Reflection and Putting Yourself First
When I began thinking about starting a blog, this was what I had planned to make my first blog post. You see, several years ago I decided to start writing a book about, well you guessed it, life experiences and how they are valuable life lessons. My plan was to take a different event in my life as a chapter and explain the event, how I handled it and the lessons I took away from it as a guide to how to handle life. I thought that by sharing my stories that this might help others going through the same things to feel like they were not alone and if I could come out on the other side still standing then so could they. I thought this was the perfect place to begin because it would explain where the inspiration for this came from so my readers could realize that we all go though many of these experiences, they are normal and we are not alone.
I am an educator. This is my profession and who I am as a person. I educate people. My grandma use to tell me that it was in my blood because she had an aunt that was a teacher. This may seem like a mundane point to make but it is the reason I started down the path of writing this blog. You see, as an educator, it is taught to us to reflect. Reflect on how successful lessons we write are. Reflect on how our class went, what worked and what did not and reflect on how we can improve as educators to become better. It is from this that this skill of reflection has become imprinted on my DNA and I have found myself not just reflecting about my job but about my life.
The point of reflection is to look at something to improve on it for the next time, however when it comes to life, we usually do not have a next time. For me, reflection has helped me put things in perspective and helped me cope with what life has brought to me. Life happens, that is the reality we all live in but it is how we chose to deal with it that makes us or can break us. Some people take the challenges that come along the way and say, “Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?”. This approach is looking at life from a negative perspective and can cause us to become angry and then we become jealous of people around us who have not been through the same things.
The other way you can look at these events is what am I suppose to learn and take away from this? I believe everything happens for a reason and there are lessons that are to be learned for each of us as we experience life. Even the most horrific things happen to us not to punish us because there is a valuable reason that we, the individual, are meant to learn from this experience. This event changes us as a person and so we can grow. Now, the really frustrating part of this is sometimes we don’t know right away what the lesson is for the experience and sometimes it can take time to begin to discover the reason.
My journey to enlightenment, as I like to call it, began as I was about to turn thirty. For a woman, there are certain birthdays that we struggle to approach and experience. For me, I wanted to know why thirty was so difficult. As I began to reflect I realized that I had several reasons for wanting to freeze time.
Professionally, I was where I wanted to be. I had just moved to a new teaching job in a great district and I enjoyed going to work everyday. I had two beautiful daughters that I was blessed with and, despite the fact I had just had my youngest daughter that year, I was in the best physical shape of my life. My family had recently moved to a new town, a new house, and a better school district for my children to go to school in and I had a husband I had been married to for 7 years. On the outside I was living the dream everyone wanted for themselves and their families but despite all of this, I realized I was not happy. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my kids and I was happy with them but I was not happy. I was depressed and sometimes it was hard for me to get out of bed in the morning. So why was I so unhappy when I had been blessed with so much?
The answer was right there and I ignored it because I didn’t want to see it. I was so busy living my life that I was not taking time to see what was going on in my life. The answer did not come to me all at once, it came to me over the course of a few weeks when I took the time to reflect on the things in my life and how they impacted me. I mentioned at the beginning that I was an educator. This fact is important because when I was home on summer break is when I finally had time to reflect. Every morning I would get up and go about my day with my daughters. I was still settling into our new house. The time with my daughters was the highlight of my day however by the end of the day I was unhappy when I went to bed every night. So what was causing this change?
About two weeks into summer I was going about my day and looked at the clock and then suddenly it hit me and stopped me in my tracks. It was about an hour until my husband would be home from work and I was wishing it was the beginning of the day again. Wow, it was my marriage that was making me so unhappy. Now, let me start by saying if you think I am about to blame my husband for everything you are wrong. In reality, I had been unhappy for a few years but I was not a quitter or someone who believed in divorce because I had two young children. I am a Taurus, May birthday and true to the sign, stubborn. This is important because if I am honest, this is one of the reasons I had stayed with my husband, to prove to other people that they were wrong about us.
My marriage and my entire relationship with my husband had been a bumpy one. There had been times where we had broken up and then we got back together. It was also not the most healthy relationship either. Through all of our bumps in the road we had stayed together and proven those who said we should not be together, should not be married, and that we would not last, wrong. The truth is, they were right and WE were wrong. As I realized that my marriage is what I was unhappy with I asked myself, ” am I still in love with this man or do I just love him”? This is the question I reflected on and over the course of the next week I realized I was not in love with him but I did love him, however, was that enough? As I reflected on my feelings and my marriage I realized that staying with him for the children was not the right answer. There was tension in our house and the girls, as young as they were, picked up on it. My girls deserved to see their parents happy. They deserved to grow up in a home with love, no fighting or yelling. I could not put my happiness aside to give then a family with both parents living together because what message would I be sending them. Now, don’t get me wrong, even though I knew the right thing to do was to divorce my husband it was still one of the hardest things I had to do. Looking back on it now, after all of these years, I know it was the right thing to do. My daughters learned to stand up for themselves, that they have the right to be happy and I have two very strong young women that I am VERY proud of today. As a mom, sometimes we feel that we do not have a right to put ourselves first because our children HAVE to come first. But what message does it send to our children when they see mommy unhappy? Mom doesn’t get to be happy until our children are grown? We set the example for our children. Moms, it is OK to put yourself first because are you really being the best mom you can be if you are not at your mental best?
Being a mom is not an easy thing. There are no manuals that say this is the proven way to raise successful children and have the perfect life. Our children need us to be our best. When I made the decision to get a divorce I thought I was the worst mom in the world for putting my happiness before my children. When we first separated and they asked why mommy and daddy couldn’t live in the same house anymore I felt like I had my proof that I was the worst mom in the world. Those young, precious girls tell me today that it was the best decision I made for all of us. Our house was not a happy house and they did not deserve to be raised in that. It was up to me to have the courage to say I can not stay here and I will not allow my children to be raised in this environment. Staying for the sake of staying is not the right answer. It is OK to say this is not the life I want and to make a better life for yourself AND your children.