THE WORST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO MY DAD SAVED HIS LIFE.

Last Saturday we were all leaving my niece's twelfth birthday party.

Good day. Great day actually. The kind where everyone stays longer than they planned and the kids are loud and happy and you drive home full.

My parents left just before us.

Then my brother called.

A stranger had stopped at the scene of a crash and had used my dad's phone to call my brother and tell him. Within minutes we were driving to the scene, not knowing what we were going to find.

I found both my parents still in the car. The front was completely smashed. Airbags deployed. And my dad was so pale. I will never forget his face. How pale he was.

We got them both to hospital. Separate ambulances. My sister went with mum. I went with dad.

By the time we got there his colour had come back a little. But there was something wrong with his chest. This indent, this hole, that just didn't look right.

The scans came back. Shattered sternum. Four fractured ribs. The sternum displaced, which explained the hole.

And then the doctor told us that while they were scanning him, they'd found something else.

An aneurysm. In his brain.

An aneurysm is a silent killer. A ticking time bomb. You can have one for years and never know. And if it ruptures, that's it.

If my dad hadn't been in that crash, we would never have found it.

The worst thing that happened to him is the thing that saved his life.

I've been sitting with that for the past week now and the whole time I couldn't help but be thankful for the car crash.

Because I think about how many times something has looked like a disaster and turned out to be the thing that changed everything. The business that failed and forced the pivot. The client who left and made space for the right one. The moment everything fell apart and turned out to be the moment everything finally got real.

What if the hardest thing isn't the end of the story?

What if it's the beginning of the best part?

Here's the thing though.

You can only get that reframe when someone shares their story with you.

Women used to do this naturally. Around campfires. In villages. Passing down what they knew, what they'd survived, what they wished someone had told them earlier. That wisdom didn't come from courses or content. It came from proximity. From sitting close enough to hear each other's stories.

And somewhere along the way, we lost that.

We got busy. We got isolated. We got sold the idea that we should be able to figure it out alone.

And so we sit in our hardest moments, stuck in our own narrative, with nobody there to say, I've been through something like that. Here's what I know now that I didn't know then.

That's what we're building at Business Mums Hub.

Not a program. Not a course. A room. A real one. Where the story you need to hear is waiting. Where the reframe that changes everything might come from the woman sitting across the table from you over a $30 coffee on a Wednesday morning.

Because without that room, without those women, without those stories, we stay stuck in the hard thing thinking it's only happening to us.

It isn't.

Come and find out.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk 🩷💙

Sandra x