We’ve all been there. You’re on the sidelines of a soccer game or in line for a coffee, and someone asks, “How are you?” Without missing a beat, you reply, “I’m fine.” Really?!?  Fine? For many of us, it’s a placeholder, a default response that brushes past the complexities of our true feelings and experiences. 

On a walk with Joelle Moray, author of What Are We Doing?!: Radical Self-Care for the Hustle Culture, we dissected this notion of “fine,” revealing layers of vulnerability, curiosity, and the courage to be authentic.

In a world where social media offers up the highlight reel of everyone else’s life, admitting that things aren’t perfect is taboo. Personally, I pause when I am asked, “How are you?” A voice in my head whispers, “Reveal nothing.” I find it to be a throw-away question so it merits a throw-away answer, “Fine.”

You have to know that “fine” is my kryptonite. As a school leader, I was dismayed when a parent asked, “How was school?” and a child could only respond, “fine.” That signified failure. Did nothing noteworthy happen at school that a child wants to relate to mom or dad? I couldn’t control carpool conversations, but I encouraged parents to ask a more provocative question, such as

• If you could switch seats with anyone in your class, who would it be and why?
• If your teacher had a superpower, what do you think it would be?
• If you wrote a book about your day at school, what would you title it?
• What made you feel proud of yourself today?
• Who made you laugh today?
• What was the hardest thing you had to do today?

A child cannot respond, FINE, to any one of those.

In her practice as a mental performance coach and a nationally certified counselor, Joelle Moray is developing the art of asking better questions. Instead of settling for the usual “How are you?” she suggests we dig deeper. Questions like “What’s been the most positive part of your day?” or “What are you struggling with right now?” invite more meaningful responses. These questions show genuine interest and can lead to richer conversations. They allow people to express themselves beyond the confines of “fine.”

As we walked briskly and breathlessly, the notion of fine shrouded us with a momentary introspective silence.

Liz: Because every time your answer is, “I’m fine.” You chip away a little bit at your growth. For me it feels like a lie.

Joelle: You do. And you also stifle the relationship with the person asking you the question.

Liz: And maybe even your own voice.

Joelle: Yeah. (long pause) And stifle your own voice.

When Joelle asks, How are you? Someone might mention a sliver of the truth: a sore back, a minor inconvenience, the illness of a parent, but her experience tells her there is more to the story. She acknowledges the opening and compassionately settles into those responses. It is easy to rush past a response, but attending to it deepens the experience and possible results for both parties. 

In her presentations for corporate wellness, she reminds her audience that often we hide behind the word “fine” to avoid digging into the real issues. She shares the following image:

It’s easier to say we’re okay than to confront the chaos on our metaphorical desks. Joelle asks her audience to consider the image from two perspectives: as the person asking the question trying to elicit meaningful and helpful dialogue, but also as the woman sitting on the floor. How does that woman respond? She is not fine. At this moment she is barely holding it together. 

Joelle suggests we respond with “ing” words. She offers substitutes for the mask of “fine” …

• I’m pausing right now. 
• I’m growing right now. 
• I’m learning right now. 
• I’m celebrating right now. 
• I’m changing right now 

The list goes on, but each one is better than “I’m fine.” Joelle likes the approach of using “some kind of ING word, the kind of word that has movement that indicates something’s happening.” As a former English teacher, I must admit the gerund is a powerful weapon. ING possesses the extraordinary ability to transform any action verb into a powerful noun, yet maintaining the essence of both verb and noun simultaneously. “I’m pausing right now” feels much more honest than “I’m fine” if I were to reflect on the exchange with someone. I can share more about the pause if I choose to be vulnerable without feeling inauthentic or triggering any imposter syndrome tendencies.

A Platform of Curiosity

These responses also spark curiosity. They offer permission to accept your feelings and your failures and your worries… all of it. Joelle’s platform on mental wellness is all about curiosity. She uses curiosity to get to know her clients and encourages it for us to get to know ourselves. Instead of feeling defensive, embrace curiosity. Why did that question trigger me? Did I assume someone was judging me? Is their judgment more of a reflection on them than it is on me? 

