When the House Gets Full, Then Quiet Again

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Okay, everybody. Welcome to Still Here. Still Trying with your host, Mike Baker. This week, I’ve been observing the Baker family on the Oregon coast, and I need you to understand there was a lot going on. Sammy had just graduated, which is huge. Jacob was there, now in Moscow, building his electrical company and casually becoming a full adult like that does not emotionally attack his father. Cameron was home before heading back to New Zealand, which is beautiful and brave, and also a direct violation of the parental preference for please live close enough for dinner.

And Kellie was happy. You could feel that one. All three kids together, the ocean. The food, the laughing, the family noise, the tiny moments that do not announce themselves as memories until later. And then there is Mike trying to be normal about all of this. Good luck. This man is finishing books, missing his mom, loving his wife, being proud of his kids, grieving a goodbye, noticing the meaning of life near the ocean, and somehow still thinking.

Yeah, this is definitely a podcast episode. Honestly, he is right. Annoying, but right. Today’s episode is about that full house feeling and what happens after everyone starts heading back into their own lives. It is about adult kids, proud parents, love that has to stretch the people we miss, and the life underneath the work Mike has been building. So take a breath. Text someone you love. And if you are pretending a goodbye did not hurt, congratulations.

You and Mike have that in common. Here’s Mike Baker with when the house gets full, then quiet again. Well, hello again. Welcome back to Still Here, Still Trying. I’m your host, Mike Baker. Hey, this is a show for people who are tired but still showing up. So it’s really for people who are trying to stay human in a world that keeps getting louder, people trying to love better, lead better, create something honest, and just keep going without pretending that everything is fine.

The last few episodes have been connected to the human first books that I have coming out on June 30th. And we started with Believe for the First Time, which is one of the most personal things that I have ever written. And then we pulled back and talked about the full Human First series, the 10 books, and kind of the question underneath all of them is just, are we still human? And what does that look like? Well, this week, Life pulled that question out of the books and just put it right in front of me.

And I just want to share that with you for this episode. So, as we talked about last episode, Sammy graduated, and I’m just still carrying that in just probably the best way. And then we had all the kids here, so we went to the Oregon coast. Uh Jacob was there, Cameron was home before he was heading back to New Zealand. Sammy was fresh off graduation, and Kellie and I had all three kids in one place for a few days. And when your kids are becoming adults, that just starts to feel different than it did when they were little.

When the kids were young, everyone being together is just kind of the default. It’s loud and messy and sticky and exhausting. And someone always needs something, someone’s always in a hurry, and someone’s always hungry, someone’s mad because life just didn’t go their way. And someone’s lost a shoe that was somehow in their hands seven seconds ago. And you spend years inside that, constant family noise, and you do not always understand that the chaos is also just closeness.

And then they grow up, they move, they work, they build companies, and they get on planes and they create lives with their own schedules, their own worries, their own plans, and their own direction. And that is the goal, of course. That is what you want as a parent. You want them to become whole people. You want them to be brave enough to build their own lives. You want them to walk into the world with strength and kindness and just some sense of who they are.

And then they do it, and your heart acts offended almost. And because I think that is parenting adult kids. There’s pride and ache in the same breath. And this week gave me that feeling over and over again. The house got full, we had family in town, the family was together, and Kellie was happy in that deep way that she gets when all the kids are close. I love her so much. And seeing her with everyone home just did something to me. Uh, Jake was there, he recently moved to Moscow, and he’s building his electrical company, so that’s exciting to see.

And it’s just fun to see him still showing up as our son and as a big brother, though. Like we said, Sammy had just graduated, and I’m so proud of her. I could barely find the right words. And then Cameron was home, and then yesterday he left again for New Zealand, which makes me proud and just breaks my heart a little at the same time. And in the middle of all of that, I’m finishing the books. I’m editing, I’m tightening, I’m checking covers, I’m thinking about release.

I’m just getting ready to send this part of my heart out into the world. And those books have pieces of my soul in them. I hope that people enjoy them. More than that, I just I hope they help. Writing them has been healing for me. And I hope they do a little good for the world. I hope that they make the world just better somehow. Even if it is just one person, one conversation, one moment of feeling less alone. And I also did what I tend to do when life gets too full for regular words.

