I sat down for dinner tonight.
There are a lot of nights when I eat standing at the kitchen counter or grab something on the go. The meal was simple: macaroni salad and a chicken patty.
My bonus mom made the macaroni salad for a family dinner last night and left some extra with me. It’s honestly one of the first things I remember her making. She made it when she and my dad were dating. It’s a simple food — some pasta, a few chopped veggies, a special sauce. It’s delicious. We joke — only sometimes joke — that her pasta salad, peanut butter and honey sandwiches, chocolate éclair pie, and her unmatched persistence were what held our family together.
I’ve asked her on multiple occasions how she managed to keep going. Her answer is always the same: “I knew I was supposed to be here.”
My bonus mom joined our family in 1994 with one child of her own and walked into a house with five more — three of us teenagers, all of us grieving. It was chaos. She married into heartbreak and a wall of teenage resistance. There was unfinished mourning and no shortage of emotional landmines.
We were often intentionally unkind. In a way — unjustified as it was — we used our anger to shout over our own pain. Teenagers can be selfish, and grief only magnified that.
We had lost our mom, and in the aftermath, none of us really knew who we were anymore.
Honestly, I’m still figuring that part out.
But she — without question — knew who she was. She wasn’t there to replace our mother but knew she was filling a void we desperately needed filled. And she stayed.
I think about that a lot. Especially now, as I juggle two businesses, a marriage, five kids of my own, and a seemingly endless stack of responsibilities. There’s a lot of noise and pressure. A lot of people chasing something.
Often, I’m one of them.
Hustle is a tricky thing. It gets wrapped up in ambition. It flatters you with words like “the grind” and “next level.” But hustle always makes you feel like if you’re not sprinting, you’re falling behind. If you ever stop running, everything will fall apart.
Lately, the people who impress me most aren’t the ones chasing the next big thing — or anything, for that matter. They’re the people who know who they are and act from that place. Quietly. Consistently. No performance. Very little recognition.
That’s what I saw in my bonus mom. No grand pronouncements. No demands for attention or thanks. Just the steady work of showing up with love, consistency, and a kind of grace that didn’t flinch, even when we tried to make it impossible.
She wasn’t hustling to prove something because she was grounded in who she was.
There’s power in that. A kind of persistent strength — endurance — that suppresses the noise.
I’ve spent too many years trying to earn my worth — working long hours to prove I’m a good dad, fixing everything to prove I’m a good husband, over-delivering (or at least over-promising) to prove I’m a good provider. Arriving early. Leaving late. Always in motion. But all that proving has taken a toll. It’s left me exhausted. And if I’m honest, split. One version of me for work, another for home. The job gets the best of me; my family, too often, gets what’s left — or even the worst of me.
And while I never question the life I’ve built with my wife and kids — I love this life — I’ve started to see the ways I’ve built around them instead of with them. Not out of a lack of love, but from years of running on autopilot. Trying to be everything for everyone, except maybe the version of myself they actually need most.
There’s a moment when you realize that the hustle doesn’t stop until identity starts. That when you know who you are — and who you’re trying to be — you stop chasing everything else.
You start choosing.
You start saying no.
You start listening more than performing.
You show up not because you’re supposed to, but because you mean it.
That’s where I’m trying to live now. Not in the race to keep up. Or win. But in the slow, deliberate effort to be someone my family can count on — not because I do everything, but because I’m grounded in who I am.
The canyon I’ve been climbing out of wasn’t built by failure. It was carved by the constant need to hustle for my value — and maybe the shadows of failure that used to scare me.
I’m not out yet. But I’m finding footholds in the quiet. In the metaphorical macaroni salads of life. In the stories I tell my kids. In the moments when I stop to sit down and eat.
I’m still figuring it out. But at least now, I’m doing it as someone who’s remembering who he is.
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