After Jon and I got married, our lives became much more intertwined with my family.
Jon didn't just become my husband.
He became part of my family's business.
I was already working with my parents, and after we were married, Jon worked with them too.
Our employment, our marriage, our finances, and our family life became connected in ways that were sometimes good and sometimes incredibly complicated.
We were working.
We were raising children.
We were trying to build a life.
From the outside, there were probably plenty of moments when we looked like a normal family trying to make it work.
Inside our house, there was much more going on.
I was trying to keep up with everything.
Work.
The kids.
Our marriage.
Money.
Jon's children from before our marriage.
Our own daughters.
Family obligations.
The constant driving and running around.
And all of the emotional problems that came with trying to keep a complicated family together.
I had spent years believing that if I worked hard enough, loved hard enough, and kept everyone moving forward, I could somehow keep everything from falling apart.
But families aren't businesses.
You can't simply work harder and guarantee that everything will succeed.
People bring their histories with them.
People bring their wounds with them.
People bring their mistakes with them.
And sometimes those things collide.
Jon's employment with my family meant that the lines between husband, employee, son-in-law, and family member became blurred.
When work was going well, that could feel like a blessing.
When things weren't going well, there was nowhere to hide from the consequences.
There were conversations about money.
There were conversations about work.
There were conversations about commissions.
There were conversations about jobs and contractors.
There were periods when Jon was doing well and periods when he wasn't.
I was watching all of it while also trying to raise our daughters.
Then Marley got sick.
She was diagnosed with a form of kidney disease called nephrotic syndrome shortly before her second birthday.
That changed everything.
Having a sick child changes the way you see time.
Things that used to seem important suddenly don't.
You stop thinking only about what needs to happen next week.
You start thinking about the next appointment.
The next test.
The next symptom.
The next phone call.
The next time your child doesn't feel right.
I remember going through that experience and trying to document it while I was living it.
I wrote a blog about Marley and what our family was going through.
That blog became a record of that period of our lives, written while I was actually in the middle of it rather than years afterward.
I want to include that material in this book because Marley deserves to have that part of her story remembered too.
She wasn't just the child who existed during the years everything fell apart.
She was a little girl with her own life, her own personality, and her own battle with a disease that none of us had asked for.
And then there was McKinley.
I don't want to write this story as though only one of my daughters existed.
They were both there.
They were both growing up.
They were both experiencing our family.
They were both affected by everything happening around them.
When I look back now, I realize just how much of my life was spent trying to keep those two girls okay.
That was one of the biggest reasons I kept pushing myself.
I didn't have the luxury of simply falling apart.
There were children who needed me.
There was work that needed to be done.
There was a household that needed to function.
There was a husband.
There were extended family responsibilities.
There were medical issues.
There were financial problems.
And there was a marriage that was becoming increasingly difficult.
I was trying to carry all of it.