Resilience Story: Meet Kate

1. Name: Kate

2. Hometown: Newburgh, NY and Windsor, CT

3. Current town: Avon, CT

4. Favorite song? Music is one of my great passions and my tastes are wide ranging! It’s so hard to pick just one because my favorite song varies with my mood and the season. Whitney Houston has been one of my favorite artists since I was a young girl. I recently took a Peloton class that was Whitney themed and I am really feeling “I’m Every Woman” right now. It’s like the soundtrack for where I am at this stage of my life.

5. Favorite book? Again, hard to pick one! It’s a tie between Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban and Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.

6. Favorite recipe? HelloFresh has a Brussels Sprout flatbread with lemon ricotta and a hot honey drizzle. If I ever open a restaurant, that will be on my menu!

7. What does resilience mean to you? Getting knocked down but getting back up again. (think Chumbawamba or Poppy from Trolls). For me, resilience is learning from those things that knock you down and using them to improve throughout your life. As a toddler learns to walk they fall down hundreds of times before they master the skill of taking consecutive steps. I believe that never stops. Resilience is doing or handling the hard things that life throws at you until they aren’t so hard anymore.

8. Describe a time when you were so happy you felt like singing out loud: I often sing out loud even though I’m not so great at it! Every summer my family vacations at “the shore” a.k.a. South Jersey beaches. When I see our exit on the Garden State Parkway I get the same rush of joy that I have felt since childhood. When we cross the bridge to the island, car windows go down, music turns up and its car concert time!

9. Share a story about something you regret or the hardest thing you've even had to go through: I have had to navigate quite a few hard things in my life, but the hardest was my parent’s divorce. My family has always been very close and parents were married for 37 years. I was 36 and my second child was 7 months old when everything abruptly fell apart. The dynamic of my family changed significantly. My relationship and my children’s relationship with my parents changed as well. There were and still are a lot of adjustments and emotions that I am working through 4 years later.

10. What do you do to get through the hard times? Look for the joy and the humor, even if it’s dark humor. Laughter really can do wonders to lighten even the darkest of times. Laughter is my light. As Albus Dumbledore (HP reference) said: “Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”

11. What is one thing you can't live without? My family!

12. Describe what you are going through now in one word, and then explain: Evolution.

2020 was certainly a strange year to say the least. If you had told me one year ago that my life would look the way it does today, I would not have believed it. I continue to evolve in every aspect of my life. Some of the change I like and some of it I don’t, but all of it is necessary for survival.

13. What is the one thing that you are most proud of? I know it sounds cliché, but my children. I love watching them grow and develop. It’s amazing to see their personalities develop as they get older. I don’t say I am proud because I take credit for who they are. I am proud that I was able to bring them into this world and be able to be play a supporting role in who they are now and will be in the future. In the movie “A League of Their Own”, Kit says to Dottie, “Thanks for getting me into the league.” Dottie replies “You got yourself into the league. I got you on the train.” I am proud that I “got them on the train.”

14. If you were to offer one piece of advice to other women, what would it be? Trust. Your. Instincts! So many times I have watched women doubt their instincts (myself included) for a myriad of reasons. Societal pressures, the fear of judgment, wanting to be “nice”. We put ourselves through so much turmoil trying to fight against those instincts. Trust yourself, who else in this world knows you better? As my daughter tells me, “You aren’t in my brain, you don’t know what I am thinking.”

::Oh, snap::

15. If you got to be Oprah for a day and give everyone one product, what would you choose? AHHHH! Really I have three products that I think every adult needs, but to play the game by the rules, I will pick a Dyson vacuum. Truly, almost everyone would have a use for one and there is no ongoing cost associated with it. My 16 year old self would never imagine that she would one day say, “I love my vacuum”, but here I am!