From Where I Sit Reflections on belonging, identity, and becoming

I've spent a lifetime sitting in a lot of different places. Bleachers. Corner tables. Design showrooms. Boardrooms. Hospital waiting rooms. The booth at Poppin Fresh Bakery where I first looked into the eyes of my birth mother and saw my own face looking back.

From every one of those seats, I've been paying attention.

These essays are what I've noticed. They're about the rooms that didn't fit and the ones that finally did. About the permission we spend years waiting for that was always ours to give. About hair and faith and belonging and what it means to show up — fully, finally, without apology — as exactly who you are.

I'm not writing from a place of having figured it all out. I'm writing from where I sit — which is somewhere between who I've been and who I'm still becoming.

I hope something here lands for you. And if it does, I'd love to hear about it.

— Katie

From Where I Sit

I have no distinguishable backside. And after years of reflection, I am fairly certain I know why.

A significant portion of my life has been spent on bleachers—watching, coaching, cheering, learning. Before any of that, though, my very first role in sports was as a player, a marginally decent one.

After giving birth to three daughters, my only real hope was that they would inherit their father’s athletic prowess. Spoiler alert—they did.

From there, my life in sports unfolded in a familiar rhythm: player, fan, parent, coach—oh, the stories I could tell—then back again to parent and fan. And now, here I am once more on the bleachers, only this time as a grandmother. A new season. A new title. And, thankfully, new and improved lenses.

My granddaughter plays on an 11-3’s club volleyball team. She is nine. Her teammates range from nine to eleven, and for many of them—and their parents—this is their first experience on a team. Which means the gym is not just a place for sport. It is a classroom for everyone.

Sit in the stands long enough and you will hear it: “Be aggressive!” “Call the ball!” “Just get it over!” The energy is real. The investment is genuine. And the intention is good. But sometimes, it is a bit much.

At one point, I found myself gently reminding my husband that he did not need to comment on every play—even if it was only whispered in my ear. And if I am honest, I have had my own moments. There was the time I loudly called out “Point!” from the sidelines when the young scorekeeper missed it. Which, in my defense, was accurate. But also…not my job.

In that moment, it struck me: the children are not the only ones learning here.

Years ago, my son-in-law shared a phrase that has stayed with me ever since: lower expectations, raise aspirations. Through a lens of expectation, we notice mistakes. Through a lens of aspiration, we see effort, courage, and growth in real time. These children are not failing. They are learning.

Watching a young team develop is a lesson in patience. At first, it can feel chaotic. Balls drop untouched. Players hesitate. Communication is more hopeful than effective. And then, slowly, something shifts. A serve clears the net. A pass connects. Someone calls “Mine” and takes it. Not perfection. But progress.

And then there is the moment that matters most. The shy, unsure child makes a play, and you see it in their face—joy, pride, a spark of belief. That is the magic. That moment is what keeps them coming back. Because they will fall short again. That is not failure. That is the process. And if we are paying attention, we realize this is not just sports. It is life.

At one tournament, a parent asked my daughter—the head coach—why another team was being told exactly where to serve, while ours was not. It led to a deeper conversation about coaching philosophy. There is a time to direct, and a time to develop. If we remove the moment where a child must think and decide, we may get a better point—but we lose a better player.

My daughter played volleyball at the Division I level. She now coaches alongside young assistants who are learning how to lead. This gym is a petri dish of growth. Players, coaches, and parents are all learning together.

I care deeply about this because I have seen the alternative. Years ago, I watched a coach berate young players, even allowing “You guys suck” to be said aloud. After being told to stay in my lane, I chose a different path. I found a new coach—a former collegiate player, a woman—and stepped in to help. And just like that, I became a coach. And my lens changed.

Having experienced this from every angle, I can say this: the stands are not the place for coaching. Our role is to support. At the end of the day, the most important words we can offer are simple: “I love to watch you play.”

So here I sit once again on the bleachers, watching young athletes figure it out—not perfectly, but wholeheartedly. And through this lens, I see it clearly. This is courage. This is growth. This is becoming.

And lest we think I am too old to learn… I am about to order a cushy bleacher seat, because there are many more gyms—and likely a few ice rinks—in my future. Our grandsons are leaning towards Hockey.  A new season. Another sport. Another lens.

From Where I Sit

My hair has been part of my lexicon my entire life.

It arrived before I had words for it. By the time I was two years old, I had a full head of thick, coarse, curly hair — the kind that has opinions. The kind that doesn't ask permission. My mother had thin, straight hair. She loved me completely. But my hair was a foreign language she had never been asked to speak.

 So in third grade, she did what made sense to her. She took me to a stylist and had it cut into a Vidal Sassoon pixie. Neat. Controlled. Manageable. For the first time in my young life, my hair behaved.

 Or at least it looked like it did.

 I should tell you: I was adopted. My parents chose me — wanted me, loved me — and I have no doubt they were fully committed. But a baby is still largely a mystery at arrival. I was simply the unknown of a baby on steroids. They were learning too.

 My hair was the first visible evidence that I was uniquely, undeniably me. Before I had language for identity, I had a curl pattern.