I made a song. It’s called All of This Is Us. It’s not released yet, and I just built it for this moment, for this family, for this week, and for the way that the Oregon Coast just felt with everyone together, and the way the house felt after everyone started leaving again. I’m going to share it at the end of the episode with the people who care enough to be here with me while all of this is still fresh. So this week is just not like a clean little topic.

It is life. It’s the full part, the hard part, the proud part, the missing part, the part where the house is loud and alive for a few days, and then people leave, flights take off, cars pull away, and the quiet comes back. This is when the house gets full, then quiet again. Let’s get into it. Well, there is something about the Oregon coast that just makes you pay attention. It’s not shiny in the way that some places are shiny. It has more mood than that.

Uh the air feels different, the ocean feels big in a way that reminds you that your life is both tiny and important. The wind is always blowing, the sky changes its mind every few minutes, and everything just feels a little raw, a little beautiful, and a little temporary. And that was the backdrop this week. But the real story was just having everyone together. The trip could have been anywhere, honestly, but the coast just made it even more beautiful.

But the heart of it was just all of us being in the same place. When your kids are younger, you get used to being together because you are the transportation department, the food service department, the emotional support department, and the complaint desk. You’re not trying to coordinate adult lives, you’re trying to get everyone into the car without someone melting down over socks or something silly like that. You’re trying to get through dinner and showers and homework and practice and appointments and just a weird stretch of evening where everyone in the house seems to lose their mind at the exact same time.

With adult kids, the math changes. Everyone has their own orbit. As I said earlier, Jacob has moved to Moscow, and that’s just exciting. Cameron has a life in New Zealand. Sammy’s stepping into the next part of her life after graduation. And just getting everyone together becomes something that you feel in your chest because you understand it’s not guaranteed. And that is what I kept feeling on the coast. This is rare now. This is worth noticing. And it was not one big dramatic moment, right?

It was just the little stuff, the kind of stuff that would just sound boring if you tried to explain it to someone else. But just the sitting around, Cameron made us dinners each night and just eating together, watching the kids talking, someone laughing, someone saying something ridiculous, and just walking around, looking at the ocean, letting the day just unfold without demanding that it become some perfect memory on command. And that is usually how the best family moments work.

They happen while nobody is trying too hard. And this was the coolest part. I don’t know. I watched Kellie in the middle of it, and that may have just been one of the best parts for me. Just seeing her happy with everyone home, seeing her with the kids, seeing her get those moments. There’s just joy in her when the family is all together that I know all too well. But it still catches me. It’s deep. It’s not something that’s a performance. It’s the kind of happiness that just settles into her because the people she loves most are close enough to see and hear.

She has given so much of herself to this family. Years of love, years of worry, years of doing the next thing, years of carrying details and feelings and needs that most people just never see. Mothers carry families in ways that are hard to measure. And I’ve had a front row seat to the way that Kellie has loved ours. I love her so much. And there are moments in marriage where you see the life that you built together from a little distance. Most of the time you’re in it, right?

You’re dealing with work and bills and kids’ appointments and dinner and all the other stuff. But you’re you’re not standing there narrating the meaning of your own life. You are just trying to get through Tuesday, right? And then a moment arrives where everyone is together and the noise slows down just enough for you to see it. And you see the woman you married, you see the kids you raised, you see the years that brought you there. You see the younger versions of yourselves who had no idea what they were signing up for.

And you want to tell them, you won’t do it perfectly, but look. Look what you built. That was part of the Oregon trip for me. I was proud of the kids, but I was also proud of us. I was proud of Kellie. I was proud of the family that we have kept trying to be. We are not perfect. No family is. We have had hard years, we’ve had hard conversations, we’ve had health struggles, and we’ve made mistakes, we’ve had lots of stress, and we’ve had loss and plenty of moments where everyone needed more grace than they had in their pocket.

But we are still here, still connected, still choosing each other, and still showing up. And the older I get, the more I understand that family is built in the returning. People come back to the table, people forgive, people keep texting, people show up for the trip, people laugh at the old jokes, people make room for each other’s changes, and people let the family become something new without deciding that the old version was the only version that counted.

