The Trenches: Where This All Began

In the Trenches: What I Really Mean When I Say That

“In the trenches.”

It sounds harsh.

Ugly.

A place no sane person would choose to be — except maybe me and my kid.

We’ve built trenches.
We’ve fallen into trenches.
We’ve climbed out of trenches with dirt on our faces and sweat in our eyes because, well, that’s kind of our thing.

One of my kiddo’s deepest interests is history — all history, all the time — especially World War I and II. So we recreate it. We build pillow trenches, block trenches, cardboard-barricade trenches, and one time we even attempted to dig our own trench in the backyard.

I still have the hole in the middle of the yard as evidence.

We got maybe a foot in before the heat got too intense. He couldn’t breathe. The sun burned his eyes even behind dark sunglasses. And honestly? Thank God — my back was killing me. I kept telling him, “There is nothing harder than digging a hole.”

He very politely — pompously? matter-of-factly? honestly I’m still not sure — reminded me that the men (boys, really) who dug trenches did it with barely anything. Sometimes just their hands. And they dug because they were fighting for something. Fighting for each other. Helping their friends survive. Helping each other take that next breath.

So when I say “welcome to the trenches,” I’m not saying “poor me” or “poor him” or “let’s sit in the gloomy misery of everything we deal with daily.”

No.

What I’m really saying is:
Welcome to my world.
A little dirty, a little dark, but full of learning.
Learning from each other.
Learning from our kids.

We follow them into appointments and therapies.
We crawl under tables and wedge into tiny chairs.

We show up for them in rooms that don’t welcome us, with systems that don’t listen, with hearts that keep pounding anyway.

Sometimes we step into the trenches.
Sometimes we fall into them.
But we are not alone — even when it feels like we are.

Because somewhere out there, there’s a mom in Pittsburgh digging a hole in 90-degree heat while her kid stands at the kitchen door shouting orders about how trench warfare worked 100 years ago.

Good lord — I'm glad he gave me a shovel.

Maybe it was the heat.

Maybe it was the delirium of pounding dirt and knowing tomorrow would start all over again — the appointments, the papers, the scribbles, the questions, the denials, the energy I didn’t have but had to somehow find.

As I shoveled, all I could think was:
There has to be a better way.

A better way to climb out of this damn hole — figuratively and literally.

So when he finally deemed my trench “good enough,” I wiped off the dirt, walked inside, and sat at my other trench:

my kitchen table.

The one covered in folders, sticky notes, insurance letters, and the kind of organized chaos only medical parents understand.

And that’s when it hit me:

I want to fight the good fight.
I want all of us to fight the good fight — because we deserve it, and our kids deserve it.

That moment — sweaty, delirious, covered in dirt — was the beginning of K&K Studios.

Born in the trenches.

Built because there had to be a better way than spinning in circles, digging holes with our bare hands, and trying to keep track of a whole medical life on scraps of paper and pretty pink templates that never understood the depth of this world.

So I made something real.
Something functional.
Something built for people like us — people tired of digging and even more tired of being dismissed.

K&K didn’t start as a business.
It started as a mom climbing out of a hole she never asked to dig.

Welcome to the trenches.

I’m glad you’re here.

If this hit you today, you can join me in the trenches — my weekly letter is where I share the moments between the moments.