Hi, I'm Juli Brenning.
There is absolutely nothing extraordinary about me, except maybe there is.
Broken apart, the word extraordinary means ordinary in an extra way.
That’s me. I’m extra ordinary.
I published my first book in 2016. Maggi and Milo is the story of a Vermont summer day where I had the privilege of watching my 4 year old daughter, Mackenzi, and my parents’ dog, Max, hunt frogs in a mountain pond.
You know those days when you get to the end of them and you think, “I am so grateful to have been an eyewitness to that”? It was that kind of day.
I was sure I would make a million dollars and become a full time children’s book author.
I didn’t.
However, I was doing precisely what I was meant to do at that moment- I was a full time mom. To two remarkably complicated humans. I love, and loved, being their mom.
But I’m not going to lie, our road to Oz was a bumpy one. I regret that I didn’t write about those years, but I hadn’t found my authentic voice. Yet.
When Cooper and Mackenzi were in high school, I found myself in an ancillary role. And I wasn’t the famous children’s book author of my dreams, so I returned to the middle school classroom.
I loved teaching. I hated the testing realities of public school. I struggled with the blatant lack of separation of church and state in the Tennessee public school system. I was constantly bolstered by the energy of middle schoolers and devastated to have an active shooter plan.
But, in the end, it was the pandemic that tarnished teaching for me. I stayed through 2021 and had planned on staying through 2022 but the universe had other plans for us.
My husband, Ryan, works in corporate sales. We’ve moved a lot. And we’ve also had to continually balance promotions and moves, but with every offer he’s been given, we both believed that we’d know if we were meant to go.
Countless times, he said no. But this time. It was time. But it was a very hard move. We loved Tennessee. We loved our friends, our home, our neighbors.
The universe often asks you to do hard things.
Coming home meant coming home.
10 months later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. (oh, and my dad has Alzheimer’s which is one of the nine circles of Hell)
The universe also rarely makes mistakes.
And. I found my voice. My authentic voice.
That lesson that I was taught all those years earlier about my words, my work, my voice - I finally learned it.
It was a hard fought battle to find my voice and even harder to have the confidence to share it. I’m not sure where this is going to take me, but I hope that my extra ordinary life will resonate with your extra ordinary life, and together we can tell our own stories.