And this week the family looked like five adults and a whole lot of history standing near the ocean. And that was enough. I want to spend a little bit of time on Jacob because having him there mattered to me in a different way. Jacob is our oldest, and there’s just something powerful about watching your first kid become an adult with his own life, his own work, his own responsibilities, and his own future taking shape. Jacob is building a life nearby in Moscow, Idaho, and like I said, he’s building his electrical company, and that is just a big deal.

It takes guts to build something of your own. It takes discipline and humility and confidence and problem solving and the willingness to just keep showing up when nothing is guaranteed. Seeing him on the Oregon coast with us, not as the little kid that we were raising, but as a grown man building his life, it hit me. He was there as our son, as Sammy and Cameron’s big brother, and as his own person. And that is the part that I keep thinking about.

Your kids grow up, and if you are paying attention, you start seeing them less as people you are responsible for directing, and more as people you are just honored to know. The first kid changes everything. You think you are ready, and then they arrive and immediately prove that readiness was just a cute theory. You learn parenting in real time with the first one. Every stage is new, every mistake feels permanent, every milestone feels like a test that you studied for using the wrong book.

Jacob got those versions of us, the earlier versions, the figuring it out versions, the younger versions of me and Kellie, who were trying to build a life, raise a child, work hard, stay married, pay bills, and just become the kind of parents that we hoped that we could be. And he was growing while we were growing, and that is humbling. And then one day, he is a grown man. He has skills, he has work, he’s building a company, he has a life, he is he has opinions and humor and responsibilities.

He’s not the kid in the backseat anymore. He is someone you talk to as an adult, someone whose choices belong to him and someone whose future is being built by his own hands. And that transition is beautiful, but it also asks something of you as a parent. You have to stop trying to parent the version of them that no longer exists. You have to see the person in front of you. And that sounds obvious, but is harder than people admit. Parents hold every version of their child inside them.

You see the baby, the little kid, the teenager, the hard years, the funny moments, the mistakes, the growth, and the adult all at once. This week I saw Jacob as the adult that he is becoming, and I just felt proud. I also saw him as a big brother, and that mattered to me. Being the oldest is its own thing. It comes with a role that you did not ask for and responsibilities that people do not always name. Sometimes older siblings carry more than anyone realizes, and sometimes they become part of the family structure before they even understand what that means.

And I don’t want to turn him into a symbol, but I do want to say that seeing him show up, seeing him be there with Sammy and Cameron, seeing him stay connected to the family while building his own life meant a lot. And that kind of showing up just does not always make noise. It doesn’t announce itself. It does not, it’s not dramatic. It’s it looks like just being there. It looks like making the trip. It looks like laughing with your siblings. It looks like being part of the moment because the moment matters.

As a dad, I noticed. And I am proud of the life that Jacob is building. I’m proud of his work ethic. I’m proud that he is finding his own way. And I am proud that he remains connected to us. I’m proud that when we had this little window where everyone was together, he was part of it. When your kids are adults, showing up just becomes love in a new way. And they are choosing to be there. Jacob was there, and that mattered. Well, as we talked about last week, Sammy graduated, and I am still carrying that around.

We have talked about it already, so I’m not going to repeat the same tribute over and over, but I also do not want to rush past it because graduation is more than a ceremony. It’s a marker. It’s one of those life moments where the outside world finally pauses long enough to acknowledge what someone has been building quietly for years. With Sammy, that means a lot to me. I am proud of the accomplishment. Of course I am. But I am more proud of the person.

I know pieces of what it took for her to get there. I know that there were hard days. I know there were seasons of pain and uncertainty and frustration. I know there were moments when continuing required a kind of strength that people do not always see from the outside. That is part of why the book Believe Her the First Time matters so deeply to me. It came from sitting beside her in pain. It came from that helpless father feeling where you would trade places in a second and can’t.

It came from trying to learn how to show up when fixing is not available. It came from the reality that women, women and girls should not have to prove pain that deserves belief. But Sammy is not only that story, and that matters. She’s not only the pain she has carried, she is not a chapter in my book, she is not a lesson for other people. She’s my daughter, and she is funny. She is strong, she is caring, she has her own mind, her own future, her own voice, her own life ahead of her.

