Oldest of six children, I grew up mostly in western Washington state. My parents divorced when I was in my early teens. For various reasons, I lived in foster homes for the last three years of high school. I met my husband when we both were seniors at rival high schools. We married less than a year after graduation and had the first of our five children when we were twenty-year-old college students.
Our life has been an adventure as we’ve grown up together (to the extent we’ve grown up at all!). We’ve lived in Washington state, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and New York. We spent the early years of our marriage playing music together, leading the faithful in worship at churches across the country.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve lived more than one life during my lifetime. I’ve home-schooled my children, taught childbirth classes, given birth to my two youngest at home. We’ve cared for foster children. I’ve taught adult Sunday School classes and led women’s ministries programs and workshops at homeschooling conferences. In my early 30s, I went back to college, graduating with honors at 35 with a BA in political science. Our family then moved from Nebraska to New York so I could attend Cornell Law School, and then to Dallas where I joined a major law firm where I became a partner a few years later.
Through it all I’ve had a passion for connecting with other women and communicating the lessons learned from both the small triumphs of my life and my terrible mistakes. I love to write, I enjoy public speaking, and my heart beats to encourage women — especially moms — as they navigate the often stressful waters of life as a 21st-century woman. So many women feel inadequate, insecure, and overwhelmed in their roles as women, wives, mothers, workers, caretakers, citizens. I don’t pretend to have the answers, but I love to share what I’ve learned, encourage other women, and see how we can help each other find peace and purpose in the roles that matter so much to us.
Professional Bio
A lawyer by day and a lover of the written word since childhood, Laura has been published both in professional publications and inspirational magazines and has been a contributor to the popular Stepcase Lifehack blog. In 2012 she committed to pursuing her lifetime dream of writing a novel, and she’s currently polishing her first women’s fiction manuscript in anticipation of submitting it (by request!) to her dream agent. Do No Harm is the story of a disgraced Seattle obstetrician whose efforts to fit into her new Texas home are stymied by family conflicts, cultural differences, church politics, and ghosts from her past. Laura is member of American Christian Fiction Writers, the women’s fiction category winner in the 2012 Phoenix Rattler fiction contest, and winner of the 2013 Olympia fiction contest. She hosts a weekly podcast, The Productive Woman, whose purpose is to help women find the tools and encouragement they need to manage their time, life, stress, and stuff so they can accomplish the things they care about most, and make a life that matters.