How Do I Define Success?

From the Just Between Mom & Me journal series

Just Between Mom & Me is a guided journal I created for mothers and their children — a place to pass questions back and forth, to say the things that are hardest to say out loud. I answer these prompts as letters to my mom, who passed away in December 2020. She never got to fill this journal out with me. So I'm filling it out for both of us — answering as myself, and sometimes imagining what she might say back. This series is called If She Were Here. I'm glad you found it.

This prompt is from me to her.

The journal asks: how do you define success in your life?

And before I answer it, I have to tell you something about my mom first.

She never really worried about me.

Not in the way some mothers worry. She had a quiet confidence that I would be fine — that things would work out for me. I think part of that was just her nature. But part of it, if I'm being honest, was that she assumed my looks would carry me. That I'd be pretty enough, charming enough, that the right situation would find me.

She used to say I could always marry rich.

And I understand where that came from. She wanted me safe in a way she hadn't always been able to make me safe. I don't fault her for it. But what I wanted — what I have always wanted — was to be seen for something else entirely. My work ethic. The value I bring. The way I show up for a business, for a team, for myself. My mind. My hustle. The fact that I have been working in restaurants since I was 14 years old and have never once waited for someone to hand me anything.

She didn't worry about me. But I wanted her to believe in me.

Those are different things.

And she never got to see what I actually built. She passed before I walked across that stage to collect my Bachelor of Science in Entrepreneurship. Before I met my husband — the right man, steady and loving and nothing like what I was told to wait for. Before Caring Catalogs existed. Before any of it.

She missed it all.

So this answer is partly for her.

Success, to me, is waking up happy where you live.

Not dreaming of somewhere else. Not counting down to a different version of your life. Just opening your eyes in the morning and feeling like you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

It is having a partner who is dependable and loving. Someone who doesn't provoke or destabilize you. Someone who is just — steady. I think she would love him, my husband. She might raise an eyebrow at our age gap — I know her well enough to know that — but I think if she saw how he loves me she would come around. I believe she would.

It is work that never feels like forcing yourself out the door.

I have spent most of my life in restaurants. Right now I manage a place that employs and serves people rebuilding their lives — people coming out of incarceration, people in recovery, people who are starting completely over and need someone to believe they can. Both of my parents struggled with addiction. I grew up inside that world. And now, every single day, I get to be part of someone's fresh start.

I don't take that lightly. I don't think I ever will.

That is success to me. Not a title. Not a number. The feeling that what I do matters — to me and to someone else.

Financial freedom, in my definition, is not about being wealthy.

It is about generating income. And then generating income from that income. It is about loving what you do so much that it never feels like work. It is about building something of your own that grows even when you are resting.

That last part is what Caring Catalogs is to me. A business I created from my own grief and my own love and my own need to preserve the conversations that matter most. It is mine in a way nothing else has ever been.

I have lived paycheck to paycheck. I have slept in my car. I have started over more times than I like to count. And I never once waited for someone to rescue me from any of it. I trusted myself to figure it out. I always have.

You always said I only do what I want to do, Momma.

You weren't wrong. And I've stopped apologizing for it.

I wish you could see it.

Not to convince you of anything. You never really worried — that was just who you were. But I wish you could sit with me on a slow morning and walk through my days. See the restaurant. See the journals. See the life I built from the ground up with my own two hands.

I think you'd see that I'm happy.

And I think, in the end, that's what you actually wanted for me all along.

Just Between Mom & Me is a guided pass-back-and-forth journal for mothers and their children — for the conversations that are hard to start out loud.

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