Chapter Four –
Choosing Family

There was a point when everything stopped.

Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just quietly, decisively.

The remodel was underway. Walls were changing. Rooms were shifting. I was pregnant. Preparing not just for a baby, but for a completely different season of life. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, the Giddyup Glove stopped fitting into my days.

So I put it away.

Not out of frustration.
Not out of doubt.

I packed the pieces into bins. I put the project on a shelf — literally and figuratively. And in doing so, I made a very clear choice about what came first.

I was choosing to create a family.

My energy went elsewhere. Into preparing our home. Into remodeling the downstairs. Into painting — yes, on ladders — and making space for what was coming next. My body was changing. My priorities were changing. And the kind of creation I was capable of had shifted.

The glove wasn’t gone.
It was paused.

And that pause wasn’t failure — it was discernment.

We didn’t know ahead of time whether our baby would be a boy or a girl. We had a few names picked out. Possibilities we carried with us while we waited. But nothing felt finished. Nothing felt certain.

It wasn’t until we met her.

My husband looked at me while holding our tiny baby girl in his arms and said, almost casually, with a small smile,
“I think she’s Esther Sage.”

And I said back, without hesitation,
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

It was.

We didn’t choose her name so much as recognize it. It took meeting her to know who she was. And it will take the rest of our lives to continue learning who she will become.

Esther was named after my grandmother — a woman who had quietly shaped so much of who I am, even though she passed away when I was still young. Some of my favorite memories live on the floor of her apartment, sitting on one of her quilts, having picnics with oyster crackers and our imaginations fully switched on.

We would imagine animals climbing invisible trees. Birds flying above our heads. Entire scenes unfolding right there on the quilt, in the middle of her apartment. It felt endless. Safe. Alive.

My grandmother was a maker.
A baker.
A home creator.

She recycled old clothing into quilt squares, laying them out slowly and thoughtfully. I used to help her decide which pieces should go next to each other, arranging and rearranging them on the floor. Long before I had language for iteration or design, I was learning it there.

I still have an old suitcase filled with her quilt squares.

Someday, I’ll learn how to quilt. Someday, I’ll finish something with them. There’s no rush.

That way of making — patient, intuitive, rooted in reuse and imagination — never really left me. It simply moved into the background for a while, waiting for the right season to return.

Choosing family didn’t mean abandoning creation.

It meant trusting that some things wait.

And that waiting doesn’t make them smaller.
It makes them ready.