Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we finally talk about the hunt.

Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with your friends and family! And if you’re one of those friends or family members, you can sign up to get your own copy every week right here.

Many of you emailed after Wednesday’s newsletter asking whether my husband and I got an elk on our hunting trip, so I thought today would be as good a time as any to tell y’all the story.

On Wednesday, I left off halfway through the first hunt. We were still sitting on the ridge where I saw the lone tree when we decided nothing would come our way there. Sometimes you have to cut your losses and move on from a dead spot. If you live in a high-elevation state, it probably doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to hike up and down mountain ridges. However, as a Texan who only ever walks the paved roads in my neighborhood, the over 5,000-foot elevation difference made hiking … problematic.

We spent the better part of the next two hours climbing and descending ridges as my body fought to breathe. I was sucking in air, but it didn’t feel like it was making much of a difference. My muscles ached with every step, begging for mercy as my body’s oxygen levels dropped. While I fought this battle inside, I knew I had to stay as quiet as possible.

The whole point of this trip was to fill our freezer with meat, and God willing, mount another trophy on the wall. My father drilled the importance of silent steps into me as a kid when we hunted the mesas of our south Texas property, and I didn’t want to be the reason an elk got spooked. I tried not to focus on the alarm bells ringing in my chest, whining for air. Instead, I charted the path ahead, looking for quiet places to land my feet. I started grading myself by the crunch of the ground; the softer the landing, the better. I tried to avoid thick brush, but when I couldn’t, I pushed through smoothly, trying to emulate gliding through water.

As the afternoon sun heats up, elk tend to hide in the trees to bed down. They want a safe place to cool off. We’d go back to the cabin and do the same. This process repeated itself twice a day for two days. We’d get up early, march up a ridge, wait, move on, find another spot, and then break for lunch before heading back out before sunset.

If you have never played competitive sports or been in a physically taxing environment like the military, it’s hard to describe the mental toughness it takes to push through pain and exhaustion. There is no option to quit. You just have to find the part of you that says, no matter how you feel in this moment, it’s not bad enough to let go.

“This will eventually end. You will lie down in your bed tonight. Your husband will shoot an elk if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other,” I told myself almost robotically. This mantra repeated in my mind over and over.

At one point, we found ourselves on the same ridge we sat on the first day. The one with the lone tree. It was incredible to see it, and I thought about how much had happened between the first time I saw it and now. We had been pushing so hard and coming up empty-handed, hunt after hunt. We had seen some beautiful country filled with wildlife and native plants, but not the bull.

Well, that’s not exactly true. We did see one that kept eluding us. We spotted him on the second hunt of the first day, but he was spooked by something, and we couldn’t get a clean look at him before he trotted off into the woods. Then again, he came out on the second day, but he was too far away and kept pushing farther every time we thought we’d finally gotten close. My husband affectionately named him Houdini because of how many times he disappeared.

We were told that our part of Idaho was expecting inclement weather later in the week. And sure enough, on the second-to-last day of our trip, when we broke for lunch, we realized that if we didn’t get an elk that afternoon, we’d be forced to go out in the cold rain the next day. Faced with this possibility and how tired my body had gotten over the last several days, I had decided that before we got back for dinner that night, we’d get him.

“I’ve got a feeling,” I told my husband.

Read more

Read more

Read more

Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we talk about the infamous anti-male attack ad that rocked the world.

Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with your friends and family! And if you’re one of those friends or family members, you can sign up to get your own copy every week right here.

I don’t have a son, but if I did, this is how I’d raise him in a world where women like Sarah Huckabee Sanders reign.

I’ve been thinking about her terrible welfare ad all week. The one with the young white guy named Brad sitting on the beanbag, cheese balls in one hand, controller in the other, while the governor explains that people like him are the reason the rest of us work.

We can talk all day about the statistics showing that young white men are the lowest percentage of welfare recipients in the country, but that point has been made enough, and it’s not even the biggest issue with the ad. At some point our society made the collective decision to allow male hatred to be the official policy for every major institution.

I kept picturing the boys I actually know. They aren’t anything like the guy in the ad, even the ones who play video games. The ones who spent their elementary years getting told their normal, active behavior was a cause for concern. Their predominantly female teachers wanted them medicated so that they would sit docile for their lectures on how women should rule the world. They were told over and over that their sex and their skin color made them a threat to an orderly society. None of them looked like the baffoon in the commercial. Most of them, however, looked tired and weighed down by the constant attacks.

