Breaking Down to Break Through

My daughter’s DNA is in the trees here.

There are a few Ripma sayings that I have heard so many times since marrying my husband that they have basically become part of the soundtrack of my life.

For example:

“It could always be worse.”

“It ain’t the Ritz.”

“You won’t die, but you might be miserable.”

This is essentially my husband’s entire philosophy on life. He operates with this very deep trust that we will figure it out when we get there and that discomfort is not a crisis.

And then there is me.

I am what you might call a fair weathered sailor… Someone who has historically preferred a little more information.

I said the nurse during my second labor, “if you could verbally process everything you are doing for me at all times and spare no detail that would be super helpful.”

I like knowing where we are going, when we are leaving, where we are sleeping, what everyone is eating, what the weather is doing, and what the backup plan is because somewhere along the way I decided that knowing what was coming would make me safer when it came.

I don’t know if I would say I am afraid of the unknown as much as I have spent a lot of my life assuming the unknown does not have my best interest at heart. Surely, I know best.

The concept of “trust the journey” has never been an easy one for me to grasp.

I am writing this on a hot and humid Friday afternoon from a hotel room in Nebraska while we are still on our way home from Michigan.

It has been a long day and a long trip and there is stuff everywhere and the kids are soooo tired and we are tired and somehow I am sitting here feeling like we are so fucking lucky, like we have won the lottery of life.

That feeling has followed me almost the entire trip.

Everything has been messy and at times wildly inconvenient, and still, every time we have needed the next thing, the next thing has appeared as if by magic.

I have spent a lot of my life trusting my ability to plan and prepare and work, and this trip has felt like a very different kind of lesson because I have not been able to see very far ahead at all.

I keep realizing that maybe I do not have to know what is coming in order to be okay when it comes.

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This whole trip started because my mother-in-law had a vision.

She is the kind of person who notices the book on my bedside table and checks it out from the library for herself, who sews my sweaters and braids my hair. Milestones and seasons matter deeply to her. She believes in stopping long enough to mark them… to give the speech, make the toast, celebrate the moment while we are still inside it.

She has this way of revisiting her life that I have always found interesting because I am basically the opposite. She loves going back to the places where things happened, telling the stories again and physically putting all of us inside of them.

Her family is from this tiny town on Lake Michigan where her aunt lived summers and winters for something like 50 years, where her mom had a cottage, where she was married to my father-in-law in the church, where they have a family brick in town.

Roots.

I don’t really have that.

I left New Jersey when I was 12 and basically never looked back. Of course I have been back East for weddings and funerals and visits over the years, but I have never really brought my kids into the landscape of my own childhood.

My childhood memories = the lake.

We lived in a town called Mountain Lakes, lived on a lake, and we spent summers on a lake in Upstate New York. I was always on a boat or near a dock, and to this day the smell of gasoline in a marina can do something to my entire body before I have even registered what I am smelling.

The lake. It feels like home to me in this very specific way that I almost never think about anymore.

Then we moved to California and the lake became the ocean and life kept moving, as it does, and I just kept moving with it.

You know me, so chill and go with the flow :)

But the water. It’s in our veins as my dad says. I literally have a Substack about living on a boat, which I will link here, but I had forgotten just how deeply that version of myself still lives in me.

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We decided we were going to do this trip all the way and drive, and also stop in Iowa because that is where my father-in-law spent part of his childhood, and somewhere in all of this I realized that what I really wanted was for my kids to know their grandparents as people.

I love my in-laws so much.

So we went all in. Road trip. Colorado to Iowa to Michigan.

And somewhere after the historical house in Iowa, on the way to Michigan, in the middle of a huge rainstorm in Indiana, our Tahoe broke down while we were going 75 mph on the freeway.

It did not completely shut off. It just stopped accelerating, which was almost worse because suddenly Clay had his foot on the gas and we were going 20 miles an hour while traffic was still flying around us and rain was coming down so hard we could barely see.

Naturally, I stayed totally calm. Go figure. I helped Clay navigate off the freeway and when I pulled up the map on my phone, and after hours driving through corn fields, there was actually an exit less than a mile ahead.

