10 years ago, I was just days away from embarking on the grand adventure of motherhood. It wasn’t something I planned. As a matter of fact, I didn’t plan much past the week in front of me at that time. But, the Universe had big plans for me. An opportunity that I finally couldn’t turn down. I had been given plenty of opportunities up until that point for college, good jobs, good friends, good relationships…the problem was I didn’t think I was worthy of any of that.
My life was a self fulfilling prophecy. I believed I wasn’t going to amount to anything so I made decisions to make sure that was exactly what would happen. That was the one thing in my life at that time I was really good at. Until. Until this new being came into my world. I was no longer just responsible for me and that has proven to be the only thing in my life that got me out from under the rock from which I was hiding.
I made the decision to figure out how to be happy which really meant to learn to love myself. It was nonnegotiable. I knew that if I wanted to raise children to love themselves, I had to model that behavior. I was at the bottom of a well and I had to figure out how to crawl out of it. I stopped taking my medication and I found a book about changing the neural pathways in your brain that was essentially a journey into the life changing modality of cognitive behavioral therapy and I went to work. Let me tell you people, it was hard.
The first few years were often times insufferable. We had a newborn baby, a newborn restaurant after almost 15 years of waitressing, we were on food stamps, coming out of addiction and the deep throes of depression and every day was filled with tough decisions. Decisions to choose differently.
It was like those switches on a railroad track that you pull and it changes the course of the train. Yes, just like that except that switch was so often stuck and seemingly impossible to pull. But, I had to. I knew that one track led to the same purgatory I kept myself in for 20 years. The other track was unknown, but it was a chance for something better. So, I made the decision erry day to pull that switch and choose a different path. Sometimes, I had to make those decisions dozens of times in a day.
These weren’t your typical household decisions like choosing your portfolio investments or planning the family vacation. I was choosing between being crippled by the idea that failure was fatal or feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Paralyzing fear that I was a terrible mother, an unworthy wife, my business was a losing battle, my family wished I was someone else and I had no friends.
This may not have been the reality, but it was my story, and I wasn’t giving it up easily. We cling to our beliefs so dearly, don’t we?
Ten years later and the decisions have become easier. I’ve laid new railroad tracks, ones with fewer switches. I almost truly believe I’m worthy enough and I’m proud of that. I’m proud of the intense struggles that have led me to be the kind of mother and human being that I am. I know that based on the past ten years, I’ve proven to myself that change is possible and it doesn’t stop. So, it will just keep getting better and better.
I’ve shared some of this story before, and I may share pieces of it again. I believe shame only works if you keep it a secret. I’m owning this tumultuous past and setting it free. I also wholeheartedly believe that if any one person finds solace in knowing they are not alone, it’s worth being vulnerable. You are not alone. And, we can change.