Hi, I’m Theresa!
I graduated from the University of Michigan with a BS in Environmental Engineering and an interest in fashion modeling. Early in my career, I moved between two very different worlds, reflected in the shoes in my closet: dirty steel-toed work boots for job-site inspections and high-gloss stilettos for walking a rotating auto-show stage.
I eventually decided to leave both pairs behind for the barefoot joy of being a stay-at-home mom.
I’m the author of One Without the Other, a memoir about motherhood, grief, trauma, and what happens when the life you’ve carefully planned becomes one you could never have imagined.
One Without The Other
A memoir about motherhood, grief, control, and finding peace in the life you have.
Theresa Flynn Gray had a plan. She left behind careers in engineering and modeling for the one thing she wanted most: motherhood and kittens.
Unsurprisingly, things didn’t go as scripted.
After finding a husband (Step 1 of The Plan), Theresa struggled to get pregnant. Then, after a complicated IVF procedure, she became pregnant with twins and delivered them at just twenty-four weeks. Ten days later, one of her daughters died. The other would spend more than five months in the NICU, beginning a journey through medical uncertainty, motherhood, grief, and a future that looked nothing like the one she had imagined.
Nearly two decades later, as her surviving daughter prepared to leave home, a diagnosis offered a new understanding of the child Theresa had spent a lifetime trying to protect—and forced her to look backward at her own childhood, trauma, and relentless need for control.
One Without the Other is a story about what happens when life refuses to follow the blueprint—and the hard-won peace that can come when we stop trying to make it. A memoir about learning to live with unmet expectations and embracing change.
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