Kristi Lawrance Calls The Shots

The Decision

Kristi Lawrance is clear about one thing: What happens to you is not the point.

“It doesn’t matter what you’re dealt in life,” she says. “It’s your choice to be positive or negative.” She doesn’t say it as encouragement. She says it as a decision already made, something settled long before the conversation begins.

“Life does not define you,” she adds. “What defines you is how you are as a human being.”

That belief carries into the day.

On a recent afternoon, Kristi chooses to stay upstairs.

The stairs are manageable. That is not the issue. Kristi chooses not to take them, conserving her energy for what matters later.

Downstairs, friends who have driven in from Toronto to help her and her husband, Jim, prepare their home for sale. Boxes move. Conversations overlap. Things get done.

Kristi remains upstairs, settled into bed, talking with Jim and connecting with her friends as they move through the house.

She is not part of the physical work, but she is still part of the day.

There is no sense, in how she describes it, that she is missing out.

Just a different way of participating.

She measures her days differently now. A good one includes a walk, five houses up the street and back, on Jim’s arm. After that, she reads or spends time learning something new, like crocheting.

A few winters ago, their daughter filmed them walking together through the snow to the mailbox. They both still keep the video, not because it represents something lost, but because it reflects something intact.

Kristi seen here with her husband Jim.

The Context

Kristi was 39 when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The diagnosis followed a brief and unsettling stretch. Her speech had cut out mid-sentence while teaching, then returned, then disappeared again. It was enough to send her to a doctor and then to a series of tests.

When the answer came, she absorbed it without drama. “I have MS,” she recalls thinking. “Just one more thing to deal with.”

For years, it remained in that category. She continued teaching. She did not widely share it. It sits alongside everything else in her life, not above it. The changes came gradually. Movement slowed. Energy became less predictable. Tasks that once required no thought began to require planning. But even as those shifts accumulates, her framing did not.

Today, MS is part of her life. It is not the center of it.

“MS is just a diagnosis,” she says. “I’m a human being who does so much more.”

She does not ignore what has changed. Fatigue arrives without warning. Memory falters mid-sentence. Her feet remain constantly numb.

“I’m not lazy,” she says. “I’m just tired.”

A few years ago, that numbness caused her foot to slip from brake to gas while sitting in her driveway. The car went through the garage door. She does not drive anymore. It is something that happened, and then she adjusted.

There are also things she has gained.

“Time,” she says. “I have way more time to do things that I want to do.”

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What She Protects

If there is a defining feature of how Kristi lives, it is consistency.

“I am a positive person,” she says. “Kindness matters. Positivity matters. Positive support matters.”

This is not situational. It is structural. She avoids negativity deliberately. She has no patience for what she calls “woe is me” thinking.

“You make the most of it,” she says. “That’s the choice.”

That choice extends beyond herself.

“Everything I do now is for my kids and my husband,” she says. “Stress affects me. And I only want positivity in my life for them.”

“They have enough to deal with watching their mom.”

So she filters what she shares.

Kristi places family at the center of her life and as the reason for her strength.

How She Lives

“I don’t talk about the physical challenges,” she says. “Because to me, I’m alive. I don’t care about the hard things I go through.”

What matters more is their experience, their lives still unfolding ahead of them.

She speaks about her children with quiet certainty. She avoids names and specifics.

“They’re good kids,” she says. “I’m proud of them. They were raised by great parents. Not perfect parents. But we gave them the best we knew how.”

If her outlook has a foundation, it reaches back further.

Her grandfather immigrated from Holland and survived a brutal beating by Nazi soldiers during World War II. He worked as a baker during rationing, quietly feeding families and helping children who pressed against the warm brick walls of his shop for heat.

“What I have is nothing compared to that,” she says.

It is not a dismissal of her own experience. It is perspective.

Kristi Lawrance does not frame her life around what has happened to her. She frames it around what she chooses: positive or negative, kind or not, forward or stuck.

The distinction, in her view, is simple.

“Life does not define you,” she says. “What defines you is how you are as a human being.”

She moves through her life as she has decided to, a positive presence, a devoted wife and mother, focused less on what has happened and more on what still lies ahead.

She is not defined by what she’s been given.

She is defined by what she continues to choose.