Years earlier, Riley suffered a catastrophic knee injury that tore multiple ligaments and severely damaged his peroneal nerve, leaving him with drop foot and essentially a paralyzed lower leg. For months, we followed the advice we were given and waited for the nerve to wake up.

We prayed. We hoped. We researched. We tried everything we could think of. Month after month, we returned for nerve testing, hoping for the smallest flicker of activity.

Nothing.

Seven months passed. And then one day, something inside me changed.

I knew.

It is hard to describe what knowing feels like, even though I have spent much of my life exploring that very question.

How do you know when you know?

For me, knowing arrives as a full-body sensation. My entire being comes into agreement. With Riley, it came with momentum.

Every cell in my body was saying: Move.

I had no idea what the answer was or where we would find it. I only knew I could no longer wait. So I began reaching out, asking questions, researching, and following one connection to another until we eventually found a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai pioneering a nerve-transfer procedure that could give Riley the use of his foot again.

Three weeks later, Riley and I were on a plane to Los Angeles.

The surgery worked.

After months of rehabilitation and retraining the connection between his brain and body, Riley regained movement in his foot. He returned to lacrosse, won two state championships, and went on to play college lacrosse.

Riley — my Comeback Kid.

You can read the full story I wrote years ago in Miracles Do Happen: The Story of My Comeback Kid. 

What stays with me now is what that experience taught me about surrender.

Surrender Is Not Passive

Surrender and action can live together. Sometimes surrender feels like stillness. Sometimes it arrives as momentum. With Riley, every cell in my body was saying move. I still had to listen. I still had to make the calls, ask the questions, follow the threads, and get on the plane.

My intuition didn’t hand me the answer. It showed me where to place my attention. And I listened.

That experience strengthened something in me—the muscles of surrender, discernment, trusting what I perceive, and acting when my whole being says go.

So when I watched Hadley go down on that lacrosse field years later, some part of me knew this terrain, all too well.

This one had another layer, though. Lacrosse has been woven through my life for as long as I can remember. I played Division I lacrosse and field hockey in college, but lacrosse was my love.

When Hadley came along, I got to share that love with her. I coached her from the time she was little and watched as the game slowly became hers. I watched hundreds of hours of her play, from those early years of learning the draw and developing both hands to seeing her own instincts, confidence, and way of seeing the field emerge. Somewhere along the way, the dream of seeing my daughter play Division I lacrosse took up residence in my own cells.

It was her path to choose and her dream to claim. And still, I was deeply woven into it. Which meant that when she went down, I had something to surrender too. I had to release the picture I had carried of how this would happen.

Still, I was her mother. We had decisions to make. Which surgeon? What kind of ACL graft would give her the strongest knee? What would rehabilitation look like? How could we give her the best opportunity to return to the athlete she had been?

We researched. We listened. We made decisions. We did what was ours to do.

And then came everything we couldn’t control. Her recruiting season disappeared.

The summer ahead had been filled with tournaments, camps, clinics, showcases, and USA tryouts. We would have essentially lived back East, traveling from New Jersey to New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Florida, and back again. That was the path. At least, that was the path we thought she needed. And suddenly, it was gone.

One by one, we let the tournaments go. The camps. The clinics. The showcases. The tryouts.

And something unexpected happened in the space they left behind.

We had one of the most magical summers I can remember. I spent a week alone at our cabin in Maine. We said yes to an invitation to spend three weeks in Brazil with one of Kristian’s boarding-school roommates. We visited our son, who was working as a river guide in Colorado. I traveled to Mount Shasta for a women’s retreat.

None of it would have fit inside the recruiting circuit. We were plucked out of our normal routine, and something else opened—in each of our individual lives and in our life together.

All the while, another question remained: How was Hadley going to be seen?

She had incredible film from the previous summer and fall. She had accolades and a strong body of work behind her. And still, I wondered: Who would bank on the film of a girl who couldn’t play when hundreds of other recruits were right there in front of them?

As September 1 approached—the first day Division I coaches could officially contact her recruiting class—I could feel myself living inside a strange mix of emotions. Hope. Excitement. Anticipation. Trust. Fear. All at once in my body and being.

Hadley processes life very differently than I do. I process outwardly. I talk. I wonder. I get excited. I ask questions. I want to explore the mystery out loud. You can usually see exactly what I am feeling written all over my face and body.

Hadley is more private. More internal. From where I stood, she seemed to approach the whole Rutgers possibility with very few expectations. She stayed remarkably present and open with what was in front of her.

I was feeling all of it.

And then a door opened.

A few weeks before September 1, Hadley’s club coach called. Rutgers wanted her to come to their final prospect clinic. They knew she couldn’t play. She hadn’t been cleared yet. They wanted her to come anyway.

We could easily have stayed home. Flying across the country for a two-hour lacrosse clinic where your daughter can’t actually play lacrosse isn’t the most logical proposition. But something about the invitation felt clear.

A door had opened. We walked through it. We got on the plane.

Weather forced us to divert into Pittsburgh for fuel, turning our journey into nearly seven hours in the air. Seven hours for a two-hour clinic.

When we arrived, Hadley was one of the first recruits to walk up and introduce herself to the coaching staff. They knew who she was. They graciously welcomed her onto the field. She stood with the breakout groups and listened to the coaches. She talked with players. She asked questions. She told jokes. She laughed. She connected.

She couldn’t show them what she could do with a lacrosse stick that day. They got to experience who she was without one.

Later that evening, her club coach texted us and told us she had just heard that the staff had never had a recruit who couldn’t play make such an impression on the coaches and team. I was so proud of her.

