An old Super 8 home movie of me dancing around our entry hallway in strappy high heels, auburn pigtails flapping, belting out an ad lib song at the top of my lungs while simultaneously bowling with my kiddy bowling set at the age of three provides a perfect picture (literally) of my eclectic, precocious personality.
And it only got more interesting from there.
After I came to the realization at the age of five or six that my mom and dad weren’t going to let me run off and join a traveling circus, I concentrated on tap, Brownies, and singing.
One of my favorite backyard activities was pumping as hard as I could on my backyard swing in order to get high enough to launch myself off at the upswing height and latch onto the nearby tree limb. I did that so many times that one day, when I latched onto the limb, it cracked. Dad had to saw it off. When he first asked me how that happened, I lied and told him I didn’t know. But I finally confessed. He kept asking me gently if I was sure I didn’t know how that happened. He didn’t display anger; he just impressed upon me how my actions had damaged a beautiful, full tree.
Soon after they enrolled me in the summer YMCA program to harness my energy.
I started out in swimming and promptly moved from guppy to minnow status, but I had no real desire to work hard enough swimming methodically up, down, and back up a rectangular pool to progress to barracuda and then shark. After a chat with the coach, he and my mom agreed that maybe the gymnastics and aerial ladder class would be more my style.
The aerial ladder terrified me. But tumbling, that was the ticket! Several days into the class, I saw a perky little girl about my age—eight and a half—with an official gymnastics team patch plastered on the hip of her candy apple red leotard do a back walkover on the tumbling mat. Wow! Exhilaration made my body tingle all over! I wanted to be able to do one of those too! So back home in our smallish living room, hour after hour, I used one of our cushy arm chairs to get the hang of forcing my back bones to bend into an upside-down U-shape, before placing my palms on the ground, arching my back and kicking my legs over my head. I had it down in record time.
In spite of my initial terror of the 3 and 15/16 of an inch-wide, 16-foot long balance beam, I was hooked. The genesis of my athletic career had begun! I willingly forfeited a normal life and devoted my available hours to (and made an idol out of) gymnastics. I even started my coaching career at the age of 16 and continued coaching into my mid-twenties.
For 11 years I had quite a run at the sport, with numerous state championships in all levels, a large stash of interscholastic league championships, AAU Junior Olympic Regional Championships, two-time AAU Junior Olympic National Competitions, and was one of the few women athletes around the country in the late seventies to attend college on an athletic scholarship—a direct recipient of one of my home state’s senator’s heroic efforts to change the NCAA rules to provide equal opportunity athletic scholarships to women.
My claim to fame is being the first female gymnast from the State of Hawaii to be offered and attend a four-year university on a NCAA Division 1 gymnastics scholarship.
Unfortunately, a catastrophic leg fracture ended my career (and, I thought, my entire purpose for living) at Big Ten Championships my freshman year. It took the next two-and-a-half-years to extricate myself from the deep depression that event flung me into.
But having to spend so much time in rehabilitation training rooms introduced me to an exciting world of athletic training, or sports medicine. I promptly switched my major to Physical Education with a K-12 teacher’s certification and a concentration area in athletic training. Even though I had to acquire the teaching certification, I didn’t want to teach and had no intention of pursuing that bonus to my degree following graduation. But God knew what He was doing, and I developed a passion for teaching. Nothing quite surpasses the thrill of seeing and watching students—no matter what their ages—learn, and grow and flourish. It is perhaps the most rewarding experience I’ve ever had. And I continue to love and thrive on teaching.
I met my beloved—also an athlete—at the University of Wisconsin, so the place is pretty special to me.
I went on to Indiana University (Bloomington) and was awarded a Masters of Science degree from them. Then, after my beloved and I married, I headed to work at physical therapy clinics in Wisconsin and California as sports medicine clinic director, patient care provider, program developer, marketer, and public relations coordinator. I’ve had the opportunity to work with athletes of all abilities and ages, from wee beginners to collegiate athletes and Olympians, and recreational and disabled (para) athletes.
From there I took my knowledge to the technical school arena and developed curricula and taught orthopedic assisting for several years. Then the premature death of our daughter, Victoria, and the high-risk pregnancy and near death of our younger son changed my life’s course, and the depth of my faith and practice of it.
I decided to become a stay-at-home mom and devoted the next thirteen years of my life to raising and home schooling my boys. I took an early retirement from athletic training but continued to study athletic injury prevention and treatment, health, fitness and nutrition, and brain and mental health.
Getting our kids involved in local science fairs kept me fine-tuned in science research and writing. Being invited to join the board of the Southern Arizona Research and Science Fair foundation kept me busy and up-to-date in science research and promotion. Being the community liaison for the University of Arizona Institute for Biosafety Committee for five years allowed me to rub shoulders with some of the brightest and best science researchers in Arizona, and learn what research is being done in a variety of science disciplines.
