From This Moment 

On this day 24 years ago, Marah Jo Petre came into our lives and completed our family.  It was such a memorable day because these spring snow storms that we have been getting this year also happened on the day Marah was born.  On the way to the hospital it had begun to snow.  By the time Don went home that evening there was 7 inches of snow on the ground.  By the time we brought Marah home two days later the snow was all gone.

Marah made a very quick entrance into this world because as we have learned about Marah when she gets something into her mind to do, she makes it happen.  So I think on April 7, 2000 she was ready to start her life and she wasn’t going to take her time so luckily we got to the hospital in time.  We arrived at 11:10 a.m. and Marah was born at 11:35 a.m.  She would have come even more quickly but we were waiting for the doctor to arrive!

There are so many things about Marah that impress me and inspire me but I am only going to focus on one for the purpose of this blog.

Tenacity.  Since Marah was a teenager she always had a vision of her future and worked toward it.  She didn’t just dream about it or talk about her dreams, she made them happen.  Even when those dreams changed.  

She started high school thinking that she wanted to do something in the health sciences.  Marah is extremely intelligent but she also has such a creative mind and literally knows how to solve all kinds of puzzles so Don and I always were trying to have her think about the engineering field. When she started talking about the health sciences, we started thinking about the biomedical engineering field.  In high school Marah enrolled in a program that allowed her to explore the health science field and as part of this program one summer she did an internship at a hospital.  She came home that summer knowing that the hospital/lab environment was not an environment that she wanted to work in.  She wasn’t turning her back on the health sciences but was definitely having her doubts if this was the field for her.

While in high school, she also took a lot of art classes including photography.  One day she told us that she was going to purchase a camera with the money that she had been saving.  That purchase really changed the whole trajectory of Marah’s life.  She came home and told us that she no longer wanted to pursue the health sciences and that she really wanted to look into careers in photography and film.  From there she started her own business at the age of 17 taking senior photos and that branched into wedding videos and since then she is now a social media content creator.

I will never forget dropping her off one day in Chicago for one of her weddings and thinking about her walking into a room full of people she did not know, introducing herself, making small talk, and attempting to understand their vision of what they wanted her to create.  I was in awe that she was able to do this and then create such incredible memories of the most important day of this stranger’s life .

Marah has always wanted to be a traveler.  In college she decided she wanted to go to Iceland.  I thought this was just talk and something that she would always just talk about but before I knew it she had her entire itinerary planned and had convinced her sister and four of her friends to go with her.  She made all the flight plans and had events planned for everyday .  We won’t talk about her one misstep that almost ruined this trip but once again I was so impressed that Marah put in motion one of her dreams and made it happen.  

Since high school, Marah always wanted to live in Los Angeles.  She never wavered from this dream and even when she fell in love with someone who wasn’t ready to make such a move she still moved herself out there(well, we helped a little).  I will never forget saying goodbye to her at the airport and looking at Don thinking “We are really going to leave her here all by herself?”  We did, and she has flourished.  She has created a great life for herself.  She has met some incredible people along the way, traveled, and experienced more than I ever did at her age.

Recently, her and her boyfriend created a bucket list and once again Marah has some big dreams on that list but I can no longer doubt that she won’t make a majority of that list happen because she has proven that when she wants something she will take the steps she needs to take to make it happen.

I called this blog “From This Moment” because I used this Shania Twain song to create Marah’s birth announcement to express how Marah’s birth changed all of our lives from the moment she arrived.  I have said this for many years and I continue to feel this way–Marah Jo Petre makes me a better person.  She makes me believe in dreams.  She always asks thought provoking questions that allow me to dig deeper and look at life differently.  She conquers her fears and is so incredibly independent.  I want to be Marah Petre when I grow up!  I won’t  include the entire lyrics but here are just a few words from the song that was on her birth announcement.  In honor of Marah’s birthday, I would love to hear the word that others think of when they think of Marah.  

Happy Birthday my sweet, beautiful daughter!

From this moment, as long as I live

I will love you, I promise you this

There is nothing I wouldn’t give

From this moment on