Michelle Hughes, MCPC
My life has always been a story of needing more than life wanted to give me.
I didn’t grow up living with my mom, and I only met my dad once as a child — introduced to him as a coworker of my mom’s, not as my dad. The family I grew up with loved me when they didn’t have to. And while I am deeply grateful for that love, that whole dynamic created obstacles I spent years trying to find my way through.
At 22, I met the man who would be my husband for the next 19 years. We married in seven months and had two wonderful sons. I finally had the family I had always wanted. My Mark loved me like no one else on this planet has ever loved me. In 2015, I lost him to AML leukemia after a ten-month fight for his life.
I believed with everything in me that God was going to heal Mark on this earth. Instead, Mark received a heavenly healing. My world fell apart. I stopped being the mom I needed to be for my then-teenage boys — but I was simply doing the best I could. I am so grateful for my boys and how tenderly they loved me while they were grieving their daddy too.
In 2017, we lost my mom to bladder cancer. What I didn’t expect was what her illness would give me.
As my mom got sicker, her walls came down. The woman who had always kept a certain distance let me in — because she had no other choice. And in those final months, conversations with my aunts opened a window into my mother’s own childhood, her own story, the life she had lived before I ever knew her. For the first time, I understood why she had made the choices she made. She wasn’t withholding. She was doing the best she could with what she had. The way she showed up for me — even in the ways that hurt — was because she loved me.
That realization didn’t just heal my relationship with my mom. It cracked something open in me.
Over the next several years, God kept peeling back the layers. Loss by loss. Conversation by conversation. He used Mark’s passing, my mom’s passing, the work of raising my boys as their only remaining parent, and a painful situation with a dear friend to show me more of myself than I had ever been willing to see. Including this: I hadn’t been showing up perfectly either. I was doing the best I could too. And my best, in those seasons, wasn’t always enough — but it was all I had.
It was in the middle of navigating all of that when I found my own coach. Not a therapist — a coach. Someone who helped me figure out where I was, where I wanted to go, and how to move forward in a way that actually represented who I was becoming. It worked. And I knew.
I knew this was what I was supposed to do for other women.
I became a Master Certified Professional Life Coach because I have lived the story I now help other women walk through. I know what it is to lose everything that held your life together and have to decide — quietly, without fanfare, with nobody cheering you on — to keep going anyway. I know what it is to finally stop running on autopilot and start actually leading your own life.
That is exactly what I help you do.
Not with a quick fix. Not with a perfect plan. But with a faith-rooted framework, the right tools, and someone in your corner who truly gets it.
You were made whole. Let’s help you live like it.
Much love ❤️
Michelle