The Life That Built Me

When I left California, I wasn’t running toward something anymore.

 

For most of my adult life, I had been in motion.
One more job.
One more city.
One more opportunity.
One more reinvention.

I had crossed states chasing careers, packed my belongings into more moving trucks than I cared to count, and spent years searching for a place that felt like home. Along the way, I collected experiences the way other people collected souvenirs – Hollywood, advocacy, motherhood, triumphs, failures, and enough unexpected detours to fill several lifetimes.
Returning to Seattle felt different.

For the first time, I wasn’t searching.

I had found my son.
I had found my purpose.

And, perhaps most surprising of all, I had found myself.
The reckless certainty of youth had been replaced by something steadier. Experience had a way of sanding down sharp edges. I was no longer making decisions on instinct alone. Years of advocacy taught me patience. Motherhood taught me humility. Life taught me that certainty was often an illusion and that resilience mattered far more than control.

The woman who came home from California was not the same woman who had left.

She was stronger.
More grounded.
Better educated.
More capable.

And for the first time in a very long time, she felt settled.

I had spent eight years advocating for children and families. I had watched parents fight impossible battles on behalf of their children. I understood systems, policies, and services. I knew how to navigate complexity. I knew how to ask hard questions. I knew how to keep moving when circumstances became difficult.

Looking back now, I can see that I was standing on the firmest ground of my life.

At the time, I simply thought I was beginning the next chapter.

I had no idea the most important chapter was about to begin.

The Silence was Deafening

Landing back home in Kirkland, we had rented a big five bedroom, three level house with my brother Ian and his then wife. My nephew Jace was only four days old. I was thrilled to raise Jack and Jace side by side, and I was ready to get to work – unpacking, job hunting, setting up temporary health insurance, building our new life.

One morning, roughly two weeks after we arrived, I was in the middle of the usual chaos – boxes everywhere, emails going out, paperwork spread across the dining room table – when I realized Jack hadn’t said anything. He was babbling. Just babbling.

At first, I thought it was stress. A big move. A new baby in the house. A lot of change for a little boy.

But curiosity turned into confusion. Confusion turned into fear. Fear turned into panic.

He was fine physically. But his words – the words he had worked so hard for – were gone. Just gone. Where did they go? How does that happen? I didn’t understand.
I didn’t have a pediatrician set up yet, so I took him to urgent care. They did a full exam. He was physically perfect. The doctor emphasized getting a PCP established as soon as possible. He didn’t say anything else, but I could tell by the look on his face that he was concerned.

My Mom alarm went off so loudly I could feel it in my bones.

Something was wrong with my beautiful baby – my life gift, my chosen child.
And that was the moment the medical chase for a diagnosis began.

The Lifeline

Even though my personal life was unraveling from the shock of Jack’s regression, I still needed to work. Bills didn’t care about my panic. Rent didn’t pause for grief. And I needed health insurance more than ever.

I eventually landed a permanent job at Seattle University School of Law, working as a paralegal in the law clinic. The clinic is where third year law students finally step into a courtroom and represent clients under the guidance of professors. I supported three professors teaching students how to navigate client representation and court procedure in domestic violence, immigration, and international human rights.

Nothing intense about that workload.

Working in an academic environment was a huge departure for me, but I loved it. By that stage of my career, I was a seasoned paralegal, and mentoring students felt familiar – almost like the advocacy work I had done for foster youth. It was grounding. It was purposeful. It was a place where my experience mattered.

But the real lifeline was the health insurance – and the community. I was still frantically trying to get Jack into specialists, calling clinics across the greater Seattle area, only to be told that waitlists were a year long. A year. I was drowning in fear, but at least at SU, I wasn’t drowning alone.

Alice in Wonderland

Evaluation day finally arrived – almost a year after Jack had said his last word. I was anxious, but determined. Doing nothing had been killing me. I needed answers. I needed a plan. I needed to help my baby.

