The Number Nobody Tells You: 3 Years, 23 Days!

I got a notification a while back that made me sit down. The patent for the Stealth Skort had been granted — three years and twenty-three days after I filed it.

Nobody tells you that number when you start something new. They tell you about the idea. The launch day. The finish line. Nobody tells you the middle is going to take three years and twenty-three days of paperwork, waiting, and prototypes that didn't work.

I want to back up further than the paperwork, though, because the real timeline started long before any patent attorney was involved.

At sixty, I walked the Camino de Santiago with my husband Gregg — five hundred miles, thirty-eight days, three mountain ranges. Somewhere along that road, I needed to relieve myself with no bathroom and no cover. I squatted, and when I looked up, a family of five was walking toward me. There was nowhere to hide. Underneath the embarrassment was a much older, much clearer knowing: women should not have to feel this way.

I pulled up my pants and kept walking. No lightning bolt. No grand plan. Just something that happened and stayed with me.

I did nothing about it for eight years.

At sixty-eight, I sat down at my dining-room table and started cutting apart perfectly good skorts. I had been a nurse for over thirty-five years — an ER nurse, a Life Flight paramedic, a hospice nurse. I knew bodies. I knew emergencies. I knew absolutely nothing about making clothes.

But the question was never do I know how. It was am I willing to try.

That willingness, and eight years of a thread quietly ripening, turned into the Stealth Skort — a brief that unsnaps, so a woman can stay covered on her own terms. From that dining-room table to a granted patent took three years and twenty-three days: prototypes that didn't work, a manufacturer that didn't pan out, more prototypes, real tester feedback, and a lot of waiting.

If you are in the middle of your own version of this right now — the part where nothing seems to be happening — I wanted you to know the real number. It is longer than anyone tells you. And it is still worth it.

Pee like nobody's watching.