We put on our flashers, and luckily with the storm, people were not in a hurry.

We coasted off the freeway directly into a Chevrolet dealership.

Yup. A Chevy dealership.

What are the chances?!?!

I asked Chat because I was curious just how freakishly lucky this was and it told me: “I’d put the full coincidence somewhere in the one-in-tens-of-thousands to one-in-hundreds-of-thousands range per road trip.”

We pulled in and people immediately started helping us and checking the car and being so kind (the Midwest!), and for about 5 minutes I thought okay, this is medium annoying, but obviously we are exactly where we need to be.

Then, very quickly we found out the service center was closed and there were basically no rental cars and no hotel rooms within 25 miles in any direction because some huge event was happening that weekend.

It was Saturday afternoon and everything was closed on Sundays. (the Midwest!)

We were still about 3.5 hours from Michigan and we were very, very stuck.

Also, I would be remiss if I did not tell you that at this point the kids and I were still sitting in the car at the dealership and by sitting I mean they were basically roaming the Tahoe, climbing over seats, opening everything like ravenous animals, etc.

And then the Denny’s salad hit me. You know the feeling.

I could not turn the car off because it was too hot, I could not realistically bring both kids inside because there was absolutely no time for that, and I also could not remain where I was for another 30 seconds without creating a serious situation.

So I walked into the dealership as fast as possible, found Clay sitting with the dealer Dave on speaker phone being told “no” from another rental car service, and quietly whispered something along the lines of, “I have to go to the bathroom right now, the kids are alone in the car and it’s still running.”

He half heard me. If you know Clay, you know he did not hear me.

To be fair, he was currently negotiating our entire car situation and had a lot going on.

I tried again in a loud whisper.

“Kids alone. Car on. No seatbelts. I have to shit my brains out.”

At this point I made it around the corner toward the bathroom and realized very clearly that he was not getting up from that chair and I was approximately 5 seconds away from having a full Bridesmaids moment on the floor of a Chevrolet dealership in Indiana.

So I went back one last time, got directly in his ear, and said, “THE KIDS ARE ALONE IN THE RUNNING CAR AND I AM ABOUT TO HAVE EXPLOSIVE DIARRHEA.”

I made it to the bathroom in time, while images of my children driving our car through the front door of the dealer flashed before my eyes.

I recovered and walked back through that dealership like nothing had happened.

Past Clay. Who, somehow, had still not gotten the fucking memo.

Back out to the car. Where the kids were, thank God, still alive and well.

Eventually we landed at the nearest Olive Garden for far too long that is appropriate to stay at an Olive Garden. Let’s just say by the time we left, I was drunk and I had exchanged photos of our children and were on a first named basis.

By another stoke of luck, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law were flying into Chicago Midway that afternoon, and somehow they were able to rent a second car, drive an hour and a half to us, pick us up, and keep going to Michigan because where we happened to more or less be along their route.

To paint the scene when they arrived: we had been camped out in the dealership parking lot, inside our Tahoe for 2+ hours post Olive Garden and the rain was pouring down so hard we had to hunker in the car. The kids were slowing turning into wild animals, and when they pulled up Kepler was using her Bluey potty in the rain outside the car while I held an umbrella over her.

And so anyway… we made it to Michigan.

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I had never been there before, and obviously Michigan is not New Jersey or upstate New York where I am from, but the humidity and the trees and the lakes and the way the sun hangs in the sky late into the evening felt so familiar that it was almost disorienting.

That East Coast summer light at 8 o’clock at night when the sun is still somehow high in the sky, not even orange yet, like the day knows it is getting away with something.

Suddenly I could remember summers I had not thought about in years.

The first night we were there I was sitting alone in the backyard and I could hear Kepler playing with her grandpa, and I had this feeling that was so sweet I wanted to freeze it in time.

I barely remember my grandfathers.

I loved my grandmothers deeply, especially my Nan.

She was a Gemini like me, and she saw me.

I miss her every day.