And she has fought through real things, but she is more than the fight. And I think that is human first in the most personal way. No one should be reduced to the hardest thing that they have survived. And watching her graduate reminded me of that. It reminded me that our kids are always becoming something. Parents remember the hard parts because the hard parts scared the hell out of us. We remember the nights, the pain, the worry, the things that made us feel helpless.

But if we are not careful, our fear can make us freeze our kids in the most fragile version of themselves. They deserve more than that. They deserve to be seen in motion, growing, changing, becoming, building a future that is not defined only by what hurt. And that is what I saw in Sammy this week, a graduate. My kid, a young woman stepping into the next part of her life, someone who has carried hard things and still deserves joy, freedom, laughter, and possibility.

Seeing her on the coast after graduation just felt right. Like we got a small pause after the milestone. Was not a perfect pause because life never clears the calendar completely. There were still book edits and work still existed, and Cameron’s departure was coming. Everyone’s real life was still waiting. But for a few days we had space to just breathe around what had happened. And I am grateful for that. And Sammy, I will say it again because I mean it.

I am proud of you, not only for graduating, but for who you’re becoming. And then there’s Cameron. Cameron left for New Zealand yesterday, and I’m still feeling it. Some goodbyes just begin before the actual goodbye. You know the leaving is coming, so you try to stay present, but some part of you is already counting down. You want to enjoy the time without letting the end of the time take over. You want to be proud and supportive and steady. You want to say all the right things and make the goodbye feel clean.

Goodbyes rarely feel clean. I am proud of Cameron in a way that is just hard to explain without sounding like I’m trying to talk myself out of missing him. He is brave. He really is. Moving to New Zealand, building a life there, working, meeting people, figuring things out from far from home, becoming more of himself in a place that is not ours, that takes courage. And I admire it. I also hate that it means he leaves. Both of those things are true.

That is one of the strange parts of raising adult kids. You spend years trying to help them become strong enough to go, and then they go. And part of you wants to file a complaint with the whole concept. Like, excuse me, I said become independent, but I did not mean from a different hemisphere. And that just feels like a loophole. But I joke because it helps, but the ache is real. Cameron has always had a brave streak. There’s something in him that is just willing to step into the unknown.

He doesn’t need every piece figured out before he moves. That is a beautiful thing to watch as a parent. And it’s also terrifying because parents like plans. We like knowing where our kids are. We like the illusion that proximity equals safety. It does not, of course, and we all get that. They can be close and still struggle. They can be far away and still be okay. They can build lives that we do not fully understand and still be exactly where they are supposed to be.

Knowing that does not make the goodbye painless. I want the big life for him. I want him to see the world, take risks, love people, work hard, make mistakes, learn, grow, and just come into himself in ways that never would have happened if he stayed too comfortable. I also want him at dinner. I want him on the couch. I want him close enough to stop by. I want the easy version where all the kids build wonderful lives within a highly convenient. Radius approved by their father.

But apparently that was not the plan. So I’m learning. I’m learning that love has to stretch. I’m learning that pride and sadness can belong in the same room. I’m learning that adult children need blessing more than they need our fear. And I’m learning that the goodbye hurting does not mean that something’s wrong. It just means that love is real. That is human first too. Cameron is not an extension of my comfort. He is a person. His life belongs to him.

My job is to love him, bless him, support him, and just keep the porch light on in whatever way a family does that across oceans and time zones. Yesterday was hard. I am proud of him. I miss him already. While I keep thinking about Kellie in all of this, I know that I already talked about how happy she was with everyone home, but I want to stay there because that was one of the deepest parts of the week for me. There’s something about watching your wife with the life you built together that can stop you if you let it.

Kellie and I have been married a long time. We have lived a lot of life together. We have raised kids, we’ve worked hard, we’ve made decisions, we’ve navigated changed, we have argued, we’ve fixed things, we’ve laughed and cried and kept choosing the life in front of us. Marriage is not one long romantic montage. It’s more practical and more sacred than that. It’s groceries and doctor’s appointments and late night talks and bad moods and inside jokes and forgiveness and just trying again.