Something had opened. Over the next week, we could feel it—the interest, the genuine connection, the incredible alignment.

And still, there was uncertainty. September 1 was coming.

Would they call? What if they didn’t? Who else had seen her? Would she have to reclass and repeat a year of high school just to have another recruiting season? So many questions.

I could feel excitement and surrender living in my body at the same time. I wanted this for her, and I could feel the possibility. I could also feel how little control I had over any of it.

Then, on September 1 at 1:00 p.m., the Rutgers coaching staff called. Kristian and I stood outside the door listening—completely eavesdropping—until the coaches asked Hadley to bring us into the conversation. We all laughed when we got busted.

And then they offered her a place on the team.

I could barely contain myself.

She said yes.

Days later, we flew back across the country for her official visit. We spent personal time with the incredible coaches, players, and staff. We met academic advisors and learned about the resources surrounding their student-athletes. We met the Rutgers athletic director, an impressive and powerful woman. We saw the campuses, the athletic facilities, the trees and open lawns and spaces I hadn’t expected to find there.

With every conversation, I felt more resonance and awe about what was unfolding before my eyes.

This wasn’t a school I had imagined for her. Yet it felt incredibly right.

Then I learned something I am still contemplating as I write this.

The Rutgers coach who ultimately recruited Hadley had been watching her the weekend she got hurt.

He had seen her play. He remembered her. He had seen her the day she went down.

Before the MRI. Before the surgery. Before nine months of rehabilitation. Before the summer of missed tournaments. Before the camps, clinics, and showcases we thought she needed. Before all those months of wondering how anyone was going to see her.

The person who needed to see her had already seen her.

I keep coming back to that. What I thought needed to happen, we couldn’t make happen. We couldn’t give Hadley back her recruiting season. We couldn’t put her in front of hundreds of college coaches. We couldn’t manufacture the path.

The whole time, something had already happened that we knew nothing about.

I find myself wondering how often this is true in our lives.

How many times have I looked at a moment and decided what it meant while standing in the middle of a story whose ending I couldn’t see?

How many times have I mistaken a closed path for being lost or overlooked?

How many times have I tried to lay the next brick because I couldn’t yet see the road?

I have written before about the yellow brick road of our lives in my book, Leading With Light. When we look back on our lives, we can often see it so clearly.

A random meeting with a stranger on an airplane that led to an impactful conversation. A relationship that asked us to become someone new. A perceived failure that redirected us to right where we needed to be. An unexpected invitation that introduced us to someone who changed our lives.

Brick by brick.

Looking backward, I can see an elegance in the placement of so many of those bricks. They taught me what I needed to learn. They introduced me to people I needed to meet. They shaped me into the person I am today.

Trusting the Road

Hindsight makes the road visible. The practice is trusting the road while it is still being laid.

And this is where Hadley’s story turns toward my own reflections. Because I am standing in an in-between of my own.

What am I here for now?
How am I being called to serve in this next chapter?
What form might allow me to help people remember their own gifts, trust their intuition, commune with their soul, and allow that deeper knowing to lead—while also supporting me and my family?

I can feel myself changing. I can feel my work changing. I can feel relationships and friendships changing too. 

I am contemplating belonging. I am feeling the empty spaces left by forms that no longer fit quite the way they once did.

I can sense something emerging. I just can’t see the road yet. And that is an uncomfortable, familiar place to be.

It is almost funny to admit that I seem to have an easier time quarterbacking this process for my children than allowing it for myself. With them, I can hold the bigger picture. I can remind them to trust. I can see possibility when they can’t. I can mobilize when action is needed and stand beside them when waiting is all there is to do.

With Hadley, another form of surrender is deepening. I have coached her since she was little. I have guided, encouraged, questioned, researched, and walked beside her through so much of this journey. Now she has chosen.

The dream I carried in my cells has arrived in a form neither of us could have planned. Her path is hers. 

Letting Her Lead

I get to step back. I get to let her lead. I get to have her back without needing to quarterback what comes next.

And now I am being asked to offer myself that same trust. To surrender the timing. To surrender the becoming. To surrender my need to understand the orchestration while I live inside it.

To let the pieces fall where they may. To listen for the full-body move when it comes. To recognize the open door and walk through it. And in the spaces where there is no door yet, to stay. To breathe. To be here.

My thoughts drift back to that lacrosse field nine months ago. Hadley on the ground in front of me. Both of us having no idea what had just begun.

I couldn’t tell her how the story would unfold. I couldn’t tell her that nine months later we would be standing together at Rutgers taking pictures of her in a Scarlet Knights uniform. I couldn’t tell her that the coach who would eventually offer her a place on his team had already seen her.

All I could do was hold her and help her breathe.

I wonder if that is what life is asking of me now. To release my grasp on the next accomplishment, the next offering, the next identity, the next answer that will tell me where I belong or who I am becoming.

To return to my own essence. To the presence beneath all the doing. To the light I have always known myself to be—the light that comes with me wherever I go.

I have watched paths appear for both of my children where, at different moments, I could see no path at all. I have learned that surrender can feel like waiting. Surrender can feel like a full-body call to move. Surrender can be getting on the plane. Surrender can be staying exactly where you are.

For me, the practice is becoming present enough to feel the difference.

Right now, I am here. I am listening. I am breathing.

And I am letting the next brick be laid.

Because one thing these stories have taught me is how little we can see from the middle.

And so I wonder…

Where in your own life are you standing in the middle of a story whose meaning has yet to reveal itself?

What might become possible if, just for today, you released the need to see the whole road… and trusted the brick beneath your feet?