saw my grandmother’s yard.

The house in Andover, Massachusetts, where I used to visit her. I recognized the patio, backing up on a bird sanctuary. I recognized the Japanese lantern she kept in her garden.

My grandmother was there. Sitting outside, painting.

She noticed me the way you notice someone you’ve been expecting. No excitement. No words, even. Just — oh good. You’ve come. Join me.

I don’t have a memory of touching down in her garden. I just remember touching off from the ridge and seeing where I was to go.

A few weeks later, I brought my daughter to Andover for a revisit day. It was still COVID — they wanted the kids but not the parents. So I dropped her off and went for a walk in that same bird sanctuary that abutted my grandmother’s old house.

I had a friend who was dying of brain cancer. She was in the last days of her life. I was thinking about her.

And as I walked, a butterfly appeared.

It was perfectly lit. I was alone on the path in this place that has always been sacred to me — my grandmother’s everyday walking trail, where she threw a ball for her dog, where I walked behind her as a child, stepping in her boot prints when there was snow. The butterfly stayed with me. Just hovered there. Like I could tell it anything and it was there to listen. It felt so strongly like a visitation. Maybe my friend. Maybe my grandmother. Maybe both.

I didn’t know what it meant. Just like the dream. But what I felt — in the dream and on that path — was the same. Warm. Loved. Seen. Held by something I couldn’t name.

My daughter decided to go to Andover. I thought — oh, maybe that’s what the dream meant. Maybe the butterfly was telling me this was the right place for her. Maybe my grandmother in her yard was a blessing on my oldest child’s future.

I wanted that to be the answer. A literal interpretation. A clean meaning I could hold on to.

But that’s not how it usually works. At least for me.

I didn’t know what the flying dream meant. I didn’t know what the butterfly meant. But I knew how I felt. Warm. Loved. Seen. Held.

And I had to be content with the feeling, even without knowing the meaning.

Which — if you know me — is not easy. I like to plan. I like to understand.

And yet, some things don’t reveal themselves on my schedule. I’m learning that the truest thing I can do, sometimes, is pay attention and stay open. Not rush to interpret. Not force a meaning just because the not-knowing is uncomfortable.

Another post-it in my collection says, “If you’re paying attention, much is being revealed.”

Easier said than done. But I’m working on it.

🕊️

SAM

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There were over 300 of them. They didn’t all fit on the stage. The younger ones stood in the audience with their instruments. It was a remarkable feat of musicianship and, also, of operations.

Having been an elementary school principal, I know exactly what it took to make that moment happen. The emails. The t-shirt coordination. The tuning. The thousand small decisions nobody in the audience would ever think about.

Our two older kids are home for spring break and came to the concert with us, probably totally oblivious. I sat there with x-ray vision, seeing all the invisible work behind the beautiful thing.

If you had x-ray vision into our household yesterday, you would have seen a family admin day. With the two older ones back from boarding school and their respective trips to Portugal and New York City, it was time to get to work.

I made muffins to lure them out of bed. (Not a metaphor. I bribed them.)

With the 18-year-old: we planned a college visit, booked flights using air miles accumulated over two decades of flights between Asia and North America, navigated health insurance paperwork that the system won’t let a parent do for a legal adult, scripted out a phone call she needed to make — because 18-year-olds do not do phone calls — and sat next to her while she did it on speakerphone. We discussed her gap year, her summer plans, her taxes. Her dad walked her through filing, since he’d just done it with her brother. Her phone is on the fritz. That went on the list too.

With the 16-year-old: after muffins and gravel shoveling (the snowplow relocated half our driveway this winter), we sat down to map out his summer. But his summer depends on crew camp dates that haven’t been confirmed, which means his work schedule can’t be set, which means nothing is certain. He’d applied to one camp and hadn’t heard back, so the next step was to email and check in. This took about thirty minutes — 16-year-olds do not do email — drafting the wording together, the way I’d scripted the phone call for his sister.

Then there’s the driving school. We are trying to get two teenagers licensed. The driving school operates exclusively by phone. No portal. No email. Just a voicemail box that can take days to return your call. I called twice, got through on the third try, and scheduled eleven driving lessons and one road test across two kids. Added everything to the family calendar. If it’s not in the calendar, it doesn’t exist.