And seeing her with all three kids home just reminded me of the depth of that life. She was happy. I could feel it, not in some loud way, but in a deep way. The way that a mom feels when the people she loves most are all close enough to see and hear. The way that she settles into a kind of joy because everyone is there. Mothers carry so much. They carry details and histories and patterns and worries and emotional things that just nobody else even notices.

Kellie’s carried our family with love for so many years, and I do not say enough how much I admire that. I love her so much. I love the way that she loves our kids. I love the way that she has stayed in the hard things. I just I love the way she laughs, I love the way that she sees the family, and I love that after all these years, I can still look at her in a moment like this and think, this is the woman I built my life with. This is the person who knows the whole story.

This is the one who was there for the baby years, the hard years, the beautiful years, and the years that asked too much. And there is just a quiet gratitude that comes with long love. It’s not always dramatic, it does not always need a speech. Sometimes it’s just standing near the ocean, watching your wife, watch your kids, and realizing that the best parts of your life are not things that you accomplished alone. They are the things that you built together.

The books I have been writing are personal. They have pieces of my soul in them, and I know I’ve said that before, but I just I need you to hear that. But also, my soul has been shaped by this family, and Kellie is at the center of that. She is in the books even when the book is not directly about her. She is in how I think about love and caregiving and women’s health and marriage and humor and resilience, and just staying in it when life gets complicated.

That is why this episode matters to me. It’s not a break from talking about the books. It is the actual source material. You’ve got the Oregon Coast and the kids and Kellie and the goodbye, my mom, the quiet house, the release date coming. Like all of that is just part of the same story. The work came from the life, and I really hope that you enjoy it. Well, big family moments have a way of bringing the missing people into the room. I I really felt that this last week.

I kept thinking about my mom. And that happens now when something big happens with the kids. There is this layer underneath it that says she should be here. She should have seen Sammy graduate. She should have seen Jacob building a good life and building his company, and she should have seen Cameron becoming brave enough to live across the world. She should have seen Kellie with all of the kids home. And she should have seen us on the Oregon coast.

She loved the ocean. She just she would have loved all of it. My mom had this way of noticing beauty in ordinary things. A tree, a rock, a stranger, the sky. Just a small detail that someone else walked past. And she could make the world feel more alive because she paid attention to it. She made cookies, she served people. She lived from deep faith. She cared about family, and she just had a way of making ordinary things feel meaningful because she saw them with love.

Alzheimer’s stole so much from her and from us. It stole the future that she should have had. It stole years of memory and presence. It stole the version of grandmothering that she should have been able to keep living. And it stole from my dad too. It stole from all of it, all of us in ways that are just hard to explain unless you have watched someone disappear slowly while their body stays in the room. But it did not erase her. And that is part of what the book Still My Mom is about.

It’s about losing someone slowly, but it is also about the truth that love keeps echoing after disease takes what it can take. My mom is not here in the way that I want her here, but I still see her. I see her in the way our family gathers. I see her in the way that we try to notice beauty. I see her in the way my kids have grown into people with good hearts. I see her in the ache that I feel when I wish she could see what I am seeing. The Oregon Coast made me think of her because she would have noticed all of it.

She would have loved the light, the water, the little moments, she would have loved everyone being together. She would have seen the beauty in the exact kind of ordinary family trip that becomes precious later. And that is the strange thing about grief. Joy does not replace missing someone. Sometimes joy makes the missing louder. The better the moment, the more you feel who should be there. I used to think that was only sadness. And now I’m not so sure.

It hurts, yes, but it also means that love is still moving. It means the person mattered enough that the good moments still make room for them. It means that death did not get the final word of their influence. And this week I felt my mom in the missing. Still my mom. Still part of us. Still teaching me to notice. Well, in the middle of all of this, I have been finishing the books. And that sentence feels almost absurd because life was already full.

Family trip, graduation, Cameron leaving, work, emotions, a house full of people, and then quiet again. And in the middle of that, I am editing, I’m checking covers, I’m preparing the release, working on podcast pieces, and just trying to make sure that this human first series is ready. June 30th is close now. I am excited. I am tired. I am proud. And I am nervous in the way that you get nervous when something has mattered to you for a long time, and now other people are going to hold it.

