If I could make absolutely sure my kids understood one thing, it wouldn’t be some profound life lesson.
It would be this:
It is okay to be you.
You are enough.
Just be you.
Don’t wear it because it’s the brand everyone else is wearing.
Or pretend to like it because the boy does.
And don’t choose it because everybody else seems to be choosing it.
Wear the damn thing because you like how you feel in it.
Listen to the music because you like the song.
Pick the weird hobby.
Change your mind.
Have an opinion.
Choose it because it suits you.
That sounds like such a small thing.
I don’t think it is.
Not anymore.
Because one day…
It won’t be about the shirt.
Learning to Trust Yourself Starts Small
We tend to think self-trust belongs to the big decisions.
Who should I marry?
Should I leave?
Should I take the job?
Is this relationship healthy?
What kind of life do I want?
But I don’t think that’s where it starts.
I think it starts much smaller.
Do I actually like this?
Does this feel right to me?
Do I want to go?
Do I want to stay?
What do I think?
Those little decisions are practice.
They’re how you learn to recognize your own voice before you desperately need it.
I didn’t understand that when I was younger.
Honestly, I didn’t have much practice listening to mine.
I had plenty of practice listening to everyone else’s.
My Questions Were Usually About Everyone Else
I don’t know that I consciously walked around thinking,
“I’m not enough.”
It wasn’t that obvious.
My lack of self-worth showed up in the questions I was asking.
What will keep him home?
What will keep him from drinking?
Is there anything I can do differently?
What should I say?
What shouldn’t I say?
How do I keep this from happening again?
What did I miss?
What can I fix?
I was a very young mother living with a husband battling addiction.
There was chaos.
Shame.
Picking up pieces.
Hoping.
Trying again.
And again.
And again.
But the questions weren’t only about him.
There were the kids.
Are they getting what they need?
They’re clothed.
They’re fed.
And loved.
Is that enough?
Are they happy?
Am I happy?
Are any of us happy?
Some days I don’t think I wanted to sit with the answer.
So tomorrow became very important.
Tomorrow was another day.
We’d start fresh.
It would be okay.
They’d be okay.
I’d be okay.
We were okay… weren’t we?
And tomorrow we’d try again.
I Was Trying to Survive Too
There’s another piece of this story that’s important.
Through all of this, I was having horrible panic attacks.
Not “I’m feeling a little anxious today.”
Horrible.
There were times I could barely function.
My own body felt terrifying.
My home could be unpredictable.
I was trying to raise children, manage addiction, hold a family together, deal with shame, anticipate the next problem and somehow survive what was happening inside my own nervous system.
Looking back now, I can see how little bandwidth I actually had.
At the time?
I thought I was handling things.
Maybe not particularly gracefully. Okay… definitely not gracefully.
But handling them.
Because that’s what you do, right?
You get through today.
You clean up the mess.
Make dinner.
Love your kids.
You tell yourself tomorrow will be better.
Then you wake up and do it again.
When you’re living that way, there isn’t always some dramatic moment where you announce:
“I am in survival mode.”
You just keep surviving.
And eventually it starts looking suspiciously like a life.
Sometimes Other People’s Voices Sound Like Your Own
Then there were the outside voices.
People who cared about my kids.
Who seemed to know things I didn’t.
Whose intentions looked like concern.
And sometimes they genuinely were concerned.
But good intentions can get complicated.
Enter my former mother-in-law.
Her name was Mooch.
Yes.
Mooch.
Sometimes life really doesn’t bother with subtlety, does it?
I gave her far more access to my children than, looking back, I believe I should have.
What’s interesting is that I had information right in front of me suggesting stronger boundaries might have been warranted.
Her own sons kept much tighter boundaries around her relationships with their children.
I didn’t.
And it’s taken me awhile to understand why.
I’d lost my own mother young.
My children weren’t going to have my mom for a grandma.
That loss mattered in more ways than I realized.
Somewhere along the way, family had become almost sacred to me.
Family mattered.
Grandparents mattered.
Keeping people connected mattered.
I wanted my kids to have their grandmother.
I wanted them to have that relationship.
And because I wanted the idea of that relationship so badly…
I sometimes gave the idea of family more weight than I gave the reality of the person standing in front of me.
That’s difficult to admit.
Because my intentions were good.
But I’ve learned something about good intentions.
They don’t automatically make good decisions.
I wasn’t wrong to believe family mattered.
I was wrong in thinking that sharing DNA automatically made every relationship healthy.
Someone can genuinely believe they’re acting in your best interest while also being influenced by what they need, want, fear or believe.
Those things can exist at the same time.
Which is exactly why knowing your own voice matters so much.
I Could Have Left
This is one of the harder truths for me to write.
Because I could have.
There wasn’t a locked door.
I stayed.
And because I stayed, my kids lived through things I desperately wish they hadn’t.
Understanding everything that was happening to me doesn’t make that part less true.
There are choices younger me made that present-day me wishes she’d made differently.
Ways I wish I’d protected my children differently.
Things I wish they hadn’t seen.
Things I wish they hadn’t felt.
For years, I could answer all of that with:
“I did the best I could.”
And maybe I did.
But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that sentence doesn’t have to end the conversation.
I can ask harder questions now.
Could I have done better?
Should I have known better?
Why didn’t I leave?
And here’s where looking backward gets tricky.
It’s incredibly easy to give yesterday’s version of yourself today’s information.
I’m standing somewhere she had never been.
Because I know things she hadn’t learned yet.
I understand addiction differently.
I understand panic differently.
And… I understand survival.
Boundaries.
Self-trust.
I have words for things she didn’t even know had names.
So yes.
I could have left.
But that still leaves a much harder question.
Why didn’t I?