The clinic was bright and cheerful, decorated with cartoon animals and primary colors. It felt wrong. My mood didn’t match the room. Jack and I were led into a large playroom where three women waited with clipboards and warm smiles.

For hours, they peppered me with questions, scribbled notes, exchanged glances. Jack ran around opening and closing drawers and doors, over and over. I barely noticed. He had always done that.

Eventually, one of them told me they needed to step out and discuss their findings. “Sit tight,” she said. They were gone for almost thirty minutes. Jack was restless. I was unraveling.

When the door finally opened, a woman I didn’t recognize walked in first. The evaluators followed behind her like a procession. She came straight to me and introduced herself as a social worker.

“Fuck.”

All my life experience had taught me one thing: if a social worker shows up, your life is not going well.
She sat beside me. The other three women sat on the floor in a semi circle, facing me like an audience.

As the first evaluator began to speak, the room tilted. I felt like Alice falling down the rabbit hole — upside down, spinning, objects flying past me, everything distorted. I must have been half blacking out because all I heard, one after another, was:

“He exhibits autistic characteristics.”
“He exhibits autistic characteristics.”
“He exhibits autistic characteristics.”
I must have started to sway because when I came back into my body, the social worker was gripping my arm and the evaluators were on their knees, bracing me. I remember searching each of their faces, desperate for someone to tell me something different.

And the truth is, I didn’t even know what autism was. I just knew it must be bad – because of the look on their faces, and because my baby no longer spoke.

As soon as I started the car, I turned off the radio. The screams inside my head were deafening. They didn’t need competition.

I was in shock.
I couldn’t cry.
I could barely breathe.

When I walked through the front door, my mom rushed out of the kitchen and froze. Whatever was on my face stopped her cold.

“WHAT? WHAT? Oh no – what…?” she pleaded.

“He has autism,” I whispered.

Over the next few months, I went into auto pilot. My days were focused on work and getting Jack every resource I could find. It was a full time job in itself: What does insurance cover? Occupational therapy? Physical therapy? Speech therapy? What am I missing? I was frantic.

The Bunker

My late nights took a dark turn. I kept a secret from my family – or at least I thought I did. After putting Jack to sleep, everyone else would retreat to their rooms, and I would go all the way down to the basement. It felt like a bunker down there: cement walls, cold air, boxes stacked with things we should have thrown out but never did.

There was a futon in the small room, but I didn’t use it. I’d curl up on the floor in the fetal position. Some nights I laid in silence. Some nights I scream cried. And some nights I made that deep, guttural moan – the same sound my body made two years earlier when I returned to an empty home after Emily reclaimed Jack. That sound is my body’s war cry for grief that has no language.

But it was in that bunker – on that cold cement floor – where something inside me finally snapped into place. A clarity I didn’t know I’d been circling my whole life.

The accident I survived as a child – the one that left a scar on my skull because my brain swelled so badly they had to drill a hole to relieve the pressure – that accident was never just about survival. It was about preparation.

I grew up hearing whispers in the next room about “Tayshia’s accident.” In my extended family, life was divided into before Tayshia’s accident and after. My parents were terrified of Spacesha – terrified that smoking weed might trigger something buried deep within my traumatic brain injury.

Why was I unscathed physically, impacted only mentally? Why did I walk away with a rewired brain instead of a broken body?
Because it wasn’t about me.

It was about Jack.

Whether you, the reader, can take that leap with me or not, know that I take it fully – because I believe it. Chosen child? Did he choose me, or did I choose him? Maybe both. Maybe neither. Maybe something bigger.

All I know is this: I had been preparing my whole life for him. And when the moment came, I was ready.

When I walked up the stairs out of the bunker that night, grief had been put on the sidelines, and grit and determination took over. I didn’t know what waited for me on the other side, but I was no longer afraid – I was mobilized. Whatever beast had wrapped itself around my child, I would learn its name, study its patterns, and find a way to tame it. The battle was beginning, and I was already becoming the warrior mother who Jack needed.

