Change Your Story

It was ten years ago (written in March 2024) that my family made a big life decision to change our story. My husband and I were born and raised in Tennessee. Our two older children were born in Tennessee. We are a family rooted in Tennessee traditions and our extended families are all here. In 2009, while experiencing dramatic business growth with Thirty-One, we made the hard choice to move the business - and our entire lives - to Columbus, Ohio. Leaving our home and families in Tennessee was very hard. But we took  a leap of faith and didn’t look back. We sold our home, packed up our belongings and drove 400 miles toward our new life.

I had no idea if this move was going to be for a few years or for the rest of our lives. I just knew it was a necessary step for the business that I had poured the last six years of my life into and was willing to sacrifice to keep the momentum of the business going. We found our footing in Columbus quickly as we settled into our new home and got the business up and running while gradually reducing operations out of our Tennessee location. Our kids were six and three at the time. We enjoyed having a new city to explore and were extremely blessed to have not made the move to a new state alone.

Several other families who were involved in the business with us made the same sacrifice and moved their families to the Columbus area. It was the one thing that made Ohio feel a little bit like home. We had friends who knew what we were going through because they were also going through the same things. Change is hard. I would not have wanted to do this big life move without these special families in our circle. We attended church with some of these TN families and afterward we had Sunday afternoon gatherings with our families that we humorously called “Praise the Lord and Pass the Biscuits”. So many special memories of our time in Ohio make me grateful for making that sacrifice.

Our kids grew up with the kids of the other TN families and our young kids even thought these families were actually related to us. One family was in reality related to us - my sister also made the move to Ohio. A bit later our parents joined us as well since we had moved all five of their grandkids in a six month period four hundred miles away. My sister and I were blessed by our parents’ sacrifice to sell their dream home that they had built and move to a new place so they could be more involved in the lives of their grandchildren. What a gift it was to share our Ohio experiences with each other.

There are countless stories I could tell about our time in Columbus, Ohio. The awesome people I enjoyed working with at Thirty-One, the amazing people I got to know within our church family and the very special neighbors we were blessed to share a cul-de-sac with and raise our children together. Our oldest daughter, Jordan, was able to be in the same school for 1st through 5th grade and our son, Jacob, attended Kindergarten through 2nd grade while we lived there. Our biggest Ohio blessing of all arrived in 2012 when our third child, Jozie, joined our family on an early November morning. Our family was complete and we were loving every minute of it.

In early 2014, nearly five years into living in Ohio, we started really thinking about where we wanted our family to be for the long term. All I knew was that I didn’t feel like Ohio was where we were meant to be anymore. I mean, they do say “You can take the girl out of Tennessee but you can’t take Tennessee out of the girl”. Every trip back to Tennessee to visit family during the last several years just made it more clear that we didn’t want to spend much more of our life having to travel 400 miles each way to visit home. We wanted to go back home.

I remember the day clearly when we went to lunch with my parents and told them we felt it was time to change our story and go back home to Tennessee. I expected a very difference reaction than I got. Because this news was going to separate my sister’s family and my family, it was to my surprise that my parents said they wanted to go back home too. Don’t worry, my sis eventually moved her family back to Tennessee as well. While I knew this was a big life decision that was going to impact my family and my career, I knew even more that it was the right thing to do for our future.

Sometimes life throws you curveballs and other times you get to throw curveballs at life. I was grateful that my career did not have to end just because I was moving back home. Remote working was not yet a thing in 2014, but I became one of the first in our company to do it. A few other people actually followed suit and we transitioned into a company with remote workers before it was the norm. For the benefit of my mental health, I did take a big step back in my role at work so I could put my family first. I strongly considered leaving my role altogether but decided it was better to step back and see how things went. When I look back I am so happy we got to have that five year adventure in Ohio but I am even more grateful that we got to return to our roots in Tennessee to raise our kids.  Changing our story is what we needed and it’s been a beautiful journey.