Here’s the part that made me laugh: we have to drive the 16-year-old home from boarding school repeatedly this spring for his driving lessons so that he can get his license by summer so that we don’t have to drive him around anymore.

And that’s just the logistics.

There’s also the emotional realm of a family of five — most of us neurodivergent — adjusting to being back under one roof after months apart. Each person asserting their own independence in their own way, which is developmentally appropriate and also a lot of competing energy. There are hard things we’re navigating that I’ll take up in other posts. Every family has them.

If you saw my kids out in the world — at school, at a concert, walking through a campus visit — you might think, wow, they’re so together. What great kids.

They are great kids.

And this is what it takes.

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I know I’m not alone in this. I know you have your own version — your own particular children, your own particular complications, your own list of eleven driving lessons and scripted phone calls and muffin bribes. I know that many of the mothers I talk to feel like they are being drawn and quartered by the demands of keeping a family together while doing professional work that also has a real impact.

It’s a lot. It’s a delicate dance. And honestly, it’s probably what makes us great at our jobs. Nobody is “normal” in our lives, and so we’ve learned to be creative and to individualize and to bring out the best in people — at work and at home.

After the concert, there was an almost-meltdown. But luckily, it was not a meltdown that McDonald’s couldn’t solve.

Some problems in my life can still be fixed with an M&M McFlurry.

I’ll take it.

🕊️

SAM

I collect them by email. Obituaries. Group email threads on a grandparent’s birthday. I find them in the Phillips Academy archive. Letters, speeches, travel itineraries. I collect them in conversations — in person, by Zoom, by phone. I am greedy for them because they help me know people I never knew as an adult.

And I know how fast the stories can disappear.

A few months ago, I got my cousin Frank talking. Two hours later, I had almost 90 minutes of recordings. When I got home, I spent ten minutes turning the audio into a transcript and shared it with my Mom and my sisters.

The stories were new for them, too.

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If you don’t know what I mean by “turning audio into a transcript,” start with My #1 life hack. The short version: I press record, talk, then paste the transcript into Claude with one simple instruction. It works with voice memos, Zoom recordings, and phone calls. (Here’s how to record a phone call on an iPhone, if you’re curious.)

I use this all the time with clients, too. Someone will say something brilliant — the exact sentence that should open their next faculty meeting — and I’ll ask, “Can I record this?”

A few of you have written to ask: OK, I’ve got the recording. Now what?

Here’s the whole thing:

Open Claude or ChatGPT or whatever you use. Start a new chat. Paste in this prompt, then paste in your transcript:

Edit this voice transcript by removing filler words and adding headers. Do not summarize.

That’s it.

If you want to skip the prompt step every time, create a project (in Claude) or a custom GPT (in ChatGPT) and paste that same instruction into the project settings. Then every transcript you drop in gets cleaned up automatically.

The hack is useful. I know that.

But the reason I keep using it isn’t efficiency.

AI doesn’t know my family’s stories. But it can help me capture them — and share them. My sisters couldn’t be there when Frank started talking. But ten minutes after I got home, they had the transcript on their phones.

That’s what I love about AI. Not that it replaces anything human. That it can make a human moment last.

Two hours with Frank gave my family something we didn’t have the day before.

Whose stories are you collecting? Whose stories do you want to capture before they disappear?

Leave a comment

Happy storytelling.

🕊️

SAM

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When I was a lower school head, my own three children attended the school. And sometimes, when I called a colleague, instead of saying “Hi, this is Sarah,” I’d introduce myself as somebody’s mom. One of three somebodies, depending on which child I was calling about.

One day, a colleague stopped me cold.

“You’re either the principal,” she said, “or you’re somebody’s mom, or you’re somebody’s wife.”

“When do you get to be Sarah?”

I wrote it down immediately. I still refer to it.

When I eventually left that job, another colleague gave me a “mama” hat — a keepsake, a symbol. Now, she said, you can wear this more often.

I loved the gesture. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized: I don’t actually want more hats.

I want fewer.

