When I was a little girl living in a small town in New Jersey, I never really thought much about the future. My parents had a crazy divorce so a lot was always happening. I lived in the present and always just thought things would work out. If I followed the "rules" of life I believed my life would follow a fairly predictable order: Work hard. Stay healthy. Fall in love. Have kids. Grow older together. The end.
I tried to follow the rules, but I got cancer at 26. I moved from NYC to Portland, Oregon at 32. I got divorced at 34. I became a mom at 43. And I will spend the rest of my life with the love of my life, Ben, who is a pilot—someone whose job constantly reminds me how unpredictable life really is.
None of this was the life I imagined. And yet, it is this beautiful and ever-challenging life that taught me the most about strength, beauty, love, and surrender.
When I Started to See the Sparkle
In my mid-twenties while I was learning who I was while working late nights at an ad agency, drinking cosmopolitans, walking the streets of NYC (in heels) and trying to find my person, cancer smacked me right in the face.
Cancer taught me—quickly and painfully—that life doesn’t care much about our plans. I knew I couldn't control the cancer itself, but I could use this experience and take control of my perspective.
For me, strength didn’t look like bravery back then. It looked like showing up for treatment when I was scared. It looked like accepting help from my mom, my friends, my community. It looked like taking steps to try anything to feel strong or beautiful.
Cancer didn’t make me fearless. It gave me clarity and perspective. It changed the way I understood beauty—not as perfection, but as a way to look at the world and see beauty in everything.
I remember walking down the snowy streets of Brooklyn, freezing on my way to work. Normally, I would be miserable trying to rush to the subway. But one day, I actually stopped - as if I was in a romantic comedy - and stood on the sidewalk spinning in the beauty of the sparkly snowflakes.
I would ride the subway, and instead of hating on the smell, the crowdedness, I looked at all of the faces of beautiful people who came to the melting pot of the world, each of them with their own story. I remember waking up one early morning to the birds chirping outside my window and it felt like they created a song just for me. I looked in the mirror and saw new lines on the sides of my eyes, likely from the laughter in my life. Aging is a priviledge, and I learned that at 26.
Having Hope
Before I was even ready to think about children, I was told by my oncologist: you have estrogen positive breast cancer. Pregnancies increase your estrogen level. You should never carry a baby. I remember feeling frozen on the subway on my way home, just sitting in a fog. I walked up to my apartment and went straight into the shower and cried for a full hour. But living in NYC helped me see family was not genetic. Family didn't mean your kids looked like you. Family meant endless, unconditional love. There was hope.
It took time and work, but I finally came to terms with never being able to carry a baby and I thought I found my way. I thought my life was back on track! I fell in love. I got a dog. I got married. I bought a house with a big backyard. And a wonderful woman very close to me even graciously volunteered to step in as a gestational carrier so we could use my frozen eggs have a baby! Then pow! In what felt like one minute, it all blew up. The transfer failed and all of my eggs were gone. I was divorced roughly one year later.
Kara 2.0 began. This was a rebirth of sorts to figure out who I was and the kind of woman I wanted to be - with or without children. I carried gratitude and fear in equal measure. I had gratitude for being healthy and cancer-free. I was grateful for seeing clearly and removing my rose-colored glasses and moving on from a relationship that wasn't honest. I was finding a new version of myself and celebrating the beauty inside of me. But the fear was heavy. I was starting over, and time was no longer something I could take for granted.
I didn't rush this chapter. I was picky. And after finding a unicorn, the next thing I knew, I had a family.
Stepmotherhood and Mommyhood
After cancer, motherhood was unknown. So becoming a stepmom to a 9-year-old was everything I had hoped for and more. But it taught me a quiet kind of strength.
I quickly realized this role doesn’t come with automatic authority or instant trust. It requires patience, humility, and consistency. It reinforced to me that love doesn’t need biology—it needs presence. Sometimes the strongest thing you can do for a child isn’t to fix, guide, or correct. It’s simply to stay.
Being a stepmom reminds me that love doesn’t always arrive with recognition—but it still matters.
In 2017, studies reported "women who became pregnant after an early breast cancer diagnosis, including those with estrogen receptor–positive tumors, did not have a higher chance of cancer recurrence and death than those who did not become pregnant." This was music to my ears. Hope had risen again and aftering finding Ben, we decided to try for a baby.
Though after many attempts, heartbreaks and set backs, including an ovary removal, we were almost ready to give up. When our nurse called to touch base, she recommended us try a fertility specialist who changed everything for us. At 43, I gave birth to our miracle baby, Michael Julius Frazier.
Looking at this child every day, holding him in the middle of the night and easing his baby cries, I have never felt more in the right place and at the right time. It was not my hope to have a baby at 43 (or try for another at 45!), but having the strength to keep pushing forward and the hope to believe it was possible is one of the hardest things I have ever done. It was all God's plan. Never mine.
Choosing Trust Over Control
Being married to a pilot means living with constant reminders that nothing is guaranteed. There are moments of waiting and quiet fears you learn not to voice every day. Flights get canceled. Trips get changed. Planning is not an option.
But love—real love—requires vulnerability and trust.
I’ve learned that you can’t build a life that avoids fear. You can only build a life that’s strong enough to hold it. And as Maren Morris said, "when the bones are good, the rest don't matter (we played this at our wedding).
Cancer prepared me for this kind of love: loving deeply even when life is upredictable.
Life Lesson
These chapters—cancer, motherhood, stepmotherhood, marriage—share a common lesson:
We don’t control the timeline. But we do control how present, open, and loving we choose to be inside it.
Strength isn’t about having answers. It’s about staying soft in a world that keeps asking us to harden.
This is the heart of Fighting Pretty.
For me, strength and beauty aren’t luxuries. They are lifelines.
Kara Frazier is the founder and CEO of Fighting Pretty. Kara is a 17-year breast cancer survivor (Stage 3, Her2+. ER+, BRCA-) and underwent an explant surgery in 2020 after finding out her Allergan implants were recalled. She is a wife, new mom and stepmom. Kara is on a mission to help all women feel strong and beautiful - while battling cancer or not!
To learn more about Kara's story, click here.