Like many people, I thought heavy drinking was just part of the college experience. I wasn’t someone who drank every day, but when I did drink, I was a serious binge drinker. Once I started, I didn’t really think about stopping. Over time, that took a toll on my mental health, some of my friendships, and even my academic life. I lost credits because of depression, and my senior year became this exhausting balancing act of trying to keep up with school while still cutting loose and binge drinking.

I was fortunate in some ways that I didn’t experience some of the more visible consequences that many women in active addiction do. But I reached an emotional and spiritual bottom. I didn’t drink for the taste or the social experience; alcohol became my answer to everything. If I was bored, celebrating, going out, staying in, it felt like there was always a reason to drink.

At 22, I took medical leave from school and went to inpatient treatment. Being on a campus, with structure and accountability, was critical for me. In treatment, I met people whose consequences looked very different from mine: people with drug addictions I hadn’t even thought about, and people whose lives had gone to places I had never imagined. There, I learned that even if our stories look different on the surface, the disease is the same. I realized that if I didn’t get help, it was only a matter of time until my story could look like theirs.

Getting sober gave me so much more than just the absence of alcohol. I got to go back and finish my degree. I started a career and had the opportunity to live out of state and then come back home to Dallas, where I found a community of women in recovery. Around that same time, I started dating the man who would become my husband. My husband is also in long-term recovery, with seven years sober, and together we get to build a home and a family on a foundation of sobriety.

Today, I am a sober daughter, a sober wife, and now I am a sober mother. I just gave birth to our first child, a baby girl, and it means the world to me that I don’t have that sickness blocking me from being a present parent.

Being the Co-Chair of Nexus Family Recovery Centers' Mother’s Brunch is truly an honor. So many women at Nexus are given the chance to build that same kind of foundation for their families: long-term recovery, community support, and the resources they need to walk through the world as clear-headed, content women, no matter what circumstances they come from. Nexus is vital because it offers more than just a path to getting sober. As a woman in sobriety, I’ve found purpose, belonging, and connection, all the things I tried to chase with alcohol.

To me, Strong Like a Mother is about the strength it takes to become who God made me to be and to put my family first. It’s the strength of faith, trusting that things will be okay if I just do the next right thing. Your support helps women receive inpatient, on-campus treatment, extended resources, and ongoing recovery support. There isn’t a greater feeling than sitting across from another woman and knowing that, because of the help she’s receiving, her life, and the lives of her children, can change.