My earliest years were spent in the same home where my mother was raised in Stantonville, Tennessee. My grandfather's legacy of farming cotton and showing horses was evident in every corner of our home, alongside my grandmother's priceless antiques.
Rodeo trophies and tobacco pouches sat atop heirloom furniture, a nod to the past already baked into my DNA. The only problem was I was hungry to sow seeds of curious adventure rather than remain on the land my family had earnestly tilled.
Even from the age of 5, I was acutely aware that my place in the world held enormous privilege. I watched news coverage of the 1992 drought across southern Africa, and for years my family says I prayed at dinner for "the kids who don't have a mother or a father and have to drink muddy water."
When I started school, the weight of segregation was a great burden on my small heart. It was hard to believe that if I had been born just a few decades earlier, my friends Whitney and Angie and RoDerrick wouldn't have been in my class. And yet every Sunday, the racial lines of my small town were drawn with segregated houses of worship on either side, a steady reminder of how young that history really was.
My mother was a kindergarten teacher for most of her career, and I followed her path. I walked down the aisle to my marriage with Gavin two weeks after walking the stage of my college graduation. Gavin was finishing medical school, so we built our early life in a small Memphis apartment, teaching and pinching pennies through the 2009 recession. In 2010, we moved to Greenwood, South Carolina for his family practice residency. I taught 4th grade, began my graduate work at Clemson in International Family and Community Studies, and we both worked 60, 80, sometimes 100-hour weeks. We made plans to move overseas, and just in time, welcomed Eliza two weeks before Gavin's graduation.