And as I was sitting in the backyard in my daughter’s great great Aunt’a house (built in 1865) on Lake Michigan looking at the light coming across the back of the house, hitting the white shutters and the trees, I suddenly I felt her so strongly.

I felt her so intensely that I walked into this patch of sunlight in the yard and I said quietly, if this is you, show me.

When my Nan died, I got a butterfly tattoo for her, and ever since then I have always thought of butterflies as her little way of showing up.

And in that exact moment a monarch butterfly landed directly in the sunlight in front of me.

Maybe 3 feet away.

It spread its wings completely open and just sat there at my eye level.

It felt so much like her that I started sobbing and laughing at the same time because of course she would make it so obvious.

Like hello, here I am hun.

Then Kepi came outside and I called her over quietly and she climbed into my arms and we stood there together watching the butterfly in the sun.

“Wow, Mama.”

That moment has stayed with me through the whole trip because I was standing in a place where my daughter’s DNA is everywhere.

She had never been there before, but she came from there.

Her grandmother’s memories were there, her great-great-aunt’s home was there, her grandparents were married there, generations of people whose lives eventually became hers had lived and loved and walked around this tiny town long before she existed.

Her DNA was in the trees and I could feel it all around me.

And there in that remembering, my own grandmother found me.

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I watched my mother-in-law all week and saw her differently. I saw the girl she had been there.

At the same time, I was having this huge realization about mothering because I was watching my kids make the exact kind of memories I carry from my own childhood.

But now I am the one packing the bags and finding the swimsuits and making sure everyone has eaten and carrying everything and trying to get sunscreen on people who apparently believe sunscreen is a personal attack. Same though.

Meanwhile they are just living. And I remember being them.

I was the mom creating the summer and also the little girl remembering hers.

And then there was my work.

Somehow work was having its own breakthrough right alongside everything else.

I would put my headphones in and walk along the lake and call my mentors, talk to team members, listen to voice notes, think through client projects, dream about what I am building next, what I want to grow, where I want to take the business, and something was moving there too.

I had this expansiveness around it that I have been wanting for a long time.

There was space for me to think.

I could work during nap time and then sit on the porch swing.

I could be thinking about where my business is going while literally standing in a place that made me think about where all of us came from.

Something about those two things happening together felt really important.

The history & the future.

My daughter running around in the place her family came from while I was imagining something I have not built yet.

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And then we went back to Indiana to deal with the Tahoe yesterday.

After your family car suddenly stops accelerating while you are going 75 miles an hour in a rainstorm, you feel a little differently about getting everyone back into it for another thousand miles.

It was a newer car and it had always been a perfectly good car, but it had never been exactly the one we wanted. We had been talked into the model and the color when we bought it and it was fine, and we were grateful for it, and then Clay started talking to our new friend Dave about what they had.

They had the exact car he wanted.

Somehow he offered us an unbelievable amount for the trade-in, gave us this completely insane deal, and we drove out of there in the car we had wanted in the first place.

We left in a different car than the one we drove there in.

My husband has always believed that somehow things work out in our favor, that we will survive the part that feels impossible and usually come out of it better than we went in, and on this trip he literally coasted off the freeway in a broken-down car and drove away in the exact make, color and package he had wanted all along.

What.

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And now here I am in Nebraska, still somewhere between where we were and where we are going.

And I keep thinking about how often I have assumed that the unknown is the place I need to protect myself from.

My anxiety is very convincing when it tells me that I need to know what is coming because maybe I won’t be able to handle it otherwise, and this whole trip has been one long reminder that I handle things when they arrive.

We figure it out. We adapt. We find a cheap hotel with a pool.

I think I have spent so much time believing that I have to see the road ahead to know I can handle it, and here I am realizing I have handled every mile as it came.

There are also all of these things that can go right that I could never have planned I.E. Max, my very unplanned son and literally love of m life.

Maybe that is what is breaking open for me.

The possibility that the unknown is not always where everything falls apart.

Sometimes the unknown has my back.

Tomorrow we get back in the car and keep going.

I still don’t know exactly what happens next.

Which, apparently, is becoming less of an emergency.

-Said the Gemini

Pentwater, Michigan Summer 2026