How a Four-Leaf Clover Became the Way We Talk About Our Daughter’s Heart

Before Meadow, I thought I understood what it meant to advocate for something.

I had spent years advocating for mental health awareness, building a business around it, putting my voice behind it in every way I knew how. I believed in that work deeply. I still do. But then my daughter was born with a heart that worked differently than most, and I understood for the first time what it means to advocate for someone whose life depends on it.

Everything changed. And somehow, not in the way I expected.

The Duality Nobody Talks About

When you become the parent of a medically complex child, you find yourself living at a strange and tender intersection.

Grief and joy stop being opposites. They start existing side by side, sometimes in the same breath. You celebrate a milestone and feel the weight of everything it took to get there. You watch your child laugh and feel your heart crack open with something that is equal parts wonder and ache. There is no clean way to describe it except to say that you are simultaneously more grateful than you have ever been and more aware of how fragile everything is.

Somewhere in the middle of grief and joy is awe. And Meadow has filled me with more awe than I knew a person could hold.

That awe is what made me a fierce advocate. Not fear, not anger, not grief, but awe. Awe at who she is, at what she has already been through, at the fullness of the life she is living alongside a diagnosis that could have defined her in so many limiting ways but hasn’t. It made me want to show up for her in every room I enter, and it made me want to show up for every child like her too.

Becoming a heart mom pivoted my life in ways I never anticipated. But not in a negative way. I was a fierce advocate before, for mental health, for the people who felt unseen in clinical spaces. Now I am just advocating on a new platform, through a new lens, with a new and very personal reason to keep going.

The Book That Came From All of It

There came a point where I needed to find a way to hold all of this, the awe, the love, the complexity, the hope, and put it somewhere that could reach other families.

That is how Meadow & Her Four-Leaf Clover Heart came to be.

Meadow has four heart defects. And somewhere along the way, we made a choice about how to talk about that. We could frame it as four things that are wrong with her heart. Or we could call it something else entirely.

We call it her four-leaf clover heart. Because the odds of being born with Meadow’s specific heart defect are roughly the same as the odds of finding a four-leaf clover.

I love everything about that reframe. When you hear the words four-leaf clover, there is no negative connotation. There never is. Four-leaf clovers are lucky. They are rare. They are something you search for and feel lucky to find. That is exactly how we feel about Meadow, and it is exactly how we want her to feel about herself.

The core premise of the book is lyrical and warm and written for toddlers, but the message is for everyone: your heart defect is a part of you, but it is not all of you. In Meadow’s story, her diagnosis is one part of who she is, not the whole of it. Every CHD journey is different, and we never want to minimize that. But this is what we wanted for her narrative, and what we hope every heart family gets to define for themselves.

I wrote this book for the heart kids who need to see their own story told with love instead of fear. I wrote it for the siblings trying to understand. I wrote it for the parents searching for words that don’t make their child feel broken. And I wrote it for anyone who has ever needed a reminder that the things that make us different can also be the most extraordinary things about us.

What Meadow Has Taught Me

Meadow is three and a half years old. She has already been through more than most people will face in a lifetime. And she wakes up every morning like the world is full of possibility.

I am trying to learn from that every single day.

Meadow & Her Four-Leaf Clover Heart is available on Amazon. A portion of proceeds supports congenital heart disease awareness and research.