In fact, maybe I’m tired of the metaphor entirely.

We’ve all heard the versions. I’ve got my 9-to-5 and my 5-to-9. I have two full-time jobs. I’m a working mom, a school leader, a partner, a room parent, a board chair, a daughter.

I understand why we talk this way. We’re trying to name something real: the massive volume of what we carry.

But I think the “hats” metaphor may be hurting us.

When I was in that lower school head role, I worked hard to compartmentalize. There were real reasons for it. If I was giving difficult feedback or not renewing someone’s contract, it wasn’t helpful when they brought up something my child did at recess. The lines mattered. So I kept them.

But eventually, I went too far. I wasn’t just keeping work and home separate. I was fragmenting myself.

A mother I’m coaching described it perfectly: the fractured way we try to live our lives feels like a coping mechanism. We compartmentalize and pivot from one role to another, pretending the wall exists between who we are at work and who we are at home. But something at work will always ripple into home, and something at home will always follow us into work.

So why are we performing otherwise?

She put it simply: I don’t want to code-switch between being a mom and a worker. I just want to be me, all the time.

She wants a new hat that just says her name.

Or better yet, in her words,

Burn the hats.

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I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what she said. And of course, I went down the research rabbit hole.

It turns out there’s a word for what she was describing: integration.

Not balance — that word implies a scale, two sides, one always threatening to tip. Integration means something different. It means the skills I bring to leadership are the same skills I bring to parenting. The patience I practice at home makes me a better colleague. The boundaries I set at work teach my children that I value my own time.

There is, in fact, a good deal already written about work-life integration, including this excellent overview from the Center for Creative Leadership. The idea isn’t new. But I think we need to hear it more.

Because here’s what I’ve noticed: every time I meet with a mother in leadership, the same exhaustion surfaces. Not just from the work, but from the switching. From the performance of being a different person in every room.

My coachee didn’t have a framework for it. She didn’t need one. She just knew.

Burn the hats.

Not because our different roles don’t matter. They do. But because when we relate to ourselves as a stack of separate identities — each requiring its own uniform, its own code of conduct, its own performance — we lose something essential.

We lose the through line.

We lose Sarah.

🕊️

SAM

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My second poop dream in two weeks.

I was visiting somewhere and sharing a room with my mom. I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I didn’t want to wake her. I especially didn’t want her to hear me.

So I crept to the bathroom and closed the door.

And then the poop started coming out. Of my mouth.

It was sticky. There was a lot of it. I scraped at it with toilet paper, trying not to let it touch my hands.

I was afraid poop was going to come out the other end, too, so I couldn’t even get off the toilet.

A voice inside me said clean it up, get back in bed, don’t disturb anyone.

When I woke up, I thought: well, that’s not subtle.

I have decided to write a book, and I am terrified.

I’d spent the past weekend doing a deep dive into the purpose and structure of said book. A book about vulnerability. About transitions. Memoir-ish. Personal growth.

Apparently, my subconscious had some thoughts about that.

And then there was the dream about the corpses.

In this one, a war had happened. People had died. And then my family came home, and we had to live among the bodies because nobody had picked them up yet.

I could see them everywhere. I tried to close a door so the others wouldn’t notice. I thought it would upset my family, too. But they didn’t seem bothered at all. My husband, my kids — they just went about their business. Even my six-month-old nephew, sleeping in a room with the corpses, was fine.

I was the only one who noticed.

I kept trying not to make a big deal about it. But I couldn’t stop seeing them. And eventually I had to ask myself: is it okay for me to notice? Is it okay to be upset by this? Or should I learn to ignore it, too?

I think these dreams are two sides of the same coin.

I am afraid of what might come out of me. That if I open my mouth, something messy and uncontrollable will emerge. Something I can’t clean up. Something my mother will hear.

Because I see things that others don’t — invisible things, difficult truths, stuff other people seem to walk past without flinching.

Together, they describe the exact tension of my work.

I am a person who notices things.

I want to keep my poop in the bathroom.

But the poop is the message.

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Every time I write one of these posts, I am choosing to open my mouth. A small voice asks, Is this too much? Am I oversharing? Does anyone really care?

