Rooted and rising.
I did not find higher ground. I climbed to it, one hard season at a time, with my kids beside me.
Grief, divorce, co-parenting, love again, a blended family. I have lived, and am still living, the chapters my clients are living, while guiding other families toward college for more than three decades.
Where it started
In 2016 I lost both of my parents, eight months apart. The next spring I filed for divorce. That fall I lost both of my grandparents, one in September and the other in November, and my divorce was final in December. By the end of 2017 I was a single mother to a 6-year-old and an 11-year-old, grieving, exhausted, and running a business that depended on me showing up calmly, with intention and supportive guidance, for my client families and especially for my students. I remember thinking I would never feel steady again.
Running a business through it
Through all of it, I was an entrepreneur. There was no leave to take and no one to hand my families to. Seniors still had deadlines, clients still needed me steady, and the business still had to grow. Some days I held it together in a meeting and fell apart in the car afterward. Building a company while my own life was coming apart was the hardest work I have ever done. It taught me that you can be frightened and keep going anyway, and that asking for help is not the same as failing.
The rebuild
The first year after the divorce was excruciatingly painful and contentious. What changed it was boundaries, a clear commitment to our children, and a willingness on both sides to transcend our own heartbreak, resentment and bad feelings for our kids. I learned what was mine to control and what was not, and I learned to keep my children out of the middle.
Part of that was letting go. It took a concerted effort not to micromanage my children’s relationship with their father, and to trust that they needed to build it on their own, without me as the intermediary. There was no triangulation, only direct communication and a real partnership between the two of us. Over time, that partnership became a positive co-parenting reality, and our relationship has evolved into a true friendship. Today my ex-husband and my husband show up together for my kids, and that is something I am deeply proud of. None of that was luck. It was practice, and a lot of choosing the high road when the low one was right there.
My roots
Long before any of this, I learned how to start over. I grew up in a Korean immigrant family in Montreal. When I was 17, my family’s finances collapsed and we moved to South Korea. I could speak Korean, but I could not read or write it when I landed. I went to college there, in a foreign country and in a language I was still learning, while going to school full time and working full time to help support my family. That is where I learned the lesson I have built my life and work around: confidence is not given to you. You earn it by doing hard things and finding out you can survive them.
Love, the second time
I met my husband, Marc, in my late forties. Neither of us was looking for, or ready for, a relationship, and it began as a casual friendship. Once we decided to commit to each other, it got serious quickly. We eloped on our front porch on the summer solstice in 2025, and celebrated a year later with the people we love. Blending a family on both sides has been harder and more humbling than I ever imagined. Thankfully, Marc has a great relationship with both of my kids and with my ex-husband. I have learned to love deeply, even through estrangement and conflict, learning day by day the difference between what is mine to carry and what is not. While we were dating, Marc and I started The Zero Hour Podcast together, and we are excited to bring it back.
Both roads at once
For more than 35 years I have sat with families at the college door. I have also lived it as a parent in a two-household family. Again and again, I meet parents holding everything together for their teenager while their own life is being remade. I know that road because I have walked it, and I am still walking it.
Why Higher Ground
I built Higher Ground for the parent in the middle of both: raising a teen toward their future while rebuilding a life. I am not writing from the summit. I am still climbing, walking alongside you and cheering you on every step of the way up.