These books have a part of my soul in them, and I know that sounds big, but it is true. I did not write them from a distance. I wrote them from my actual life. I wrote from being a dad, a husband, a son, a CEO, a person with ADHD, a creator, a man trying to grow, and a person who has lost people and still wants to keep his heart open. I’m a person who believes that healthcare should be more human. A person who believes that AI should serve people instead of replacing the parts of us that matter.

And I’m a person who has seen pain up close and still believes in hope. Writing these books has been healing for me. And it’s not easy healing and it’s not clean healing. It’s not the kind where everything suddenly makes sense and you float into the kitchen as an emotionally integrated person who now drinks enough water. It’s more like working through pieces of life by giving them language. More like taking the ache, the frustration, the love, the regret, the questions, and the hope and putting them somewhere that they just might become useful.

And that has mattered to me. I truly hope that people enjoy the books. I hope they feel the heart in them. I hope they laugh in the right places. I hope the honest parts land gently but clearly. And I hope someone else reads Believe for the First Time and feels less alone. I hope a man reads Man vs. Menopause or the Better Man Field Guide and decides to show up better. I hope that someone with ADHD reads beautifully unfocused and feels less ashamed.

I hope that someone grieving reads Still My Mom and feels like their love has somewhere to go. I hope someone tired reads This Book Won’t Fix Your Life and gets enough breath to make it through the day. I hope that human first and the future still needs us help people think differently about the world that we are building. I hope in some small way that this work makes the world better. And I know that sounds wildly ambitious for books written at night by a guy with too many tabs open and questionable relationship with sleep, but I think that is why we make things.

We do not create because we are certain that the world will change. We create because something in us is just it refuses to stop trying. And maybe a sentence helps one person. Maybe a book starts one conversation. Maybe someone reads something and apologizes. Maybe someone feels seen. Maybe someone treats a patient differently. Maybe someone listens to his wife sooner. Maybe someone calls their kid. Maybe someone thinks about AI with a little more humanity.

Or maybe someone just keeps going. And that to me is enough reason to try. This week reminded me that the books are not separate from the life that I am living. They came from this life. They came from loving Kellie, from raising Jacob and Cameron and Sammy, from missing my mom, from leading in healthcare, from wrestling with ADHD, and using AI as a tool to help shape the storm. They come from wanting the future to be more human, from trying to keep my heart open even when life hurts.

The books matter to me because the people matter to me. The people are the point. This week reminded me that life rarely gives us one clean emotion at a time. Sammy graduated, and that is joy and pride. Jacob was there, and that is gratitude and quiet pride. Cameron left for New Zealand yesterday, and that is pride and grief. Kellie was happy having everyone home, and that filled my heart. The books are almost ready, and that brings excitement and pressure.

My mom was missing from the moment, and that brings love and sadness. The Oregon Coast was beautiful, and now it is already a memory. The house was full, and then it got quiet again. That is life. We try to sort emotions into neat little folders, but most of the important stuff just arrives mixed together. You can be proud and sad, grateful and tired. You can be excited and overwhelmed, hopeful and scared. You can feel the beauty of everyone being together and already feel the ache of them leaving.

And that does not mean that something is wrong. It just means that you’re paying attention. I do not think that the lesson is balance. I’m not even sure that I believe in balance the way that people talk about it. It sounds way too clean, too symmetrical, too much like something that you say right before life throws a shoe at your head. I think the better word is presence. Just notice the full house while it is full. Notice the kid who came home. Notice the oldest son showing up.

Notice the graduate. Notice the goodbye. Notice the wife you love smiling because everyone is together. Notice the person that you miss. Notice the work that came from all of it and say thank you while you can. That does not make the goodbye easy. It does not make the house less quiet when everyone leaves. It does not bring back the people who should be here. But it changes how we live while the moment is still in our hands. And that is what I want to keep learning.

I do not want to be so busy building something about humanity that I miss the humans sitting at my table. I do not want to be so focused on release dates and edits and covers and logistics that I miss the graduation, the family trip, the goodbye hug, the big brother showing up, or the happiness on Kellie’s face, or the way that the ocean just makes time feel both huge and temporary. The work matters, it really does. The people matter more. The best work comes from remembering that.