And every time, I share anyway.

Because I know some of you are living among corpses, too.

I don’t know yet if I’m ready for this whole book idea.

But I’m ready to stop scraping shit off the roof of my mouth in private.

🕊️

SAM

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If you were to ask my husband, he’d say: Sarah always knows where she is, and she always knows where she’s going.

That’s not quite true.

When I’m outside in the daylight—whether driving or walking—I have an internal compass. I almost always know which way is north.

But I get tripped up in two places.

Shopping malls. And driving in the dark.

In shopping malls, our GPS switches completely. He moves through a mall the way I move through a highway. He understands the logic of it—what’s next to what, where the food court is, where the bathrooms might be. Meanwhile, I’m standing at the directory trying to figure out which dot is me.

Driving at night, though, we’re both blind.

Last week, I was driving home after dark on a road I’d never taken before. No streetlights. No shoulder. Just my headlights cutting a narrow tunnel through the blackness, illuminating maybe fifty feet ahead. The rest was invisible.

In daylight, driving is easy. You can see for miles. You know where the exits are. You can anticipate the curves, adjust in advance, plan your next move.

At night? You can only see as far as your headlights allow.

And you have to keep moving anyway.

This is what transitions feel like.

A friend told me recently she felt like she was in “the wilderness.” Yes. That.

William Bridges describes transitions in three parts: endings, the neutral zone, and new beginnings. I wrote about this in The dragonfly. When things are ending, we can usually see what’s behind us. When something new begins, there’s light on the horizon.

But the neutral zone—that in-between space—is the dark stretch of highway.

Looking back, the path seems clear. The decisions make sense. The story has shape.

Looking forward, you can’t see where you’re going. You can only see the next step.

For mothers in leadership, transitions rarely come one at a time. They overlap. A child starts a new school while you’re starting a new role. A relationship is shifting while a project is ending. You’re grieving something you haven’t fully named while building something you can’t yet see.

And in the middle of all of it, you think you’re supposed to know where you’re going.

But sometimes you don’t.

Sometimes you’re just driving in the dark.

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Here’s what I’ve noticed about driving at night.

There are signs. Highway markers, exit numbers, speed limits. They’re reflective on purpose—so that when your light hits them, they shine back. Someone put them there knowing you would need them. Someone who had driven this road before. Kind of like imaginal cells.

Sometimes there are streetlights. A stretch of brightness, a moment of relief. You think: It’s not so dark.

And then you’re back in the narrow beam of your headlights.

The neutral zone doesn’t require us to know the destination. It asks us to stay on the road. To trust the signs. To keep moving forward.

One small stretch at a time.

🕊️

SAM

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We’re wired to learn by watching. Younger siblings copy the next oldest. The oldest copies the parents. In our family, I see it with cousins: the one who’s a few years older is magnetic, and the younger one orbits them, absorbing everything.

It happens at work, too. I just didn’t realize it at first.

I was incredibly fortunate to work for Tonya Porter, Head of Primary at Chinese International School. She tapped me for my first leadership role, supported my growth, and was a wonderful boss and mentor.

She was also the only woman I had ever worked for.

As I shared on Tuesday, I eventually broke down in her office. “Tonya,” I said, “I can’t do it like you do.”

I suddenly realized what was happening. Tonya was my closest model. The way a younger cousin reaches toward the older one, absorbs their habits, tries on their life was the same way I had been watching her and trying to become her. And the version of Tonya I was watching was always available, always working, seamlessly managing an enormous job.

She had never had children.

If this was the model, I was in trouble.

I was going to have to find some others.

I looked.

I found a few peers — women my age, with kids the same age, navigating similar roles. Through Excelle, a collective for women in leadership in independent schools, I met a cohort of women who were trying to figure this out alongside me. One in particular — same age, kids around the same age, assistant head of school — became someone I leaned on deeply. We found such strength in just knowing the other existed.

I had two female work coaches during this period. One was a social worker with adult children. The other was a successful school administrator who, like Tonya, had never had children. Both were wise and generous.

Neither could model what I was actually trying to figure out.

I didn’t have anyone ten years ahead of me who had already done it — someone I could watch and copy and reassure myself it was possible.