And what do you do as a mother when you find yourself raising a boy in this environment?

Read more

Read more

Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we talk about scrolling Instagram and picking the right spouse.

Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with your friends and family! And if you’re one of those friends or family members, you can sign up to get your own copy every week right here.

My husband has been out of town for the past two weeks. One of his coworkers got sick, and he had to take over a big project. The loneliest part of him traveling always comes at night, after I’ve finished all of the girls’ various activities and everyone is in bed. I try hard not to scroll on my phone, but I can’t fall asleep without him here, so I usually end up on Instagram watching reels until I do.

This week, a video series came across my timeline that genuinely made me hopeful. I speak a lot about the state of dating in our modern culture. The divide between men and women is so vast that the dating scene is extremely depressing for most singles, which made this series so inviting.

A new dad who trains for races broke from his typical content focused on different long-distance running techniques and equipment to make a plea for his wife’s sister. He’s on the hunt for a cool brother-in-law. For the last 30 days, he’s posted a video of himself that always starts the same way: “Day X of me running until I find a cool husband for my sister-in-law so I have someone to hang out with for the next 30-40-50 years.”

He films himself running, talking about her best qualities, and tells interested guys to DM her and him. He is also pretty straightforward about the qualities that won’t make the potential match a good fit. Most of the specifications are about what she is looking for, but he doesn’t hide the fact that he wants his sister-in-law to meet someone he actually likes hanging out with. Anyone interested has to fit well in the family.

It was like a modern-day family-arranged marriage, only the point wasn’t a sterile partnership so much as finding a built-in buddy. He wants another man who will, of course, love and cherish his sister-in-law, but also someone he will be excited to travel with and will fold into a family that already knows how to have fun.

It’s actually so genius and something that a lot of people don’t really think about when they are picking a spouse. I certainly didn’t worry about whether my husband would get along with my sister’s potential husbands. We got super blessed, but it could have been very bad.

Before I tell this story, let me calm your nerves: as soon as I saw Andy’s video series, I thought of one of my sisters and her boyfriends, who thankfully never made it over the line. I have already warned her that I would be talking about the experience from our side of the relationship, and she agreed to let me tell it.

Read more

Read more

Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we’ll talk about what it means to be a mother.

Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with your friends and family! And if you’re one of those friends or family members, you can sign up to get your own copy every week right here.

Pregnancy brings complicated emotions. There’s the excitement of something new. The fear that you might lose the baby or might not be prepared to be a mother. It’s something all mothers feel the moment they find out they’re pregnant, but the beauty is that all of these emotions eventually work themselves out one way or the other.

The New Yorker recently published a cultural piece about pregnancy in which the author reacts to biological anthropologist Kate Clancy’s new book, “Pregnancy Interrupted.” The New Yorker author, Apoorva Tadepalli, claims that “there are a seemingly infinite number of ways that pregnancy can be misunderstood, mislabelled, or oversimplified, whether because of deceptively binary tests or cultural narratives that tell us pregnancy is a linear experience.”

The premise of the piece is that an at-home pregnancy test can’t be accurate because there is a possibility that you miscarry. In her view, a baby that is never fully formed or born alive is not a real pregnancy. She, of course, uses language like pregnant people instead of women or mothers, and she refuses to call the life growing inside their wombs a baby, but rather a fetus or embryo. She even mentions a “woman’s right to choose,” which is a flowery euphemism for abortion. It’s easy to roll your eyes at her. The way she talks about pregnancy is cold and disconnected, even though she very clearly wants a baby.

She admits in the piece that she has been pregnant five times. She lost four of her babies before term. She is now pregnant and about to deliver her first of five pregnancies. When I was able to ignore her genuflecting to left-wing language, I actually began feeling sorry for her. Losing even one child is hard, but going through it four times is definitely devastating. I understand the emotions that made her write the piece, but she wasn’t being honest.

Pregnancy is, in fact, a linear experience: you are either pregnant, or you aren’t. You can have a miscarriage or lose the baby in some other terrible way, but from the moment of conception you are a mother. This has been true since creation and will remain true long after our generation dies. But our modern world tells us a different story.