I would get ready.
I would always be ready.

Grad School Done Dirty

I came up out of The Bunker like a vampire whose castle had collapsed on their coffin -disheveled, dazed, blinking at the light like it was a personal attack. Three months of scream crying on a cement floor will do that to you. It strips you down to whatever truth can survive the dark.

When I finally surfaced, the grief didn’t lift – it clarified. I wasn’t just a single mother anymore. I now identified as the sole parent of a child with a disability, and the cost of that reality was staggering.

I hit the research like someone checking the price of their own survival. On average, it costs 17.8% more per year to raise a child with a disability. And I was just one person. One income. One everything.

“Fuck.”

That was the moment – still half dazed from The Bunker, still shaking from everything I’d survived – when the decision snapped into place.

I was going back to school. Not inspired. Not hopeful. Not ready.

Just determined.

Grad school wasn’t ambition. It was survival.

A perk of being an employee at SU was free tuition, so I enrolled in the Public Administration graduate program at night. And that’s when I learned two things very quickly:

1. I wasn’t making enough money at SU to support Jack and myself.
2. Night classes in the city were a fever dream I could not afford — financially, emotionally, or logistically.

So I landed a new job – more on that nightmare later – closer to home, and transferred into the same program at my alma mater, the University of San Francisco. Online. Jesuit education, even though I’m not Catholic. I love the rigor. I love the structure. I love the community aspect.

Although she was 100% willing, I was not going to have my mom raise Jack while I was in school. I wasn’t about to miss any part of him growing up.

So that’s how things got dirty.

Because “online grad school” for me didn’t look like a latte, a laptop, and a curated study playlist. It looked like:

* researching FEMA policy on an iPhone at the park while Jack waded in the water like a tiny Viking king surveying his kingdom

* reading tax codes on an iPad sitting on the bathroom floor while he splashed in the tub and squealed his own aquatic adventures

* highlighting lobbying restrictions during Mickey Mouse marathons, praying the Hot Dog Song would buy me ten more minutes of focus

* writing papers at 2 a.m. because that was the only time the house stopped needing me

* pulling all nighters, then going straight to work, then coming home to be Mom, then logging back in as a grad student

*crying on the stairs, telling my mother I was dropping out, then remembering I’d have student loans for an unfinished degree and dragging myself back upstairs like a defeated gladiator returning to the arena

It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t balanced. It wasn’t inspirational.

What kept me going was knowing it was temporary. I could do anything for two years if it meant getting Jack the support he needed – a future after I was gone.

In the end, it was dirty. It was survival. It was the only way forward.

Two weeks before I finished grad school, literarily – TWO WEEKS – I was laid-off again.

The Detour

I’m just going to put this out there: I am not ashamed. Sometimes I still do some pretty crazy shit. But in a more adulting way – like the kind of impulsive chaos that technically counts as “professional development” if you squint hard enough.

While studying the open position ads, I saw something that sparked an interest: Senior Business Manager for a commercial real estate company. I used to have my real estate license. I liked real estate. So I applied.

Got hired.
Regretted it from day one.

That world was PowerPoint decks and sales pitches. Mine was client representation and contracts. They used Excel.

Excel.

Legal people don’t use Excel. Legal people use Word, Westlaw, and caffeine. They prep for trials and IPO deadlines. These people prepped for executive presentations with color coded charts and “synergy.”

They conducted detailed, all day trainings. I get nervous and overshare in front of a group. Awkward.

For almost two years, I had the most frustrating job I had EVER had – while doing grad school dirty at night. It was a nightmare. Because? Of course it was. Sometimes my impetuous borderline high risk experiments work out, and… well… sometimes they don’t.

This job? A definite NOT.

They knew it. I knew it. But I was stuck.

I made the decision to try and make it work long enough to finish school.

They had other plans.