DEAR IRIS
March 5, 2026
THE RETURN OF DEAR ADVISED, NOW DEAR IRIS
Dear Reader,
Some columns are born from theory. This one was born from responsibility.
In 2008, I trained at The Protocol School of Washington in Washington, D.C., and became a Certified Etiquette and Protocol Expert. This foundation led me to launch my advice column, Dear Advised, in 2014.
At the time, I was navigating a significant life transition while raising my children and rebuilding our home. Stability, I learned, is not something that simply arrives. It is built through structure, discipline, and daily decisions that carry long-term weight. Rebuilding required steadiness more than sentiment.
Women began writing to me about their own turning points: marriages under strain, shaken confidence, fractured friendships, and the fear of beginning again when life refused to follow the plan. I answered in the margins of my days, between work and home, offering whatever clarity and composure I could muster.
I kept every letter.
What I did not expect was the sharpness of the online world. Advice given in good faith was often met with dismissal or ridicule. I was still forming my voice, so I stepped away, understanding that conviction must run deeper than commentary.
Life, as it always does, continued its own education.
Long before Dear Advised now Dear Iris, I was a homemaker learning through practice. Keeping a home led me into catering, which demanded precision, timing, and the grace to serve others well under pressure. That work naturally led me to formal study in etiquette and protocol so I could bring structure and civility to every table I set. Culinary writing followed, and with it came deeper conversations with women around those same tables.
It was the daily work of homemaking, managing a household, rebuilding after hardship, and showing up consistently that gave those lessons their true weight. One discipline flowed into the next.
Over the years I learned how to hold boundaries without anger, correct without humiliation, and apologize without surrendering authority. I have seen both struggle and strength in marriage. I have walked through seasons of loss that reordered my understanding of what is permanent. Responsibility has a way of clarifying what truly deserves our attention.
The questions women ask have not changed:
How do I rebuild after betrayal?
How do I strengthen my marriage without losing myself?
How do I become confident without becoming hardened?
How do I make decisions that will shape my family for years to come?
What has changed is the depth from which I now answer.
I have returned to those early letters and rewritten my responses with clearer judgment and steadier hands. I am less interested in sounding agreeable and far more committed to being responsible with the weight words carry.
Dear Advised has matured.
It now returns as Dear Iris, a column here at American Country Living.
For generations, American women sought counsel from those a few seasons ahead, across kitchen tables where coffee cooled in porcelain cups, in church vestibules after Sunday service, in sewing circles, and on front porches at dusk. The advice was practical, measured, and rooted in the real work of keeping a household and a life intact.
Dear Iris stands in that tradition.
I’ll be writing as letters arrive and as the moment feels right, not locked into a rigid schedule, but whenever the words and the need meet. The first new letter publishes soon.
We begin again.
Steadily yours,
Iris ✍︎
write to dear iris✍︎ Every letter begins with a story.
There are seasons in life when the heart feels certain, and others when it feels tangled. You may be standing at a crossroads in marriage. You may be carrying a private disappointment. You may simply need someone steady to help you sort through what you already know but cannot quite name.