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So I became very conscious of the role I was playing for others.

I was a principal with three children in my division. I was also a spouse, a daughter, a sister. I tried not to pretend any of it was simple.

I stopped sending emails after hours. I wrote them, but I scheduled the send. It was a small thing. And also not a small thing.

I made my parenting visible. It was impossible to hide anyway. The teachers, psychologist, and after-school team were crucial members of our care team. So I stopped trying to gloss over it and started letting it be part of the picture.

I said to the women I mentored, explicitly and often: this can be done.

Some of them believed me.

One has become a lower school head. Several others hold meaningful leadership roles while also parenting young children.

Recently, I asked my coaching circle: Who are your role models?

Two out of three pointed to me.

Initially, I felt proud.

Then alarmed.

We’ve got some work to do.

I don’t want to be the only example people in my community can point to. I don’t want my personal story to be the only place someone finds herself reflected back.

The closest thing I’ve found to a comprehensive overview of our situation is this study. The research is clear: one of the most helpful interventions for mothers in leadership is role modeling.

Women helping other women see what’s possible.

So I’m building something.

A series — modeled loosely on Kelly Nolan’s “How I Structure My Day” — where mothers in leadership share how they actually do it.

• What does your week really look like?

• What systems do you rely on?

• What have you figured out that no one taught you?

• What’s invisible that you could make visible to help someone else?

If this resonates — if you have figured out something worth sharing, or if you’re still looking for a map — reply to this email. Tell me who you are, where you are in this journey, and what you need. I’ll follow up.

Because here’s what I know:

We’re not going to find each other by accident.

Our world is too diffuse. Our extended families and communities aren’t always close. And even if they were, they might not be packed with mothers in leadership. Mine wasn’t.

So it’s on us.

I’ll organize it.

But I need your voice.

Who better than us?

🕊️

SAM

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He followed my mother’s father as head of school at Phillips Academy. My father’s father was the board chair who hired him. I grew up hearing Ted’s name, absorbing his ideas secondhand. It wasn’t until I got older that I understood the full scope of what he and his wife Nancy had built — a body of work that influenced education around the world.

One phrase stuck with me: the children are watching.

It is based on the title of one of Ted and Nancy’s books, but I absorbed the idea long before I read it. Children do not learn from our lectures. They learn from what we do. They are always taking notes.

As the oldest child in my family, I watched my mother carefully. When in doubt, even now, I find myself doing what she did. She was my first example.

So when I became a mother, especially to a daughter, I knew she was watching me.

For years, that daughter insisted that she did not want children.

Then one day, she came home and said, out of the blue, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe I do want kids. But I can’t do it the way you do it. I can’t be a mom like you. You’re so patient. I’m not like that.”

Her words took my breath away.

Without meaning to, I had made motherhood look unattainable.

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I thought that because she was watching me, I had to be perfect. Show her it was possible to balance parenting and other passions. I thought I was modeling competence. Patience.

Instead, I was modeling something that felt impossible to replicate.

Her words transported me back years, to a different office, a different conversation.

“I can’t do it like you do it,” I had told my mentor, Tonya Porter, through tears.

She worked constantly. Saturday mornings in her office. Evening emails. Endless availability. I had absorbed her example and concluded that if I could not do it exactly as she did, I could not do it at all.

My daughter had done the same math.

If I can’t do it like you, maybe I can’t do it.

I’ve spent a lot of my adult life battling perfectionism, and I keep encountering it in new disguises. This is one of its most insidious: the belief that a good example has to be a polished one.

But my daughter didn’t need a polished example. She needed to see me drop some balls. Lose my temper. She needed to know that the chaos and the stumbling are part of it — not evidence that you’re doing it wrong, but evidence that you’re doing it.

In coaching sessions, when a mother in leadership is up against a situation that feels impossible, I’ll sometimes ask:

What would you want your daughter to do in this situation?

It cuts right through.

Because almost always, what we want for our daughters is not perfection. It’s courage. Honesty. Self-compassion. The willingness to ask for help.

How about we model that?

For their sake. And also for our own.

The children are watching.

🕊️

SAM

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