Theresa A. Markham

Theresa Markham was extremely fortunate to have parents who loved traveling and adventure. With her father being in the Army when she was born, she had seen the world by the age of 6. By then, she was back in Massachusetts, the home of her family tree. It was also then that it became evident that she loved math – and art – and music.

Always balancing between those two worlds – sometimes watching them intermingle, she crafted a life that included academic and professional achievements accompanied by a lot of extracurricular activities and hobbies – volunteer work, art projects, home projects, and adventures.

That path included a youth filled with art classes, music lessons, speaking competitions, academics, volunteering, traveling, endless reading, Girl Scouts, speech writing and the beginnings of book writing, and even a couple beauty pageants. Then, as a young adult, she was blessed with two fabulous educational experiences – Providence College and Fordham Law School.

Her career on Wall Street began in 1987 as a cold caller (two months before the crash), which then morphed into positions in all aspects of the brokerage business, during which time she attending law school at night while working full-time, commuting all over Manhattan island by subway and bus. Nonetheless, her volunteer work and creative activities continued, including writing a software program for her future law firm. After law school, she was an attorney at Morgan Stanley for a few years, where she led a team of wonderful attorneys before she and her husband moved to New Jersey, and started her own law firm shortly thereafter. Her law firm ultimately focused on divorce law, which Markham enjoyed because it gave her an opportunity to combine her math and creative talents, as well as her research, writing, speaking and advocacy skills, to help people going through a crisis. 

After many years of intense 60+ hour weeks, the burn-out became real and she took a sabbatical that ultimately culminated her retiring from the Rolls of the NJ Bar – and discovering a whole lifestyle that didn’t involve constant pressure! It was a period of wonderful discoveries and personal development. She homeschooled her daughter from 3rd grade through 12th grade (with her daughter ultimately receiving a college scholarship and accomplishing a graduate degree by age 22). As a full-time homemaker, she learned to cook and preserve food by pressure canning. She volunteered on boards of art and civic organizations. She tutored kids in math, history and writing.

After years of being a full-time homemaker, Theresa more fully appreciated how much homemakers contribute to their communities. They are the ones making the soup for sick people and casseroles for their families, picking up friends’ kids when an emergency arises, selling the tickets at the front door of the community theater, making the posters for the bake sales that raise money for the nearby needy family, and “just” sitting listening to a hurting person’s struggles. Without full-time homemakers, there is a gaping hole in a community’s safety net.

And she became a gardener. Her love of digging in dirt had started when she was a child. But, the gardening at the New Jersey home started when her 5 year-old wanted more butterflies to chase. So, of course, since the soil was so awful from the new construction, she “had to” take on the project of doing research on soil, then compost, and sub-soil environments, etc. All to plant a butterfly bush.

A few years later, she jumped into the world of community gardens – with and without raised beds. As a dedicated introvert, gardening in a community wasn’t exactly what she viewed as ideal, but she did it anyway. After a few seasons of her family eating amazing food, other activities took priority.

Then, with the youngest off to college, it was time to re-evaluate career options. In early 2020, Markham became a financial advisor. Once again she was using her math and creative talents to help clients achieve their personal goals, but in a much more constructive – and less stressful – environment than litigation. She thoroughly enjoys working closely with her clients and watching them transform their lives.

And so it was that in 2021, a farmer friend offered Theresa the opportunity to plant a little garden on part of his farmland. That little garden turned into 2,000 square feet of land that she uses to grow flowers and vegetables, yes – but also to grow soil. An eternal researching, her garden is her playground for gardening and soil-growing experimentation, with everything from cover crop mixtures to companion planting and non-traditional farming/garden strategies like no-till – at some of which, her friend just shakes his head.

It was in that gardening process though, after over five decades of life, that Theresa Markham finally learned to exhale. Repeatedly. On her own, without being reminded. She was able to accomplish it as if it was a naturally occurring event. 

And then, the more she enjoyed just being in the garden talking to the flowers and the worms, and experimented with plant varieties and with growing soil, the more she started to be present enough and clear-headed enough in her garden activities that she began to see connections between the most basic gardening experiences and life wisdom.

Why publish a non-fiction book?

Well, her initial foray into book-writing was a children’s book in her early 20s. Her heroes in her youth were (among others) Charles Schultz, Jim Henson, Walt Disney, and Dr. Seuss. And, she loves teaching children (and adults, and really, anyone nearby). So, children’s books would seem to be an obvious fit. But her dreams of writing an excellent children’s book (as another recovering lawyer, Doreen Cronin did with Click Clack Moo, Cows that Type) will have to wait until that skill set improves.

As a lawyer, she had written two ebooks – one on how to create and use a 4-part children’s bank, and one as a guidebook for people going through a divorce (both have been discontinued, perhaps to be dusted off again in the future, perhaps not).

As for writing adult fiction, Markham would love to have that talent. While she breezes through scores of audiobooks every year (especially while cleaning the kitchen, doing laundry, driving everywhere, and walking around the track), and especially loves jumping between cozy murder mysteries and espionage novels and biographies and history and non-fiction personal development/business, she has unsuccessfully attempted a few times to write a fiction story. But she isn’t surprised to be lacking in that area. She’s a math-nerd, not a story-teller. She’s an introvert, not a people-person. So, how would she know how a dozen different types of people would think and interact? Fortunately, there are extremely talented fiction writers that DO know how people think, and tick, and behave – and who have been making up imaginary stories for as long as Theresa has been mentally rearranging numbers for fun. And she gets to enjoy reading the wonderful novels that they write.

So, for now, Theresa Markham has been given the gifts of being able to garden, to write about it – and to be able to share it in the hopes it will bring happiness, insight, comfort or hope to others. She considers herself extremely lucky to be able to do that AND to have the love-filled, faith-centered, adventurous, abundant American life she lives.

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