326. The Last Message of Sara Raras

Becoming a parent can be one of the best gifts you can receive in life.

Whether that's a pet parent, a human parent, there's nothing like the love we have for our babies.

But becoming a parent comes with a whole bunch of new challenges.

We worry about facing a lot of judgment.

Are we disciplining right? Are we working too hard and not spending enough time with our babies? For some moms, the question is, will my body ever go back to the way it was? And don't get me wrong, it's not just women.

I know dads can feel this way too.

The point is, being a new parent is a vulnerable time in life, which is why new parents need all of the encouragement they can get.

But not everyone is willing to offer up that support.

Some people have steadfast ideas on what it means to bring up a good person in this world, and opinions that are that strong can have the ability to fracture even the closest relationships, sometimes to the point of no return.

So our case today starts in Elkridge, Maryland.

This is an upscale town in between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, and it's here that 35-year-old Sarah Rohrs is trying to restart her life.

Now, Sarah was originally born in Florida on a military base.

She was actually the daughter of an Air Force sergeant, which meant she moved around quite a bit as a kid.

When she was about seven years old, her dad's work took the family to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and that is actually where she stayed until high school.

And it was a pretty early age that Sarah found the thing she was really good at, I mean, the thing that she was just meant to do.

That was mathematics.

She was incredibly smart and talented, but everyone who knew her said she had another useful skill too.

She was also incredibly social.

Sarah was an extrovert, selfless, someone who put others first, and because of that, even though she was moving around a lot as a military kid, she made friends every step of the way in life, including at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, where she eventually met her first husband.

Sarah earned her degree in math with a minor in English and was planning to get her master's until she got a job working with the military at White Sands Missile Base instead.

And then just a few years later, Sarah's husband got a job in Maryland, and Sarah went with him, and then that's how we end up there.

Okay.

She landed herself a job that combined both her skills in math and a duty for her country, just like her father.

She was working for the NSA, the National Security Agency.

But even while working this very challenging job, Sarah used her free time outside of work to just continue building her skill set as she got older.