Conventional wisdom prepares women for motherhood by centering the needs of the child.
After birth, conventional wisdom, continues this thread, focusing on developmental milestones, healthy parenting techniques, and conforming your lifestyle to make room for your new job as as a parent.
But what about your ‘former job’? What about the career that you built leading up to this life change?
What about the person you were, the ambitions you had, and the dreams you held for yourself?
It's as if the expectation is that everything that made up who you were should become a footnote to the tiny human that you made.
THAT part, is what lead me to an identity crisis, which evolved into clinical depression, and a whole lot of other less than healthy coping mechanisms.
I had 4 children in all, and all the while continued to climb the ‘career ladder’. Executive level positions, clout, responsibilities, six figure salary and all the things that came with operating on that level in the professional world.
I kept going and going, becoming increasingly accomplished on the outside, and increasingly ‘dead’ on the inside.
The vitality that I once had, I surrendered to the persona that I felt I had to adopt as the ‘cliche’ working mother.
Resilient, organized, super "profesh", and just all around ‘having my shit together’.
But I was NOT OK.
I dare not share a tear though…because…how would that look? “Boo hoo…look at me, being successful, living with privilege, having it all…life is sooooo hard”.
Only, it wasn't true. Or at least it wasn't the whole story.
Once I hit my ‘rock bottom’, I was a puddle of tears, spiritually lost, mentally defeated, and desperately seeking who I really was, beneath the veneer I had built.
It took a long time, tears, and pain, but eventually, my experience lead me to understand that I needed to stop limiting the view of my life by any past or present experience. Including that of becoming a mother.
It was easy to commiserate with the reality that the world we live in is not designed for working mothers to experience holistic being. To be able to exist as whole persons, without apology or complicated explanation.
For the health of our families, we compromise the health of ourselves.
That part is a fact.
But it is time we let our own consciousness guide our lives.
Time to reclaim ourselves, recenter our value, and name ourselves on our own terms.
I serve as a guide for others, who find themselves where I was (and full disclosure, where I sometimes still visit).
Let's do this together!