A Woman Who Knows
What Idaho Is Made Of

High Desert, Hard Work, and the Sixth of Eight

I was born in Oregon and spent my childhood summers on a family ranch in Christmas Valley — high desert country east of the Cascades, land poor and work rich. No running water in the summer trailers. A landscape that teaches you, early and without sentiment, that the earth requires tending and will not be fooled.

I was the sixth of eight children — three older sisters, two older brothers, then me, then two younger brothers. One of my older brothers ran with the big kids, out on the tractors with the sisters, doing the real ranch work. The other older brother landed with me and one younger brother in the “little kids” group — the ones whose job, officially, was to stay out of the way. I was not the oldest, not the youngest, not the baby who gets softness or the firstborn who gets ceremony. I was in the middle — which is its own education. What I learned was not that I could beat everyone. It was that I would not step aside. That has not changed. (My younger brothers eventually grew to 6’3″ and 6’4″. The window of physical advantage was real, and then biology closed it. The stubbornness remained.)

When the little kids got underfoot, our dad had a solution: he’d drive us a couple miles out into the sagebrush, drop us off, and tell us to pick up sticks or pick rocks. Then he’d come back at dusk. That’s not cruelty. That’s a Western childhood. You learned to occupy yourself in a big, quiet landscape. You learned that being set down somewhere with nothing is not the same as having nothing to do. I have been drawing on that ever since.

The Palouse, the University Town, and a Household Full of Scripture

I came to Moscow, Idaho for junior high and high school. The Palouse. The University of Idaho town. A community with a genuine intellectual life and a serious streak of independent thought — and real winters, and real hills.

I worked from early on. Early-morning paper routes in the dark, in the snow, up and down Moscow’s actual hills. Childcare jobs. By the time I was 14 I was buying my own clothes. You’ve heard the joke about walking to school uphill both ways in the snow — in Moscow, that’s not a joke. I did it. The hills are there. The snow is there. I have the work ethic to prove it.

I grew up in a household steeped in scripture and world religions — a home where faith was something studied, lived, and taken seriously, extended generously to traditions beyond our own. Not debated like an academic seminar — formed, the way faith is supposed to work. I am LDS, and I was raised to understand that every person is a child of God, full stop. Not every person of one faith, not every person of one background — every person. That includes the stranger at the border. The Bible is not ambiguous about this. Leviticus, Matthew, Ruth — the text is consistent and it is not subtle. I have been making that argument my whole life and I am prepared to keep making it in Washington.

Moscow is also where I became aware, years later, that a pastor from my high school town had traveled to the Pentagon to tell the Secretary of Defense that women should not vote — that women are, in his words, the kind of people that other people come out of, and should be governed accordingly. I graduated from Moscow High School. I have something to say about that. I am saying it by running.

WordPerfect. Novell. The Industry Before It Ate Itself.

Straight out of high school I went to work in technology — for WordPerfect and then Novell, two of the most consequential software companies of their era. This was the industry in its formative years, before the consolidation, before the surveillance economy, before five companies owned the infrastructure of modern life.

I learned how technology actually gets built, sold, deployed, and used — not from a lecture hall, but from the inside. When Congress debates artificial intelligence regulation, data broker legislation, or cybersecurity infrastructure today, they are mostly making decisions about things they do not understand. I understand them. That matters.

Coming Home. Single Mother. Four Children.

Life took me out of Idaho for a time. I married, had four children, and when that chapter closed I came back to Idaho — to the Treasure Valley — and raised them here as a single parent. Child support came in, and it was still hard. I know what it costs to keep a household together on a stretched income in this state. I know what the housing market looks like from the bottom. I know what it is to stretch a grocery budget, to need programs to function, to be entirely dependent on systems that are supposed to catch people and often don’t.

My children value their privacy and I honor that. They are grown, they are the reason I care about housing policy and food security and economic fairness with my whole chest — not theoretically, but because those were the conditions of our actual lives.

Back to School at Fifty. On Campus With My Daughter.

When my youngest graduated, I enrolled at Boise State University. I lived on campus — alongside my daughter, in the same university community — and earned two degrees and a minor: Information Technology Management, Supply Chain Management, and a minor in Cybersecurity.

These are not accidental choices. The federal government is one of the largest and most inefficient supply chains in the world. Congress is making decisions about surveillance technology, AI systems, and data security with almost no one in the room who understands how any of it actually works. I went back to school because I saw what was coming and I wanted to be ready to fight it with something more than talking points.