Hi, I’m Jennifer.
I am a momma. I am a critical care nurse by trade. I am now a Nai Nai. And also now, I guess I can call myself a florist?? So crazy.
Before there were flowers, there were four kids.
I became a momma at eighteen, straight out of high school. I was married and scared and, if I’m being truthful, still very much a child trying to raise a child. For a while, it felt like it was just me and my little Tin figuring out how to grow up together.
Three years later came Emi. Then Bear. Then Aiden, our caboose. Somewhere in the middle of raising babies and trying to figure out who I was, I started nursing school. Life interrupted that plan for a while, but eventually I found my way back.
Nursing school took me a little longer than I planned. Life had a habit of interrupting. But I went back. I graduated. And eventually I found my way into trauma surgery intensive care—exactly the kind of place where my very orderly brain made perfect sense.
I worked trauma surgery ICU, served as a PRN supervisor, and became the first RN to start our rapid response team. I loved the work. I loved taking care of people. And, as it turns out, I am exceptionally comfortable when everything is on fire—as long as there is a protocol and everybody follows it.
And then I became a nurse.
Somewhere along the way, I found myself again.
For a long time, so much of my life had been about taking care of everyone else. Raising kids. Nursing. Holding things together. Then life changed, and somewhere in the middle of all that changing, I started figuring out who Jennifer was too.
I bought entirely too many plants. I made beautiful gardens. I traveled with my kids. I started saying yes to things that felt like life again. I became a little fiercer, a little braver, and a whole lot more myself.
And then there was Brad. Brilliant, kind, wildly intelligent—and organized in approximately none of the ways I am. Somewhere along the way, I realized that maybe the Lord has a sense of humor about these things. And with Brad came Mia, his only child, who has become a daughter to me.
Emi once told me, “Mom, I think God gave you me to help prepare you for Brad.”
She came into the world at full volume and never really saw a reason to turn it down.
She was fierce and fearless and funny. Strong-willed from the beginning. She walked early, climbed everything she could reach, and earned the nickname Monkey because apparently furniture was merely a suggestion. She could dress like a fairy princess one minute and be halfway up something she had no business climbing the next.
She loved animals-probably more than people some days-and little tree frogs were especially irresistible. She adored her brothers, fought with Tin like cats and dogs, and would defend any one of them without hesitation. Emi could be generous and tender and an absolute handful, sometimes all before lunch.
Her kindergarten teacher once described her perfectly, “It’s Emi’s world and she just lets us live in it.”
And then there was Emi.
Mental illness was part of her story.
But it was never the whole story.
As she got older, Emi began struggling with her mental health. There were hard years. There were hospital stays and medications and stretches when she was doing well, followed by times when she wasn’t. We loved her through all of it.
And then, after nearly three years of fighting a battle that was often invisible to everyone around her, Jesus took our girl by the hand and carried her Home.
There are a thousand things I could tell you about losing a child. But this story is not going to introduce my daughter by the way she died. Emi lived before she died.
Mental illness was something Emi experienced. It was never her identity. She was still fierce. Still funny. Still generous. Still our Monkey. Still the girl who loved animals and her siblings and adventure. Still Emi.
And then the world kept going.
My world had stopped. It seemed impossible to me that everything else hadn’t stopped with it. And yet, every dang morning the sun came back up.
The sky still changed colors. The wind still moved through the trees. Grass kept growing. Water kept flowing. And slowly, I began to understand that creation wasn’t ignoring my grief. God was meeting me in it.
But God.
I had always found God in nature. After Emi, I began to understand that differently. The sunrise became a reminder that darkness does not get to keep everything. Beauty could still exist beside heartbreak. Joy could still show up beside grief.
The dirt didn’t need me to explain how I was doing.
After Emi died, people were hard for me. I had always loved people, but suddenly I couldn’t bear the small talk. I couldn’t bear watching someone search my face for clues about what they were supposed to say. I couldn’t bear trying to answer the simplest question: “How are you?”
But I could put my hands in the dirt. I could plant something. I could cut stems and move flowers around until they felt right. The flowers didn’t need me to talk.
I could make something beautiful for someone and let the flowers do the talking for me.
And then somebody started paying attention.
