Kelly Corrigan

Without knowing how to spell starboard or which side it referred to, I got on a 46-foot boat, and I sailed from Malta to Tunisia to Sicily.

I traveled 11,000 miles over 13 months,

to seven different countries without a plan or a phone or a credit card.

Just $3,800 in traveler's checks, which, if you're under 30, was like a little booklet of ... perforated ... I don't know.

And some expired antibiotics my mom made me bring.

And then, running out of money, I landed as a nanny for two kids, four and seven, who had just lost their mom.

I moved into their house so I could cover things.

On the three days a week, their dad worked as a flight attendant for Qantas.

I smeared sunblock on their noses and Vegemite on their toast.

I read them to sleep at night, I cleaned the counters.

The heavy lifting was left for the truly brave, a man who organized his emotions and answered the hardest questions such that his kids and hers could feel a modicum of safety in a patently unsafe world.

Questions like, what is cremation?

And what happens to us if you die?

And so it is that I stood witness to the unphotographable, unmeasurable bravery of some guy named Jim in Sydney, Australia.

And over the years since, I find I just can't stop cataloging these Olympic achievements in family life.

The really big things often come with a game plan and a team of experts and enough adrenaline to lift a school bus over your head.

But inside every crisis you think you might be ready for are 100 dirty surprises that are not in the playbook.

I had stage three cancer in my 30s, and I can tell you that following the chemo schedule didn't take nearly as much courage as admitting to my husband that sex felt less sexy after my boobs, which were once a real strong suit for me,

were made weird and uneven by a surgeon's knife.

Here's a surprise.