To add some variety to my life, and extra income, I began freelancing in the area of customer service evaluations, which advanced to report editing. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve come across personally, heard from other evaluators whose reports I edited, or saw happening in the world of customer service, in all fields. I’ve been sworn to secrecy, though, in my freelancing contracts!
My writing career actually started in elementary school, when I wrote and directed my first play while in third grade. The teacher actually thought it was good enough to produce. The acting of my classmates, however, left much to be desired.
I was an avid journaler (not a real word) most of my life, through high school, and I took my first journalism class and wrote for the school newspaper my senior year. The thrill of seeing my name attached to a printed article was thrilling! In college, I was a volunteer writer for the yearbook staff. I continued to write, direct and perform on stage. I wrote church newsletter articles and plays and was the church drama director for years. I choreographed and coordinated popular rush performances for my sorority. I love being a liturgist, to speak the word of God from the pulpit. To bring it to life for God’s people. My pastor’s wife gave me the opportunity to teach Bible study classes with her.
Then one year my pastor asked me to give the sermon for him on a Sunday while he was on vacation. I had the privilege of subbing for him several times after that and discovered another love, although I did not feel called to become a pastor. I did return to my inspirational writing, though, and began pursuing that in earnest. In October of 2012, I began my ministry blog “Broken Hearts, Redeemed,” which is dedicated to helping families recover emotionally, physically, and spiritually from the loss of a child in pregnancy or birth, or soon after birth.
And then I started to become published on a wider scale. Although I had completed a personal memoir manuscript about the faith journey I traversed after the death of our daughter and through the pregnancy and birth of our younger son, I had not published it. An agent suggested that I extract chapters or parts of the story to publish in periodicals or anthologies. That was the single best piece of advise I’ve ever received as a writer, and it worked.
Soon I was being published in anthologies and devotional books, including small-distribution publications and Chicken Soup for the Souland Guidepostsbook division. I was hired to freelance for two local magazines, promoting their businesses and community services. A local ghostwriter and editor hired me to work with him on his projects. I also became the coordinator and writing educator for Tucson Christian Writers, a position I held for three years until taking a hiatus this year (2018).
Then I reached for the big time. I entered Guideposts magazine’s bi-annual “Tell Us Your Story Workshop Contest”in 2012. I wasn’t selected, so I tried again in 2014. But I still didn’t make it to the 12-person winner’s circle. (Maybe not realizing either time that I needed to include a cover letter had something to do with it!)
But in 2016, I had the honor of being selected for their Class of 2016, and was one of 12 out of 2,400 writers awarded—courtesy of the famous and beloved author, Debbie Macomber, who has faithfully supported Guidepostsfor years—an all-expense- paid trip to Rye, New York for a week to study with the Guideposts editors and become a Guideposts writer. It was the icing on my writing cake!
Since then I’ve continued to write personal and ghostwritten stories for Guidepostsand be selected to attend twice-a-year refresher workshops they hold around the continent for their Guidepostswriters. I’ve met some amazing and talented people and been stretched in my writing and observation and listening skills. I’ve learned even more how to see God working in miraculous and small and big ways in our everyday lives. Winning that contest has been a tremendous gift to me.
In 2016, I felt God’s call to take chaplaincy training through the International Fellowship of Chaplains (IFOC)and became a Senior Chaplain—Ordainedin 2017. I’m still awaiting God’s call in a more specific area of chaplaincy, in addition to my ministry to grieving parents, but I envision it being in the area of emergency aid—natural disasters—and athletics, since both of these would be in my expertise and interests.
The personal memoir manuscript I completed 20 years ago is being fine-tuned one last time, and will be published—one way or the other—in 2019.
Last year, 2017, I felt a call to combine all four of my interests—writing, health and fitness, and spiritual teaching and guidance—to help people live more balance lives. Having it offered on my author website seemed to be the perfect venue, since I didn’t want my author website to be just me-focused. I wanted it to provide benefits in areas people struggle with in their lives.
My beloved and I, who just celebrated 35 years of matrimony, also own a small company. He writes and sells engineering curricula, and I offer my freelance content and copywriting services to businesses and non-profits. We have two sons who keep us energize us and keep us motivated to stay engaged and live life (as we taught them to do), a beautiful daughter-in-law who keeps our older son on his toes, an adorable granddog, a Shetland sheepdog who seems determined to keep going until she’s a hundred, and a black lab/German shorthaired pointer who knows how to live life at the perfect pace—slow and easy.
If you’ve made it to the end of this bio, thank you for hanging in there with me to hear the abbreviated version of my life story. I am grateful, and grateful.
THE END!