Monthly Spotlight

Every woman reaches a moment when the life she's built begins asking a different question.

Sometimes it comes after success. Sometimes after disappointment.

More often, it begins with a question she can no longer ignore:

Is the life I've built still asking enough of me?

In Her Words is where women pause long enough to examine those moments...not to offer perfect answers, but to tell the truth about what comes next.

"I knew that I had to be strong for the both of us."

Ask someone what she does and you learn what she has been measured by. Katie Dubon is 34, the CFO of Bravo Foods USA and one of the younger executives in her industry. She has gotten used to conversations that stop at her title.

So she starts somewhere else, with the day itself. It was her son's birthday, and the anniversary of the days he spent on life support.

She was born near North Hollywood to parents from El Salvador who came to this country as children, her father at 11 and her mother at 14. Their home was strict and close, with curfews and no sleepovers.

She understood what it took to raise a child most fully at 25, when her son was born.

He arrived in crisis. He had aspirated and was on full life support, intubated and not responding to treatment. The doctors told her oxygen loss to the brain could mean damage, and that with a baby it might be years before anyone knew. She remembers sitting there hearing the words without being able to take them in. Then she lay down alone and prayed, asking for the chance to be the mother he had been waiting for, and promising to care for him, provide for him, and protect him.

She cried during that prayer. She did not cry once while looking at her son surrounded by machines, even as people asked how she was doing it.

"I knew that I had to be strong for the both of us."

He came home without any lasting effects. She calls him a miracle baby, and he is nine now.

Motherhood hadn't been part of her plan, and neither was what followed. She chose to leave a relationship she had outgrown, and she had to become, quickly, someone her son could lean on emotionally, financially, and mentally. "There's no time to be sad. There's no time to cry." She has watched other women stay in that place too long, so she moved through it as fast as she could and surrounded herself with people who wanted her to come out the other side.

Her work is tied to where she comes from. Around 2005, her parents tried a restaurant and bakery, the kind of business that runs seven days a week. They kept it for a couple of years, then sold it. Her father didn't walk away from food. He kept going, taking on distribution and building up the Bravo brand, and Katie grew up inside that world. Today she is the CFO of what it became, and she built something of her own beside it: Latin Foods at Your Door, an online platform that sells directly to customers across the country and gives the family business a way to reach far past the West Coast.

Her parents left El Salvador as children, so the traditions never fully traveled with them, and when she was old enough to look for them herself, going back was too dangerous. She used the job to learn how the food grows, where it comes from, how it is prepared, and how it is eaten.

Customers write to tell her which products taste like the ones their grandmothers made. "Food is like time traveling," she says. It's why she believes they are selling a story before they sell a product. She grew up in years when Salvadoran culture was seldom recognized on its own, and she is glad to see that changing. She now collaborates on Central American heritage nights, supports up and coming entrepreneurs, and has helped bring a Central American film festival to life.

Raising her son has also changed how she remembers her own childhood. She remembers wondering why her parents couldn't just take them to the park like everyone else. Their restaurant never closed, and she was too young to understand why. As a child, she saw the time her parents weren't spending with her. As an adult, she sees what they were trying to build.

"Now I understand it."

She recognizes the trade because she is living it. People see the title, the travel, the glamour. Her son sees Mom. She has taken his calls in meetings and while traveling abroad, and when she misses one, he texts: Mom, can you please answer? She answers. "It's not something that I can call out for. Ever." A large portrait of him hangs behind her desk, because some days she needs the reminder to go home.

So she tells him where she's going, and when she is with him, the phone goes away. "When I'm out, I'm thinking about him, and then when I finally am with him, I have to be here for him."

She does not think everything she was handed deserves to travel unchanged. "We inherit those," she says of the generational traumas families pass along without meaning to. What she wants to give her son is the other inheritance: where he comes from, what it tastes like, and what it takes to get there. And she has changed one thing about the way she was raised to work. "I could tell you I could do it all by myself. I can't." She has a team she calls her village, and she says Latinas in particular rarely ask for help. What many women overlook, she says, is that asking for help and receiving it are "two different things."

She is learning to rest, too. She books the spa day and gets her hair done. "Who's gonna take care of you better than you?" She keeps a succulent garden and thinks of women the way she thinks of those plants. When you believe one is gone, a little water and the right light will bring it back bigger than before.

At 34, there is still plenty she wants to build. The brand has been a West Coast name, and she is working to put it on grocery shelves across the East Coast. Within five years, she wants Bravo Foods to be the largest food distributor in the United States. At 40, she expects to start thinking about another chapter.

Asked to finish one sentence without overthinking it, "What comes next for me is," her answer came quickly.

"A daughter."

She laughed as she said it. She hasn't decided, and she says she was "definitely traumatized" by what happened with her first birth. "I thought I read everything. I read every blog." The one thing she never read about was what actually happened. If another baby comes, life will have to slow down first. "I can't be at a million and try to bring in another baby." But her son shares her personality and her interests, and she is curious what raising a girl would be like.

Asked what she hopes someone feels after reading her story, she doesn't reach for her title or her company.

"We can have the life that we choose to write for ourselves. And more."

What is the life you are choosing to write for yourself?

This is Katie. This is SAR.