I want to tell you about my husband.

Rob is Canadian — a proud Canuck, Jets fan, former hockey coach, and lately has dinner on the table before I've even thought about cooking. He is impatient, hilarious, and most of the time a very laid-back person. Which, as it turns out, is exactly the personality you need for what life had in store for him.

Rob was born with a tethered spinal cord. Nobody caught it. Not when he was a kid. Not when he was a teenager. Not through decades of adult life, coaching high school girls hockey, raising Lucy, building a life. He just kept going — the way Canadians do — quietly and without complaint.

It wasn't until his 40s that doctors finally connected the dots. Two surgeries followed. The second one, in 2023, changed everything. Rob came home from that surgery in a wheelchair.

And here's what I want you to know about that:

The first year was hard. Really hard. There is grief in a diagnosis like this — for the life you planned, the body you trusted, the future you pictured. Rob felt it. We all felt it. We gave that grief the space it deserved.

And then, slowly, we figured it out. Together — Rob, Lucy and me. We found our footing, redesigned our life, and discovered something we didn't expect on the other side: we are better than okay. We are genuinely, gratefully, fiercely okay even if we are always a little bit off.