Women are told they can kill their baby because it’s an inconvenience or has a defect. We are told that a baby isn’t real until it’s delivered out of our womb. The reason is actually quite simple. The more distance our world creates between a mother and her child, the easier it is to explain away evil. Just look at the Lindsey Clancy trial or the women marching in the street for their supposed right to commit infanticide. It’s the same ideology just under different circumstances. Women applauding other women who killed their children.

Read more

Read more

Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we’ll discuss my time at the RNC.

Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with your friends and family! And if you’re one of those friends or family members, you can sign up to get your own copy every week right here.

I went to the Midterm Republican National Convention this week, as well as an event I’ll write more about later, but today I wanted to focus on Vice President JD Vance’s closing-night speech. Online, people are comparing it to President Trump’s 2016 campaign. Some are calling it the breakout speech for 2028. And while there is a long road ahead between now and the next presidential election, being there in person and feeling the reception Vance received from the crowd, I can’t help but agree.

I was sitting in the crowd with the regular admission guests. That let me listen to everyday Americans’ conversations about the speakers and get unfiltered feedback from the GOP’s core base. You can’t get that from a press box or one of the booths up top.

The convention was packed from the moment I got there. It was hard to find a seat even though Vance and Trump weren’t supposed to take the stage for hours. Even still, as Vance’s time got closer, ushers were guiding attendees down the aisles, looking for any available seats left. By the time he took the stage, every spot was taken. The only empty seats were blocked off for security reasons by the Secret Service.

Polling shows that Vance has a lead over any other potential 2028 Republican primary candidate, and I wanted to see if that held up among the base in real life. The people who travel to attend a convention are the voters the party doesn’t have to worry about showing up to the polls. These voters will determine the party’s future with their choices. Knowing which way they are leaning is a critical barometer for the work I do. I pride myself on staying connected to the grassroots, but even I can get stuck in an issue bubble that blinds me.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that wasn’t the case with Vance.

As the woman sitting directly behind me put it: “There will never be another president like Trump, but Vance will be great.”

He came out to cheers of “JD! JD! JD! JD!” which is somewhat expected. But it wouldn’t be the only time the crowd chanted his name or screamed “JD 48!” throughout his 40-minute speech. Vance was the only speaker I witnessed who seemed to understand the plight of the regular American. He spoke about the economic and job-related exhaustion that they feel without belittling it or claiming that their feelings aren’t real. He talked about the attacks from the left on the nuclear family and how these have come close to home for him after his wife, Usha, had their fourth child six weeks ago.

When Trump campaigned in 2016, people didn’t choose him over the rest because they thought a billionaire might run the country better than elites. They chose him because he identified the problems that have kept Americans from realizing the American Dream. The way Trump spoke about our decimated domestic manufacturing and how illegal immigration was causing problems in our communities made Americans believe that he would fight for their future. He made them believe in the political process again, that if they show up and vote, help would be on the way.

Vance offered the same connection to the problem and promise for a solution that Trump offered a decade ago. The delivery is different, of course. After witnessing the two speak back-to-back, I understand what that woman meant when she said there will never be another Trump. He has a way about him that, even if you are frustrated with his policy decisions, you can’t help but be disarmed by his charisma. But I also noticed that with Vance there was no need to disarm the crowd, which I wasn’t expecting.

He spoke directly to young men who came out in droves to deliver the GOP the 2024 victories but feel disillusioned or left out of the conversation in 2026. Vance reminded the crowd that the fight that sent Trump into the White House twice is not over. The battle will outlive his presidency, and that “will to fight,” as he put it, is the only way to save this country for our children.

Read more

Read more

Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we discuss what it’s like to get hit by an immigrant in America’s new low-trust society.

Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with your friends and family! And if you’re one of those friends or family members, you can sign up to get your own copy every week right here.

I write a lot about how it feels, as an American who can trace her lineage in this country back to the 1600s, to watch what’s happening to my home. Maybe not so specifically. But a good part of my focus recently has been on the side effects of immigration, both legal and illegal, that affect kitchen-table issues for everyday Americans.

This topic became all too real to me Wednesday when an immigrant hit my car on the way to pick up the girls from school.

I’ve been in accidents before. The typical schedule of events is something along the lines of both cars pulling over, exchanging information, sometimes the cops are called to file a report for the insurance, and then, God willing, everyone can drive away with no drama. Of course, sometimes there are heated exchanges, but most of the time it comes down to annoying frustration that adds one more thing to your plate before the accident eventually fades from memory.