When You Don’t Know Your Worth, Every Choice Gets Harder
There isn’t one answer.
I wish there were.
Addiction was part of it.
Fear was part of it.
Panic was part of it.
Being young was part of it.
Hope was part of it.
Wanting my family to stay together was certainly part of it.
And underneath all of that was something I didn’t understand very well at the time.
My own worth.
Was I worthy enough to leave?
Did I deserve something better?
Could I actually do this on my own?
Was I overreacting?
Maybe it wasn’t really that bad.
Maybe tomorrow would be different.
He could change.
Maybe I could change something.
Maybe I was the problem.
And then there was the other side of that same ugly question.
Maybe this was exactly what I deserved.
That’s one hell of a double-edged sword.
Am I worthy enough to demand something different?
Or am I so unworthy that this is exactly where I belong?
Those aren’t particularly useful questions when you’re trying to decide what the rest of your life should look like.
But I didn’t know how to ask the question I understand now:
What is okay with me?
Not him.
Not his family.
Or everyone watching from the outside.
Me.
What do I need?
Believe?
What am I willing to live with?
What does my own experience tell me?
I don’t know that I had answers.
I’m not sure I completely understood that I was allowed to ask the questions.
Understanding Why I Stayed Doesn’t Erase What It Cost
This is where I’ve had to learn to hold two truths at once.
I can understand younger me.
And I can wish she’d made different choices.
Those things don’t cancel each other out.
Understanding why I stayed doesn’t require pretending staying didn’t have a cost.
Acknowledging the cost doesn’t require sentencing younger me to a lifetime of punishment either.
She was young.
She was scared.
Her nervous system was on fire.
She was trying to love people through things she couldn’t fix.
She desperately wanted her family to be okay.
Self-trust? That wasn’t even a blip on her radar.
And most of all, she didn’t understand the thing I wish I could go back and tell her:
You matter in this equation too.
Your safety matters.
Your peace matters.
What you want matters.
What you see matters.
Who you are matters.
Not because you’ve earned it.
Or because somebody chose you.
And not because you successfully held everything together.
You matter because you’re a person standing in your own damn life.
You get to matter in it.
“I Did the Best I Could” Isn’t an Eraser
Although there is compassion in saying:
I did the best I could.
I don’t want to use those words to erase everything I wish had been different.
Maybe they aren’t supposed to be an eraser.
And maybe they aren’t a verdict either.
Maybe they’re an invitation to understand.
What did my best actually look like then?
What did I know? Or believe?
What was I carrying?
What was I terrified of?
Whose voice was I listening to?
What couldn’t I see yet?
And then there’s another question that matters a hell of a lot more to my life today:
What does my best look like now?
Because that part I can do something about.
I can’t go back and make younger me leave.
I can’t remove experiences from my children’s childhoods.
And I can’t hand that woman the knowledge it took me decades to earn.
But I can be honest about what happened.
And understand it.
I can own what belongs to me.
I can repair what can be repaired.
And I can use what I know now to choose differently.
I’m not saying it’s now something that is magically easy.
I’m just saying, that’s the part that’s still mine.
One Day It Won’t Be About the Shirt
And that brings me back to my kids.
To the clothes.
The music.
The boy.
All those seemingly insignificant little choices.
I care about them because I know now that they’re not insignificant.
They’re practice.
Wear the shirt you like.
Skip the brand.
Choose the weird hobby.
Listen to the music you love.
Even if I think it’s terrible.
Say what you actually think.
Change your mind.
Say:
“Actually… I don’t like that.”
Have preferences.
Have opinions.
Learn what feels right to you.
Learn what doesn’t.
Because today it might be a shirt.
Someday it won’t be.
Someday the question might be:
Do I stay?
Or do I leave?
Do I want this person in my life?
Is this relationship actually okay with me?
Do I believe what I’m being told?
Am I choosing this because I want it…
Or because I’ve been taught that I’m supposed to?
And when those questions come, I don’t want my kids meeting their own voice for the first time.
I want them to recognize it.
I want them to have spent years practicing:
This is what I think.
This is what I feel.
Is this what I want?
I know this is what I don’t.
Not because their opinion will always be right.
Or because nobody else gets a say.
And not because being yourself means bulldozing everyone around you.
Other people matter.
How we treat them matters.
Learning matters.
Changing our minds matters.
But you still have to exist in your own life.
Your voice gets a seat at the table too.
It Really Is Okay to Be You
Some of those old questions still show up for me.
What will people think?
Should I say that?
Am I doing this right?
Is this what I’m supposed to want?
The difference is…
I recognize them as questions now.
They’re not instructions.
Now I can listen to someone else’s opinion without automatically making it more important than mine.
I can learn something and change my mind.
I can realize I was wrong.
And I can also realize:
Nope. This one’s mine.
That’s a kind of self-trust I didn’t have when I was younger.
And I think a lot of my recovery has simply been learning to trust myself.
Not becoming some shiny, improved version of myself.
Actually, almost the opposite.
Removing things.
Other people’s expectations.
Roles I’d outgrown.
Survival skills I didn’t need anymore.
The belief that being needed made me valuable.
The idea that somebody else’s approval could tell me who I was.
And underneath all of that…
I didn’t discover somebody new.
I found more of me.
So yes.
Wear the shirt.
Skip the brand.
Impress the boy.
Don’t impress the boy.
I really don’t care.
Just make sure underneath all of it…
It’s you.
Because your voice matters.
Your experience matters.
You’re allowed to trust what you see, what you feel, what you need and what you want.
You don’t have to earn the right to take up space in your own life.
You are enough to be you.
Today, maybe that means wearing the shirt.
Someday, it might mean choosing the life.
Either way, I hope you choose you.