Before Emi died, I had played with flowers here and there. I helped a friend with flowers for a couples shower, and later my friend Gavin—a trauma surgeon who also happened to have an eye for design—let me work alongside him on a weekly arrangement for a doctor’s office.
People started commenting on those arrangements. Asking who made them. Noticing them. And little by little, that gave me something I didn’t quite have yet: confidence.
Then Gavin referred someone to me for a wedding reception. The floral budget was $1,500. Bouquet. Boutonnière. A big statement arrangement. Table flowers. Bud vases. Cake flowers. The whole dang thing.
I said yes. And then figured it out. That reception ripped the band-aid off and showed me I could actually do this. The weekly flowers had given me confidence. That first reception gave me proof.
There wasn’t one big moment when Drenched in Grace suddenly appeared. Looking back, it feels more like several different parts of my life had been slowly making their way toward one another.
There were the flowers. There was the confidence Gavin and that first reception had given me. There was a nursing scholarship being established in Emi’s name. And there was a phrase from a worship song that I had clung to after choosing the music for her funeral: Drenched in Grace.
And then it occurred to me: the flowers could help fund the scholarship. Something that was helping me learn how to live again could help someone else become a nurse. Beauty could carry my daughter’s name forward.
The flowers became a way to love people through the moments that mattered to them. The scholarship became a way to keep Emi’s name moving forward. And Drenched in Grace became the name of what was growing.
Somewhere along the way, all the paths started to intersect.
Every ribbon remembers her.
Baby blue became a part of the way our family remembers Emi. After we lost her, we painted our nails baby blue. Her brothers wore baby blue ties. Somehow that little bit of blue stayed with us.
Now I tie a baby-blue ribbon into Drenched in Grace arrangements. It isn’t meant to be the centerpiece. Sometimes it hangs quietly. Sometimes it curls through the stems. Sometimes, apparently, it gets a little wild too.
Not the centerpiece. Always a part of it.
All the stuff in the middle.
Drenched in Grace is for all the stuff in the middle-the joy and the heartbreak, the celebrating and the remembering, the holding on and the learning to let go.
It was born from our story, but it was never meant to belong only to us. Because everybody has a middle. Everybody has something they’re celebrating, carrying, missing, beginning, surviving, or learning how to hold.
There is grace there too.
Sometimes flowers celebrate. Sometimes they encourage. Sometimes they welcome, honor, love, or remember. And sometimes they simply say, “I see you in the middle of whatever this is.”
Somewhere in the flowers, I found her again.
I am orderly by nature. I like structure. I like things where they belong. I believe there is a proper way to load a dishwasher, and I will stand by that until the Lord calls me Home.
Emi was not particularly interested in where things belonged. She was wild and free and perfectly comfortable coloring outside every line I had carefully drawn.
And somewhere along the way, I started noticing that my flowers looked a little like the two of us. I gave them structure. And somehow, they kept reaching, bending, trailing, wandering—escaping the boundaries I thought I had given them.
I give them structure. Emi gives them permission to escape.
I don’t know that I ever intended for that to happen. But there she was. The daughter who was always wild and free had somehow found her way into momma’s flowers.
The whole thing started because a momma needed somewhere for all that love to go.
I thought I was making flowers. What I was really doing was finding another way to keep loving people—and another way to keep mothering my girl.
And somehow, all that love kept becoming things—flowers, a baby-blue ribbon, a scholarship, a business, a story. A way of saying her name. A way of loving somebody else well.
And somehow, all this time later, the flowers are still doing exactly that.
Beauty still blooms.
Twenty years from now, I can already see it.
There’s a Drenched in Grace storefront with exposed brick and green and cream walls. Houseplants everywhere. Collected vessels and ribbon and flowers spilling out of whatever I’ve found to put them in.
Tin is there. Vivi is there. Maybe my sons’ families are there. Maybe they’re putting flowers together while I follow behind everybody sweeping and straightening things that apparently no one else can see are crooked.
The scholarship is fully endowed. Forever. Emi’s name is still being spoken. And somewhere, a nursing student is walking into a life she helped make possible.
The baby-blue ribbon is still hanging around. Still wandering through the flowers. Still making people ask what it means.
Because twenty years from now, I don’t think success will look like how much Drenched in Grace sold. I think it will look like how many people we loved along the way.