I don’t think officials know or truly care what happens to an American when someone from a completely different culture than ours enters the equation.

That day, I came off the highway like I usually do and turned onto the road to the next highway I need to get on to get to school. It was in the afternoon, so traffic was much lighter because everyone was still at work. I always turn into the far left lane to go under the overpass because I know that I’ll be passing a popular shopping center and don’t want to get trapped behind someone turning in or out. As I was passing the first entrance to the shopping center, I noticed a young girl was not paying attention and had decided to pull out.

At first, I assumed she would enter the right lane since there were no cars in it and I was obviously occupying the left lane. But in a split second, I realized that she was merging across both lanes and was likely going to hit me. I’ve been driving for decades, and I leaned on my experience, deciding that the best thing to do was to speed up in hopes of a near miss. However, I drive a mom car that is quite long, and despite my best efforts, she still rammed her car into mine.

I immediately signaled, changed lanes, and pulled into the shopping center she had just exited. She followed suit. We had both gotten out of the car when I asked her if she was okay and why she hit me.

“Did you not see me? Were you not paying attention? What happened?”

That’s when she claimed in a foreign accent that I had come out of nowhere. I explained that coming out of nowhere was physically impossible. I am not the Angel Gabriel. People just don’t appear on the road. Then she tried to accuse me of driving the wrong way down this one-way street. Again, I had to explain to her that this would have been physically impossible, given where the damage was on both our cars. Her front driver’s side was all smashed up, and my back right passenger side was battered and bruised. If I had been driving in the opposite direction, as she claimed, she would have hit me on the left front, not the back right.

I stopped arguing with her and asked for her information. She immediately called who I assumed was her dad. I could hear a man’s voice but couldn’t understand what they were saying to each other because they were speaking in a foreign language. As he was on the phone, she became increasingly confrontational with me about who was at fault. I decided that the best thing I could do for both of us was to call the police and ask for an officer to come.

We sat and waited for the officer to arrive for what seemed like an eternity. About 15 minutes after I called the police, but before they arrived, her father showed up. I was standing pretty close to my car, assessing the damage again when he walked over to me. There were plenty of places to stand, but he chose to stand right next to me, shoulder to shoulder. I couldn’t have moved an inch and had to fold my right arm into my body to avoid him touching me. He was so close that it was impossible not to notice that he was much taller and bigger than me. It was clear that he was trying to intimidate me physically. He never even looked at me or spoke to me. He just stood, peering over me and speaking to his daughter in their home language.

Read more

Read more

Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we discuss how best to use the gifts God gives us in service of our children.

Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with your friends and family! And if you’re one of those friends or family members, you can sign up to get your own copy every week right here.

I’m at that stage in my motherhood journey where I’m constantly reassessing the best way to talk to my high school daughter so she keeps listening to my advice.

I have this uncanny ability to read people. I truly think it’s a gift that God gave me. I’m not sure what you would call it. Intuition maybe? Regardless, I can spot a bad friend, boyfriend, coworker, whatever long before anyone else catches on. This can leave me feeling a bit lonely until eventually the people I’ve warned see it for themselves.

When I was in high school, my sisters used to get so mad at me because I would tell them their boyfriends were no good for them. Or I’d warn them not to trust that friend they had been spending all their time with. They’d argue with me, telling me they didn’t care because I didn’t like anyone they dated. Then, eventually, the boyfriend or friend would show their true selves, and if I were lucky, I’d get a thank-you, but most of the time I’d happily settle for them not being in their lives anymore.

I don’t blame them really. I wasn’t very tactful in how I approached the subject. Back then, I was more of a sledgehammer than anything else. They probably felt like I was hurting them. I’ve gotten better at delivering the news as I’ve aged. My husband finds it useful.

The nature of his job means he’s taking a lot of phone calls and meetings at home or in the car. I get to hear conversations I wouldn’t normally hear if he worked a traditional 9-5. When he gets off, I often gently mention that he should be wary of one thing or another, and because we’ve built up trust over the last 15 years, he takes my counsel and uses it to his advantage.

I say all of this to give you a little background information before I really get into the nitty-gritty of what’s been happening around here.

Read more

Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, we discuss the murder of three innocent chi…

Read more

Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we discuss scraping wallpaper off the walls both physically and metaphorically.

Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with your friends and family! And if you’re one of those friends or family members, you can sign up to get your own copy every week right here.

