Category: Unwritten & Understood

This post is a reflection on how the Kara Tippetts motherhood blog changed the way I parent. How a stranger’s story broke me, healed me, and changed how I mother.  A tribute to KaraTippetts blog about breast cancer and motherhood

📸 2019, in our old house.
That handmade sign—LOVE intentionally—hung in the heart of our home. I made it after reading a blog that broke me open in the early days of motherhood.
I don’t have the sign anymore. But I carry what it taught me.
Every day, I try to live it. 

Author’s Note:   

I cried while writing this.
Not because I was sad—though parts of it still hurt in places I’ve buried for my own sanity.
But because it took me back to a moment in motherhood that changed me.

This is for the empaths.
For anyone who has carried grief they didn’t technically earn, but couldn’t put down anyway.

I didn’t know a blog could change me. But Mundane Faithfulness didn’t just change me—it haunted me, healed me, and helped me become a more intentional mother.

This is for the ones who carry stories that were never really theirs… and still feel every cut as if they lived it.

 The Blog That Made the Mundane Holy 

I don’t care who you are—someone in your life changed you.
Not always because you asked them to. Sometimes they arrive quietly, through a screen. And sometimes, they never actually show up. You go to them.

That’s how Mundane Faithfulness found me.

I was postpartum—tired, hormonal, and suddenly terrified of my own mortality. I’d just had my second baby, and the world had shrunk to the sound of screaming infants and the clink of dinner plates I never got to eat off of while they were still warm. My old carefree self evaporated. In her place stood someone with silent but deep panic, afraid of what her body might be hiding.

I became obsessed with cancer.

I didn’t know at the time that I was processing buried trauma from watching my mom survive cancer at 28 (while I was 9), and knowing my grandmother had endured the same. They both had double mastectomies. That legacy sat quiet in my body for years—until motherhood cracked it open.

Side note: We did genetic testing later and discovered that I broke the cycle—I was negative for the BRCA gene mutation. My mom was positive, which told us two things:
• The cancer in our family was caused by a gene mutation—so we needed her to be positive in order for my negative result to truly matter.
• Somehow, my DNA broke the pattern—so Abigail is not at risk.

 Learn more about BRCA mutations and inherited cancer risk here:

CDC – BRCA Gene Mutations: Cancer Risk and Genetic Testing

Before the genetic testing, I realized this:
Suddenly, I had something to live for. And nothing makes you more afraid of dying than having something precious to stay alive for.

But all of that came later.

Then I found her. A mom with terminal cancer, writing her story in real time.

Reading her blog felt like watching my fears play out on someone else’s stage. She was me. She had babies. She had a lump. She was dying.

And I was one year younger than she had been when she was diagnosed.

Back then, the only thread of comfort I clung to was age—I was younger, surely it wouldn’t happen yet. But my mom had been 28 when she was diagnosed. So even that fragile hope was a lie I couldn’t fully believe.

Eventually, I got my mammogram and pap smear. Not because I thought I needed to, but because her story made me realize I was pretending I was invincible.

Reading her words didn’t just make me emotional. It made me physically ache. Not like a movie scene where everyone tears up at the sad part—this was deeper. It felt like I was her.
Like I was watching my kids grow up without me in slow motion.
Like I was writing letters I’d never get to read.

She wrote to her children—for milestones she knew she wouldn’t reach. 

And somewhere in those entries, she wrote two words that lit a fire inside of me:
Love intentionally.

She and her husband made sure to take turns caring for their kids. To give each other breaks. Because exhaustion is real. But love without intention can quietly curdle into resentment. So they protected each other from burnout. They fought for rest as a way to love better.

And when I realized she wouldn’t get to do that anymore—not the field trip forms, the packed lunches, the tiny hand squeezes in the carpool line—I broke.
Not just as a reader.
As a mother.

That week, I made a massive sign—three feet tall and five feet wide.
In big black letters, it read:
LOVE INTENTIONALLY

I hung it in the center of our home while my babies were small, to remind myself that the messes and monotony were not just necessary. They were sacred.
They were mine.

I don’t read that blog anymore—not often.
Just when I want to remember.
Or when I want to feel something deeply.
Sometimes I still ache for her.

That’s empathy. It doesn’t always make sense. It’s not tidy. It doesn’t ask permission.
It just shows up and bleeds with people who never knew your name.

That blog changed me.

It made me a better mom.
A more awake woman.
It wrecked me in all the right ways.

Not because I lived it.
But because part of me still feels like I did.

 The Long Goodbye is what came of the blog and the woman who inspired me: Mundane Faithfulness. 

I didn’t even know until recently that they made a movie about her—The Long Goodbye: The Kara Tippetts Story.

It felt surreal. Because I wasn’t just watching her story—I had lived it, in real time, through her words.

Long before the movie, there was the blog—Mundane Faithfulness.
That’s where I met her.
That’s what changed me.
That’s where I learned that ordinary faithfulness is anything but small.