Even when someone raises a difficult question during a presentation, she pivots to curiosity. When asked about something for which she is uncertain, she responds, “This is a great place for curiosity.”  The mindset not only diffuses potential conflict but also models a healthy approach to disagreements or self-doubt. It’s a reminder that we don’t have to have all the answers, and that’s okay. It takes perfectionism out of the game.

Ultimately, we need to be present and patient.  By asking thoughtful questions, and embracing curiosity, we can drop the “fine” mask. We cannot rush through connections with others or ourselves. 

The Patience to be a Mother

As adoptive parents, Joelle and I share a bond. The thread of our experience is a lesson in patience. Four years into motherhood Joelle guesses that she has a different perspective than other moms. “I hope I’m a little more patient. I’m more curious. I see the fragility of life and the rarity of parenthood very differently. It’s a privilege to get to teach someone how to be a human being. It is a huge privilege.” 

We both acknowledge that patience is hard when you make the decision to adopt. The road to that moment has been long enough with challenges and loss and now you’re asked to be patient. Yet that is the very lesson that Joelle and I agree our children taught us: patience.

Joelle and Stefan became parents through foster care in West Virginia. After the application process and home study, they were “open” to get calls about a child. It’s a tricky situation for someone who is not feeling patient as you are presented with the situation of whatever’s happening with a particular child or children. 

Joelle: You need to understand that you can say yes or no. And at first, I was afraid to say no because I thought we would be blacklisted or put to the end of the line or whatever, and that’s just not how it works. They want you to say no if this child is not the right fit for you and your family. Because if not, they don’t want to have to remove the child again. That’s much more traumatizing to the child. 

Yet it is not as easy as yes or no. Joelle recounts multiple stories of saying yes but the child was placed somewhere else. The gift of time allows each instance to be remembered as bumps in the road, but as an adoptive mother myself I know how each YES arrived full of hope and preparation and each loss triggered disappointment and despair.

In January the Morays thought 2020 was their year. Instead the pandemic shut down the courts and their process was derailed…until August when they got a call that there was a baby boy who had just been born with neonatal abstinence syndrome from in utero drug exposure. Their YES was met with a clear harbinger that the goal was reunification.  While there was visitation with the birth family for a few months, the baby and birth mother were never officially reunified. At ten months, the birth family relinquished their rights and her son was eligible for adoption, which wasn’t finalized until he was about 15 months old. 

Those are facts. Dates and agreements that feel contractual. I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that you have to have lived the experience of adoption to feel what it is like to walk through days holding your breath. The sense of possible loss becomes palpable, but for the Morays they had more than their hope to take care of.

On October 8, in the midst of newly navigating the journey of fostering their son, an OB GYN reached out to share that a patient was choosing adoption. Days later, Joelle was in the room when her daughter was born. Her son was only ten weeks old.

No adoption is “guaranteed.” A child has to live with you for six months before it is legally finalized. In this case, however, Joelle had met the birth mother and knew reunification was unlikely. Joelle remembered, “I made a promise to her. She feels that I can do this better than she could. And that’s a responsibility. That’s a great responsibility.” Ultimately, adoption is a promise made to provide the best life possible for a child, acknowledging the trust and hope extended by another mother.

Liz: I would say that the conversation about that promise to another mother lives on the horizon and keeps you in a different mindset as a parent. There’s a day in the future that you need to help your daughter understand adoption and realize there’s more than you…talk about humbling, talk about vulnerable.

Joelle: My daughter’s about to be four, and there’s a teacher at school who’s pregnant. And so now we have it – the questions. Is there a baby in her belly? Yeah. When I grow up, can I have a baby in my belly? Was there ever a baby in your belly? Whose belly was I in? …now it’s here.

Liz: That here moment for me came when Ella, who always knew she was born of my heart not my belly, asked, Do I have siblings? Before my mind could form a response, I realized Grace was crying. 

Joelle: Dang.

Liz: These are the things. There’s no manual, right?  

