Yesterday was our twenty-seventh anniversary. Kellie and I got married in 1999. We were both twenty-three. That same year, I joined AmeriCorps and somehow ended up inside a community health center I barely understood. I thought I was starting a marriage and a job. I had no idea how much both would shape the rest of my life.
I talk a lot about being Beautifully Unfocused. Heritage Health. Books. Music. The podcast. Art. Women’s health advocacy. Whatever new idea convinces me at midnight that sleep is optional. I’ve spent years trying to explain how all of those things fit together. This week, I found myself thinking about the person who has lived alongside all of them.
For seventeen years, I’ve led Heritage Health. There have been plenty of nights when I’ve walked through our front door while part of my brain was still sitting in a meeting from hours earlier. Kellie knows that version of me. She knows when work followed me home. She knows when I’m physically in the room but not quite there yet. At twenty-three, I had no idea that marrying someone meant they would eventually learn the weight of a job they never applied for. She did.
Then life brought us something far more personal. Kellie lives with endometriosis. So does our daughter Sammie. Sammie started getting sick at twelve and was diagnosed at fourteen. Two years is much shorter than the decade so many women spend searching for answers. From inside our house, it still felt painfully long.
And Kellie was the one who saw the pattern. She had earned her PTA license and had experience around pelvic-floor physical therapy. She knew her own history. She understood enough to start asking different questions. I run a health system. My wife connected the dots in our own daughter. That still humbles me.
A lot of what I now say publicly as EndoDad began by watching Kellie advocate for Sammie while living with the same disease herself. “Believe her sooner” became part of my advocacy later. First, it was something I had to learn at home.
Then there were the years we were losing my mom to early-onset Alzheimer’s. My dad, my brother Jon and my sister Jen carried more of her daily care than I did. I lived in Coeur d’Alene, and I still carry feelings about that distance. There are things you wish you had done differently once there is no longer anything you can change. Kellie lived beside me through that too.
Sometimes taking care of somebody doesn’t look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like a cold night when I’m sitting there somewhere else in my head and Kellie quietly pulls a blanket over my shoulder. That counts.
Then there’s the version of me she has known for twenty-seven years that tends to come alive around 1:30 in the morning. Most nights, Kellie goes to bed before I do. The house gets quiet. Gus claims the beanbag. I open something I planned to work on for twenty minutes. Suddenly it’s two in the morning. There’s a song open. A book chapter half rewritten. Podcast notes somewhere. Artwork rendering. Twenty browser tabs. And somehow I’m also thinking about Heritage Health.
Kellie married this brain years before either of us had much language for ADHD. Every obsession and new project eventually takes up some amount of space in a life she is also living. I don’t want to romanticize that. There have been times when my ability to disappear into work or an idea has taken too much of me away from the people around me. Kellie has told me when that was happening.
I wrote something recently that I think gets closest to it: Kellie loved me enough to stay close while telling me the truth. That matters.
She has also built an entire life of her own. Her work. Renewed Strength Pilates. The people she teaches and cares for. The friendships she has built. This year she turned fifty wearing a tiara and still somehow spent part of her own celebration making sure everyone else was having a good time. That is very Kellie.
And in the middle of all of this, we raised Jacob, Cameron and Sammie. When I think about those years, I don’t only think about the big events. I think about the lake. Picnics. Swimming. School mornings. Kids fighting about something stupid. Five people trying to leave the house while one of us couldn’t find the thing we absolutely needed. Life that felt completely ordinary while we were living it.
Now Jacob is building a business. Cameron has built a life in New Zealand. Sammie is becoming an adult and figuring out what comes next. That happened way too fast.
The day before our anniversary, Kellie and I went to a celebration of life for a couple who had been married sixty-six years. Someone read a passage from Tolkien about marriage and the idea that the person you actually marry becomes your soul mate through the life you build together. Kellie was sitting next to me when we heard it. Sixty-six years. We had just finished twenty-seven. For some reason, that math landed differently in that room.
When we got married, we had no idea what was coming. We didn’t know about Heritage Health. We didn’t know what parenthood would ask from us. We didn’t know about endometriosis or Alzheimer’s. There was no podcast. No music. No EndoDad. No Renewed Strength Pilates. No studio filled with ridiculous late-night ideas. We were twenty-three. We started. And here we are.
Apparently twenty-seven completed years means we have now started year twenty-eight. I’ve been doing that math wrong for most of the year, which feels pretty consistent with the first twenty-seven.
I don’t know what year twenty-eight holds. I know Kellie has lived with every version of me so far. The young AmeriCorps guy who had no clue what he was getting into. The dad trying to figure things out. The CEO who sometimes brings too much home. The son who misses his mom. The guy awake at 1:30 in the morning convinced whatever is on his screen absolutely needs to be finished tonight.
She knows the good parts. She knows the parts I’m still working on. She stayed close enough to tell me the truth about both.
Kellie, thank you for twenty-seven years. For the hard seasons, the lake days, the stupid jokes, the late nights and all the ordinary days in between. And thank you for still coming to find me when I’ve wandered too far into one of my rooms.
Year twenty-eight. Let’s see where it goes.
Just an Ordinary Tuesday
One day after the most important one.
Listen to the episode. On this week’s Still Here, Still Trying, I talk about what actually makes someone your person after twenty-seven years. Stay to the end. I wrote Kellie a song she hadn’t heard yet. Listen to Season 2, Episode 18
Pass it on. If this one landed, forward it to the person who has been beside you through your own hard seasons. Or to a friend who needs a reminder that the ordinary days count.
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