Finish Line Moments: The Finish Line Isn’t Always Where You Think It Is with Jen Murphy Parker

Writer, runner, advocate and mother Jen Murphy Parker joins Finish Line Moments for a soulful and deeply human conversation about her extraordinary memoir Fault Line Boy, raising a child with severe epilepsy, and how life can simultaneously break apart and become more meaningful.Together, we explore running as refuge, motherhood as recalibration, uncertainty as a constant companion and joy not as something recovered, but redefined.Jen shares the evolution of her relationship with running from childhood runs with her father on quiet Massachusetts streets, to marathon racing, to using running as survival during the hardest years of her son Lew’s seizures. We also talk about the profound lessons Lew has taught their family, including one deceptively simple question that now guides so much of their lives: “How can I be happy today?”The conversation also explores the broader “blast radius” of epilepsy on an entire family system and how that experience ultimately led Jen and Dr. Joseph Sullivan to help launch the PECE Center at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital - expanding support for families navigating not only the medical realities of epilepsy, but the emotional and practical ones as well.This episode is about care giving, resilience, identity, advocacy, family and learning to love the version of life - and the version of your child - that ultimately unfolds before you.And in one of those beautiful full-circle moments that could only belong on Finish Line Moments, Jen shares that Lew’s favorite song is the very theme song of this show.Because sometimes the finish line isn’t where you thought it would be. Sometimes it becomes something far deeper than you ever imagined.