There was a montage playing out in my mind. I could see a day when Ella meets her biological siblings and Grace is standing alone… a surviving twin surviving another loss. That moment only happened in my mind. The narrative has yet to play itself out over a decade later, but it is there. It lies in wait for any adoptive mother. Maybe that is why we find ourselves trying to be more patient. To live in the moment in front of us instead of ruminating on a possible situation on the horizon.

So what does Joelle hope her children will say about their mother someday?

Joelle: My mom is smart, funny, ambitious, a good cook, likes to dance in the kitchen. You know, I hope they say… Patient. They probably won’t say that.

Liz: Maybe they’ll be good at the ING words.

Joelle: Yeah, right. She’s practicing patience.

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Ask me about Barb Buchwach and I will begin a story that spans 40 years. Sharing the responsibilities of dorm mother gave us a lifelong bond. Although she has a large loving family of her own, she welcomed me as a sister. In every life decision I faced, she would toast me a bagel then smother it with onion, tomato and cheese and make it feel like home. Barb has that gift of making every person she meets feel like her day was made for the moment she spends with you. You will walk away with a feeling of being loved unconditionally and most likely a slice of banana bread or a container of soup. I could list all of the challenges we faced, but they’re less important now, fading farther into background noise every day. What remains salient are the smaller moments mostly set in Barb’s kitchen. There I have cried a thousand tears, laughed until my ribs ached, and been embraced by unconditional love. 

She was one of the first people I wanted to walk with. I almost abandoned this project before it began, but tapping into Barb’s wisdom was worth taking the first steps. She had offered counsel and comfort to so many people, who better to guide me. I listened to our recording many times before taking to the computer to document it. I know I will listen to it again and again. I laugh at her tone and first words every time. Ironically, it began far differently than expected…

Barb Let’s get this walk over with, dammit. 

Liz Well ok then. First of all, your hair looks fantastic. Does that mean you haven’t done chemo in a while?

Barb My lung nodules grew a little bit, but they’re still very small. [The doctor] wants my body to have a break because I had a long chemo session. I mean, I did chemo for 15 months straight. Most people get six months. Damn. That’s why my hair is fuller ‘cause I told her I don’t feel great a lot. My muscles are so sore. Blah, blah, blah.

Doc said, “First of all, you have to remember you have pancreatic cancer.” 

I go, ‘“Really?” 

And then she said, “And you had a lot of chemo, and you had radiation, and you just had surgery on Monday.” 

I go, “Oh, so this is normal, to feel like this?” 

So I have my hair …until I start the chemo again.

While Barb attributes her strength in battling pancreatic cancer to her community of family and friends, she also blames the stress in her life for its occurrence. 

Barb I did this to myself. I just never seemed to be able to get it all together on my own. I want to be the best at all I do as a mother, as a worker, with my house, … I just couldn’t get it all done, so what I hadn’t done would stay in my mind all the time and cause me stress. Add to that I was in sales for 22 years, and anytime you’re in sales, it’s stressful.

If I could go back 22 years, I would probably tell myself to think of me, and think of it as my job to take care of this body, this life. I always put myself last because I could, and then I just ran out of time. It’s not that I didn’t want to take care of myself. I just ran out of time. And the other things, to me, were more important.

Liz  When you say you ran out of time, you mean you thought you’d get to you, you’d take care of everybody else, and then you’d get to yourself?

Barb Yeah. And I just didn’t. So I didn’t get that walk in, I didn’t go get a massage once a month, and I didn’t make myself something extra healthy to eat because I’d run out of time in the day. And so if I had to guess, I would say it was all that. 

We walk in silence for a little bit. I don’t pretend to know what we are all rushing toward, but I know we have made time our enemy until we realize its finite… until that’s palpable. Our pace is slow. Unlike other walks, we aren’t exercising, we are just putting one foot in front of the other. The fall air and the warm sun seem the perfect background to steal this time together.

Barb And maybe that’s why I’m doing well, because it’s the first time in my life I’ve had no stress, and I have everything I wanted. I don’t know, everything’s just working out now, and I don’t have stress, and I think that’s really helping me. I just love my kids, my house, my family, my friends. 

Liz Isn’t it amazing? It takes a pancreatic cancer diagnosis to get you to the point that you say, “I have all that I wanted.”

