The Birth of Peace Love & Wine

March 12th just passed and happened to be my mother’s 60th birthday…or, it would have been. My mom passed away at the age of 49. Remembering her, and the joy with which she lived, helps give me confidence that the community and brand I’m building through Peace Love & Wine is the right thing.

When several life catastrophes happened in 2017, I decided to launch Peace Love & Wine to fuel the side of me that needed more glitter and sanity, and also allow me to support women and donate to charities through a creative business that touched my soul. My mom was a huge wine enthusiast and always volunteered for impactful causes while I was growing up. Like her, wine is something that brings me pleasure and often includes cherished girl time.

With my work, I’d really like to make an impact towards the fight against cancers and ALS through the work I do. (RIP, Stephen Hawking). Life is way too short to do a job that’s a dud and starves your soul, and I was strongly reminded of this in 2017.  My skin started getting rashy from stress and I felt like I was living in a constant, debilitating state of anxiety. Something needed to change.

Sometimes, on this entrepreneurial roller coaster (and just in life), a girl needs her ladies to lift her up. Often, a gal will go to her mom or sister for this buoy. I have to adopt my female family since I was born an only child and my mom is no longer around. Sometimes I refer to these other women as wine sisters, sometimes as one of my adopted mothers. In the past few days, despite running businesses themselves, my wine sisters Kristi and Tiffany C. have generously supported me in remembering my mom and have helped me navigate the emotional challenges of missing her. (Thank you ladies. Mwah!)

Thankfully, Peace Love & Wine has been a sisterhood, passion project, and happy distraction that helped me get through some very challenging times last year and helped me to look forward to the future. I love (and sometimes hate) the process of building a business from scratch. Today, when people ask me what I do, I tell them, “I do wine. I do fun.”

My heart still aches for Mom at times; mostly it’s with fond memories now, but the first year she was gone, I cried myself to sleep every night and couldn’t stop thinking about the “what ifs” with regard to her final weeks and days in the hospital. I am so grateful that she knew I was there even if wasn’t obvious to anyone whether she could comprehend anything. Mostly unconscious and with muddled speech, the last thing she ever said to me was a treasured, “I love you.”