About Mary

I am one of the few women who admit going to college to find a husband. Alvin Stosich and I met at Brigham Young University. Al and I were married on July 5th. It is said: Firecrackers on the 4th, Dynamite and on 5th! Mission accomplished, I quit college after three semesters and followed my dream of having babies, cooking dinner and cleaning the house. Seriously, that was my dream. I have been blessed beyond measure to enjoy such a life for thirty-five years. We loved living in beautiful Idaho for over twenty-three years but eventually ended up in Utah. I love being back home in the valley of my birth and childhood.

I was raised in a rural community called Union—on the outskirts of Midvale, Utah. Today, Fort Union is towers of business and stretches of shopping centers, but back in my day, there was a Christmas card-beautiful, white church on the corner and I played and ran through dreamy, green pastures. If you happened to drive down 900 East in Union during the summers of the 1960's, I was the kid sitting about six inches from the pavement, selling tomatoes (that I hoed all summer) for 20 cents a pound.

One of my most satisfying moments was to see my first book on the shelf at BYU Bookstore, where as a student in the 70's, I worked part-time. Thirty-four years later, I graduated from BYU in the December of my fiftieth birthday, with a degree in Marriage, Family and Human Development. Meanwhile, I spent my energy doing the greatest work of my life—being a wife and a mother to five children.

Someone once asked me, “Why are you so happy?” In answer to that question I wrote my first book, Finding the Diamond Within: Ten Ways Every Woman Can Sparkle, released in January, 2008. My mission is—Nurturing Happiness

In my dedication to nurturing happiness, Al and I are parents to three sons and two daughters, two daughters-in-law, two sons-in-law and blessedly, nineteen grandchildren.I have worked as a liaison between birth mothers and adoptive parents; taught preschool, piano and troubled youth; I have written for Brigham Young University's website foreverfamilies.net; served as a volunteer LDS Institute instructor; speak publicly; write, counsel as a life coach; and a few afternoons a month, I play the gorgeous grand pianos in the lobbies of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building at the LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake City.