Just recently, the first box of my book arrived, and I had to let it sit in my hallway for a few days despite the eagerness of my sons. I felt the magnitude of the accomplishment. It has been ten years since I was first pregnant, then not pregnant, then pregnant again at work. Since then, I have often shared my own stories for support nearly always behind closed doors, yet in 2020 inspired by both the dire circumstances of the pandemic’s effect on women in the workforce and the profound strength I saw because of it, I decided to do more.
In the past three years late at night, I wrote Carry Strong (and re-wrote in one round of edits that included 4,872 track changes) to flip the script on a cultural constant—but most of all, to create conversations to empower women to defy expectations without creating new ones including for themselves. The humble ambition is to encourage women to embrace their journey and evolving identity with grace and fortitude fueled by the powerful hindsight of others to be their foresight.