While we both burst into momentary laughter at the irony, she offers some of the most profound advice I have received thus far. She reminds me that I cannot let disappointment define me. When any one of us are “in it,” we feel like it is the end of the world. It’s not. The thing that happened is not what is important in our lives. It is the way we get through it that affects our body, our mind and our heart. Somehow we have to get ourselves into a space of believing that I am where I am supposed to be. There’s always solutions. 

Barb You have to take ego out of it because ego is you thinking about you. You think you’re the cause… you feel like you could have made a difference if you’d have done something right. It’s your ego that says you’re good enough or not. I think you have to let that go and know that there is a higher power, whatever that may be. So let it happen. The key is that no matter what you do, you need to have a passion for it and ego begins to fall away. 

We both realize we have had experiences in our lives when we were truly focused without ego. The majority of those moments are when our children suffered. Life can bring you to your knees when you’re a mother. Without knowing from where you draw your strength, you stand and place one foot in front of the other. Barb jokes that sometimes strength comes from Xanax, but we know it comes from our community of love.

Barb I didn’t always handle the big things well. I let them affect my stomach. I remember plain as day Danny, (her oldest), was twelve. So that means Leah was only six. And Danny was so sick that he ended up in the hospital. And my fears were he had some really bad disease or something wrong. And immediately I was sick too. It was total fear. I couldn’t take care of my two kids that were at home. And you came and you took care of them.

Liz  I guess I’ve never said this to you, but what I saw was a woman who stepped up completely for her child, so much so that you needed a break and were brave enough to let someone else step in… instead of trying to do it all. I always think of that time as an example of your strength. 

Isn’t that part of community? It’s not just giving. It’s also receiving.

Barb And most people, if they love you, they want to do something for you and they aren’t really sure what to do. So I’ve gotten better with that. I’ll ask people. I called Jeanne today and asked her if she was going to Kroger, and she was. Heck, Matt and Big Dan volunteered to take Mac to the vet. 

I’ve always cherished my friendships and my family. And over the years, when I’m good, I would do anything for someone else. Which is a lot easier than letting someone do it for you, but now I’m getting good with it. I say, sure, yeah, I’ll take that, or, sure, you can do that for me. But I still have it in me that I think, what can I do back for them?

We randomly walk through a variety of topics as we near the end of the sidewalk… FMLA, IVF, QVC… and she tucks in a sampling of other insights that could each be the topic for a later walk:

• Show up. You don’t have to bring anything. Just you. And if you can’t get there, write.
• When you have the energy, take advantage of it.
• The more you go through in your life, the stronger you are …and then you realize, this is life. 
• There is no fairy tale and sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason. 
• We have to be willing to tell our stories. Others may judge, but that cannot be our worry.

Unlike others I will walk with, I handed Barb the magic wand – even if there are no fairy tales – and asked her to chart the course for my life ahead. She told me to make other Liz Hofreuters. The irony in that takes my breath away – I have too often worried that my girls would end up like me. She reminded me… as only a lifelong friend can do, especially one that is facing pancreatic cancer head on …that I was strong… the collateral beauty of the challenges I have faced. I needed to take advantage of that. She urged me to choose a path full of work that I not only love, but one that leaves me time to travel and visit with Grace…to go to Ella’s things and be involved in her life as much as a 16 year old will allow. To sit with her, my friend Barb. She nudged me and whispered almost inauduibly, “You need that time because that’s who you are and you don’t want to regret that.” 

Naturally, she sends me off with a container of soup.

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I’ve set out to capture the stories and insights of those who have journeyed with me. I am asking them to walk with me yet again…quite literally. Through informal interviews and candid reflections, “Walk with Me” aims to document the real-life experiences of friends and mentors – from the pivotal moments, to the challenges they overcame, to the advice they have for others.

This collection of first-hand accounts of our walks will provide a roadmap of the trials and triumphs of leadership, learning differences and motherhood – the essential trilogy of my last two decades. 

I embarked on this journey with the mindset to learn something new and the goal to nurture a culture of trust and vulnerability. There is so much to learn from one another.

So read on, and let their voices inspire, empower, and guide you as they have me.