 I should also mention: I am nearly six feet tall.

 I say that not for effect, but because it matters to the story. My hair was never operating in isolation. It was arriving on top of a person who was already impossible to miss. I stood out before I said a word, before I did a thing, before my hair had any opinion at all.

 And yet — I grew up in a family of introverts. Quiet people. People who moved through the world without needing to be noticed. I came out of the gate as an extreme extrovert, which meant I was both wired to engage every room and vaguely aware that standing out made the people I loved uncomfortable.

 I am still, honestly, learning that it's okay.

 In high school, I sat next to a boy named Mark Dolan in Science class. He used to give me a hard time — not cruelly, just with the particular confidence of a teenage boy — that my hair never looked the same two days in a row. He wasn't wrong. It didn't. It changed with the weather, with the humidity, with whatever mood it was apparently in that morning. It was unpredictable in the way that things with real personalities tend to be.

 I didn't know then that "unpredictable" could be a gift.

 What I did know — with absolute certainty — was that I wanted people to like me. An embarrassing amount, honestly, for someone who is nearly six feet tall and impossible to miss. You'd think the sheer square footage would come with built-in confidence. It does not work that way.

 What I've learned, slowly and somewhat stubbornly, is that the people who earn real respect aren't always the ones who were trying to be liked. They were busy being useful. Being honest. Showing up as exactly who they were, whether or not that fit the room.

 The hair, it turns out, was always ahead of me on this one.

 Because here's what I didn't say out loud for a very long time: I was a square peg for most of my life. The tall girl at Catholic school who came home in tears more days than I'd like to remember. The extrovert in the quiet family. The adopted child who didn't look like anyone in the room. I got very good at making it look like I was fine. At making the standing out seem like a choice rather than a condition.

 What I didn't understand then — what takes most of us the better part of a lifetime to understand — is that the not-fitting-in wasn't the problem to be solved. It was the path. Every room that didn't quite fit was teaching me something about which room eventually would. Every piece of myself I tried to manage or minimize was simply waiting to become exactly what someone else needed to see.

 I was becoming whole. I just didn't have a word for it yet.

 For years, I negotiated with my hair the way you negotiate with something you don't fully understand but can't ignore. I worked around it. I managed it. I did what I could.

 Then, about twenty-five years ago, someone handed me a round brush and changed my life.

 I know how that sounds. But I mean it.

 A stylist who actually understood my hair gave me my first real blowout. And something clicked — not just the style, but the feeling. My hair, smoothed and shaped, still mine but finally fluent. It wasn't taming. It was translation. Someone had finally learned to speak my language.

 I've been a blowout devotee ever since. Dry Bar before events. A ritual, really.

 Though I'll tell you something interesting: my hair has a second life in Palm Springs, where we have a home. The dry desert air does something to my curls that Minnesota never has. I can air dry there. I can spritz with water and watch them spring back to life. In Minnesota, that same spritz would be chaos. Same hair. Different environment. Completely different result.

 I think about that more than I probably should.

 When I turned fifty, I decided I wanted to let my hair go grey.

 My three daughters had thoughts about this.

 They worried it would age me. Make me look old before my time. And I — who had spent a lifetime learning to be exactly who I was — waited. I was fifty years old and I waited another decade for permission I never needed to ask for in the first place.

 At sixty, I stopped waiting. In January of 2020, I let the color go.

 A few months later, Covid arrived, salons closed, and suddenly going grey was everywhere. A cultural moment. A trend. Women all over the country were letting their roots grow out and calling it liberation.

 I was already there.

 My grey came in silver — really silver, with depth. Light in the front, salt and pepper underneath. The thickness that had confounded everyone around me since I was two years old turned out to be exactly what gives it dimension. The very thing that seemed unmanageable all those years was what made it beautiful.

 Going grey felt like one word: liberating.

 Recently, I was at an event. A local news anchor was serving as MC. She introduced me, I started walking up — and she stopped.

 Mid-introduction. In front of the room. To talk about my hair.

 I laughed. Of course I did.

 But I also thought: of course.

 My hair has never waited quietly in the background. It has always been present, always been noticed, always been part of how people experience me before I've said a word. It preceded my credentials into the room.

 Here is what I know now, from where I sit:

 My hair has been doing this my entire life — announcing me before I arrive, refusing to be ignored, never looking the same two days in a row. For years I thought that was the problem.

 Turns out it was just the preview.

 I spent years wondering where my relevance lived. What my voice added. Whether the most distinctive parts of me were assets or inconveniences. The curl pattern no one knew what to do with. The grey that came in a decade late but arrived exactly on time. The woman who is nearly six feet tall and still, occasionally, has to remind herself it's okay to be seen.

 My hair knew before I did.

 And here's the lesson: the things about us that seem unmanageable are usually just waiting for the right room.

 My hair has been part of my lexicon my entire life.

 I'm just finally fluent.

Coming soon: Belonging — add a placeholder with the title and a teaser line like "On names, faith, adoption, and what it actually means to find your place. Coming soon."