Like any good wife, I woke up three weeks ago and decided I needed to change something about the house. The next day, we ripped the carpet out of the girls’ rooms upstairs and prepared the walls, ceilings, and doors for new paint.

I don’t think this was even on my husband’s radar at the time. It’s not that we haven’t talked about the work needed to update their rooms since we bought the house three years ago, but nothing actionable has happened in that time. So I forced our hand. Now my husband had to help me choose paint colors, buy supplies, and do the manual labor required for us to install the matching hardwood flooring we put in downstairs.

It makes me giggle when I think about it. The look on his face in the beginning made it pretty clear that he was not a willing participant in this remodel. But he’s told me several times since we started the project how happy the girls will be once their rooms are done. He’s right. Every day a little more is done to finish them off, and you can feel their excitement growing as they get closer to moving back in.

While construction is underway, we have them all sleeping in one room. I’ve always been a proponent of having your children share bedrooms. We purposefully bought this house because of the two rooms with a jack-and-jill bathroom. I wanted them in close proximity to each other as they grew up. It forces them to be close, to learn to live with someone else constantly in their space, and, in the quiet hours of the night, to have each other to share their hopes, dreams, and little secrets.

At night we can hear them playing cards and laughing so hysterically that it’s infectious. Inevitably, my husband has to get up and tell them to knock it off.

“Girls, come on, it’s time for bed!”

Through the giggles, they say, “ok” and settle down. We know their “playtime” will continue a little longer, but it doesn’t really matter to us all that much. He just tells them to go to bed because that is something parents have to say when it’s way past their bedtime. In reality, we both could listen to their chatter for hours with smiles on our faces. It’s always a good sign to see that your kids are happy.

Read more

Read more

Read more

Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we discuss the real-life Camp of the Saints happening in Spain and what that means for the U.S.

Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with your friends and family! And if you’re one of those friends or family members, you can sign up to get your own copy every week right here.

By now, I’m sure everyone has seen the horde of illegal immigrants storming the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Fox News’ Bill Melugin reported that an estimated 60,000 mostly military-aged men invaded Spain’s territory Thursday. One video showed a steady stream of men screaming “Allahu akbar” as they made their way in.

It is radicalizing in a way almost nothing else in our society can match.

Socialism and communism are rising inside our country. The left has taken over our education system. Our economy seems to be getting worse by the day. Everything about our lives feels as though we are standing at the edge of a cliff, waiting for one small gust of wind to blow us over.

I know I can be hard on President Trump. Many of his policy decisions have frustrated and disappointed me. He has always looked to the base as a measure of his success, but lately it seems he’s forgotten how to do that. Maybe it’s the people he’s placed around him. Maybe he just doesn’t have his finger on the pulse of our movement as he did before. Whatever it is, there is a massive disconnect between his first and second term that has left me wondering where the 2016 Trump is hiding.

I’ve been very vocally against the Iran War since the start of the conflict. I knew we’d see this become a prolonged, chaotic engagement and that American blood and treasure would be sent to die in the Middle East. I was called a “Panican.”

Some of my readers told me I was complaining too much. They said I didn’t know what I was talking about.

But I have lived through war in the Middle East almost my entire life and saw what it did to our economy. I saw the devastation it brought to my friends who served. I knew the cost, and it was too much to bear.

The latest polling shows that American sentiment on the war has caught up to how I felt day one. Even Trump seems to have had enough and wants this to end. I take no pleasure in being right. I wish it had never happened.

Trump has accelerated AI in a way that worries me a lot. There seem to be few meaningful roadblocks to a technology that promises to transform nearly every aspect of our lives. States are not even permitted to regulate it independently.

I worry about how it’s going to affect my children’s ability to get a job. I have a daughter in high school. What specialty should I urge her to study in college? She used to want to be a lawyer. I’m not so sure that’s the smart move anymore.

And while I sit and wonder if Trump is even still listening to our concerns about his policy choices, none of this is as important as preventing what’s happening in Spain from happening here. There is no country to save if we can’t control who lives here.

So amid all of my frustrations with Trump and his administration, I know that he saved us from another four years of an invasion. The U.S. was (according to low estimates) averaging about 6,500 illegal immigrant encounters every day during the Biden years. There is no telling the exact number of illegal immigrants living in the U.S., but most Trump officials claim there are about 20 million who came in just under Biden. That doesn’t count any who came in during previous administrations.

Read more

Read more