The Woman Who Threw the Hat
Abbey Poe
Yesterday morning, I went for a walk.
Nothing remarkable about that. I walk most mornings — coffee cooling on the counter, the day not yet fully formed, the kind of quiet that lets you think without performing the thinking for anyone.
But somewhere along the route, a song entered my head.
“Who can turn the world on with her smile…”
The Mary Tyler Moore Show. 1970. A woman on a Minneapolis street corner, spinning around, throwing her hat in the air with everything she’s got.
And I thought — I’m going to do that.
So I did.
Full commitment. Both hands. Hat in the air on a Tuesday morning with nobody watching.
And something about it — something I didn’t fully expect — felt like exactly the right prayer.
Here’s why. It’s relevant stay with me….
🎬 What Nobody Told You About Mary Richards
Mary Richards — the character — is easy to love.
Warm, capable, quietly funny, unshakably decent. She navigates a newsroom full of chaos and egos with grace. She builds a family out of colleagues who are as flawed as they are endearing. She faces setbacks without letting them define her.
And at the top of every episode, she throws that hat.
But here’s what most people don’t know.
When Mary Tyler Moore stepped onto that Minneapolis street corner in 1970 to film that iconic opening sequence, she wasn’t a woman for whom everything had gone smoothly.
She had already buried a marriage. She had already endured the isolating reality of being a woman in an industry that had very specific — and very limiting — ideas about what women were for. She had already fought, quietly but fiercely, for the right to play a character who wasn’t defined by a husband or a search for one.
The network didn’t want to make the show. Executives told her audiences wouldn’t connect with an independent single woman as a lead. They said it wouldn’t work. They told her she was asking for something the market wasn’t asking for.
She threw the hat anyway.
And then, years later — after the show became a phenomenon, after the awards and the accolades and the cultural legacy — life handed her something the cameras never captured.
In 1978, her only son, Richard, died in a tragic accident. He was 24.
There is no way to soften that sentence. It just sits there, the way that kind of grief sits — immovable, permanent, the kind of loss that reshapes everything around it.
She didn’t disappear. She didn’t perform recovery for anyone. She grieved openly, carried her loss honestly, and kept showing up. She became a tireless advocate for Type 1 diabetes research — she’d been diagnosed at 33 — and spent decades fighting for causes bigger than her own pain.
In her later years, she was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor. She lost most of her ability to speak.
She died in January 2017.
And when the tributes poured in, they didn’t focus on her awards or her ratings or her place in television history.
They focused on her resilience. On the way she kept showing up.
On the way something in her, through all of it, remained undefeated.
The hat throw wasn’t just a moment.
It was a theology.
🌿 The Thing About Undefeated People
Here’s what I’ve noticed about the people who carry that quality — the ones who have been through the fire and come out still standing, still moving, still somehow oriented toward life instead of away from it:
They are not people who avoided suffering.
They are people who decided, somewhere in the middle of it, that suffering was not going to write the ending of their story.
Not that it didn’t happen. Not that it didn’t cost them. Not that they were fine when they weren’t fine.
But that there was something in them — something planted deeper than the pain — that the pain couldn’t reach.
Paul called it contentment learned through experience.
David called it the valley of the shadow — through which, not around which, the shepherd leads.
Mary Tyler Moore called it throwing the hat.
I called it a Tuesday morning walk with nobody watching.
🔥 The Walk This Morning
I want to be honest with you about something.
This season hasn’t been without its furnaces.
There have been professional pressures. Relational complexities. The kind of exhaustion that comes from doing the right thing quietly, without applause, for so long that you start to wonder if anyone is even paying attention.
Yesterday, I wrote about Mihrigul Tursun — a woman who lost her son in a detention camp and still shows up in Washington, D.C., wearing a pressed blue suit, to tell the truth because she believes someone needs to hear it.
I wrote about Paul singing in a prison cell.
I wrote about three young men walking toward a furnace they didn’t have to walk toward.
Then I went on a walk myself. And a theme song from 1970 entered my head. And I threw my hat in the air on a quiet street with nobody watching.
And it was the most honest prayer I prayed all day.
Because it wasn’t for an audience. It wasn’t a performance of being okay. It wasn’t the polished declaration of someone who has it all together.
It was just — I am still here. Something in me was not destroyed. And I am going to live like that is true.
That’s the whole thing.
That’s the hat throw.
💡 What This Means for You Today
You don’t need a Minneapolis street corner. You don’t need a camera crew or a theme song or a perfectly framed moment.
You need one honest moment today — unwitnessed, unperformed, completely real — where you decide:
I am still here.
The thing that tried to write the ending of my story didn’t get to.
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Not because the circumstances are easy. Not because the outcome is clear. Not because the furnace has cooled or the prison door has opened or the world has started clapping.
But because the thing that holds you is stronger than the thing that tried to break you.
Mary Tyler Moore knew that. Paul knew that. Mihrigul Tursun knows that.
And somewhere on a quiet street this morning, throwing a hat in the air with nobody watching —
So do I.
✝️ The Closing Word
Find your hat throw today.
It doesn’t have to be literal — though I highly recommend it. There’s something about the full-body, slightly ridiculous act of throwing something into the air that bypasses all the overthinking and just declares.
Make the declaration today.
Out loud or in silence. Witnessed or unwitnessed. Graceful or awkward.
Just make it real.
I am still here.
Watch me. 🎵✝️🔥
FaithSignal | Daily features and devotionals for people building a life of faith, purpose, and clarity.