Okay, well this week the house got full, and then it got quiet again. Sammy graduated and I am so proud of her. Jacob was there and he’s still showing up as a son and a big brother, and I am proud of him too. Cameron came home and then he left for New Zealand yesterday, and I’m proud of him in a way that hurts because he is brave enough to go. Kellie and I had our kids together on the Organic coast, and seeing her happy with everyone home is just something that I’m going to carry for a long time.

We missed my mom, but part of it, she was still there. I’m excited for these books to come out. I’m excited and tired and proud and hopeful. These books are are going to be something special, and I hope that people enjoy them. I hope that they help. I hope in some small way they mar make the world better, because that is what I have been trying to do with all of this. Take the life that I have been given, the people I love, the pain I have seen, the questions I carry, and the hope that I still believe in and make something useful from it.

Underneath all of it is the same truth that I keep coming back to. Still here, still trying. Human first. The people are the point. Being human is not some big abstract idea. It is standing in the middle of a family that keeps changing and loving them without trying to freeze them in place. It’s letting the goodbye hurt. It’s celebrating the graduate, it’s noticing the oldest son who showed up. It’s loving the woman who built this life with you. And it’s being proud of the kid brave enough to leave.

It’s finishing the work while remembering why the work matters. If you are in one of those moments right now where something beautiful is changing and you’re trying to be grateful without pretending it does not hurt, I see you. Just go ahead and let both of those things be true. You do not have to choose between pride and sadness. You don’t have to make the moment simple for it to be good. Just say the words. Take the picture, make the memory, hold the hand, let them go.

And keep loving them. This is still here, still trying. I’m Mike Baker. Stay human. Notice the full house. Keep showing up. I’ll see you next week. Okay, well, I hope you enjoyed that episode. It’s pretty raw and real. Um, but before I let you go, I want to share something new with you. Uh, this is not a song that I’ve released yet. I built it for this moment for this week, and honestly, for this episode. It is called All of This Is Us. And after we got back from the Oregon Coast, after Sammy had accomplished this big milestone, and again just watching Jacob and Cameron doing their things, I just kept trying to name what I was feeling.

The joy, the ache, the pride, the missing, and you know, trying to capture the way that Kellie looked with all of the kids home. The way that my mom felt present, even though she was not there. And I just regular words were not quite enough. So, like I do often, I turned it into a song. And this is one of those gifts of making music. Sometimes it just holds what a regular sentence cannot hold. All of this is us is about the leaving and the staying.

It’s about the laughter at the table and the quiet in the air after everyone goes. It’s about your kids building something. It’s about your kids growing and moving into their own life. It’s about Cameron chasing a bigger sky and just being present for all of it. I wanted to share it here first because you guys are the people who care. The people who listen, you’re part of this family, the people who have been walking with me through this part of my life and the books and my family and just trying to make sense of life as it happens.

And that means a lot to me. Look, the Human First Book series releases on June 30th. I’m excited to share them. But this week reminded me why I write and why I make songs in the first place. I create because life keeps handing us these moments, and I want to pay attention before they pass. I create because love changes shape, and I’m trying to keep up. I create because the people we love deserve to be remembered while they are still here and after they’re gone.

Thank you for listening. Thank you for being part of this with me. I hope you enjoy the song. Here is all of this is us. Enjoy it. Still on our shoulders. Kids were older, but still ours for a minute. Life keeps moving, man. It moves so fast. Sammy had that cap and gown behind her. Jacobs building something with his hands. Cameron’s bags were waiting by the doorway, chasing down a life in a far-off land. Kellie smiled the whole world around her. Like every heart is somehow brought us here.

I looked at her. Start the life we built up. Starting the wind. Love drawing. All of this is dust. And why is plans? There’s a prize. The 50 guys. When you bowls, Sam is walking into her own pain. She made it through our still girl to start. Never mind, ever scarf. All of this is us. Mom would have loved that coast in the evening. She would have noticed every shade of blue. She should have seen those kids all together. But I swear her love was moving through.

All of this is us, the joy and the aching. The kids becoming older. The laugh we keep making. All of this is us. The people we did. The people we got. All of this is the test. But it’s still full of others. All of this is a very good idea.