Tag Archives: parenting

imposter syndrome, living and growing, owning it

An impostor, no more

I’ve never forgotten it. The first time I took my first born, infant daughter for a walk.

She was in a stroller and as I was pushing it, I felt as if all eyes were on me. There was no one around me, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that if anyone saw me they would know I was an impostor.

They would know that there was no way THIS baby was mine. No way I was a mother. They would know just upon seeing me that I was only pretending. This wasn’t real.

I was suffering from impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome happens when someone doubts their skills, talents or accomplishments and worries about being exposed as a fraud. They can feel this way despite evidence that they are indeed competent.

This feeling continued for the first few weeks after my daughter was born. And then one day, it was gone. The odd thing about this was I only felt this way when I was outside with her in her stroller. The experience seemed so foreign that it felt unreal.

I haven’t thought about that too much over the decades since. But it strongly came to mind the other day. I was out with my grandson. We were going for a walk and he was seated in a stroller. We had walked for quite a while before I remembered that old feeling. It dawned on me that even though this too is a new situation, and I am still a newly minted grandmother, I have no feelings of being an impostor.

I expect that people look at me and see a grandmother out for a walk with her grandbaby. He is real. He is mine and I have no doubts about my competence. I have trained for this for decades.

I am most assuredly, an impostor no more.

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Love, Uncategorized

Love expressed…

Expressions of love can appear in so many forms. On a Valentine’s day not so long ago, it was expressed in the form of a little song, quickly made up and sung off key.

A few years back, my husband, Scott, a school teacher, had a two hour delay because of a storm. Because of this, he was home when I went to wake our teenage daughter up. As I opened the door to her room, he quickly stepped up beside me. We walked in together and spontaneously I started to sing – an old song from when our kids were young. My husband joined in. Then we launched into a Happy Valentine’s Day song sung to the tune of Happy Birthday. As we did that, Scott walked around the other side of her bed and together we bent down and kissed her.

And then we left her to get ready for the day.

And a thought occurred to me.  Never, growing up, had my parents come into my bedroom and sung to me.   Scott said that he had never experienced that either.

Yet we had just done that. We had done something we weren’t taught. Later, I realized that over the years, we’ve done similar things like that with all our kids. Spontaneously loving them through song or dance or hugs or kisses.

And I thought about how as parents, it seems that our desire is always to give to our kids some elusive thing we didn’t have as children.  It’s a desire, older than time itself.   Regardless of what our childhoods were like we want more for our children.

But usually that ‘more’ comes in the form of things, or opportunities.  But on that particular Valentine’s day, it came in the form of songs and kisses and two parents, united in their purpose to love on their daughter when the opportunity presented itself.

Some days we feel guilty about the opportunities we let pass by. Opportunities to express our love for one another.

And some days, we manage to express it just right.

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appreciation, families, Love, mothers

Mom

I don’t know how to talk about her.   I never have.   My love for her grows up from such a deep place within me that words have always seemed elusive.  Few others matter as much as her.  Still, the words to describe how I feel about her, seem to slip away before I can pin them down.   Perhaps others might feel this as well?  There’s just something about mothers that make them so significant that they evade definition by the sheer magnitude of their importance.

I used to write about my Dad all the time.  Especially when he was alive.  Birthdays, Father’s Day and any other holiday that might require a gift of words.    It was easy to gift him this.  I could write pages about him.   The words flowed easily and often.   He was larger than life.   And he loved the words.  Loved to hear how he was seen.  How he was loved.

My mother asked me once, why I didn’t often write things about her?   She misunderstood it, I think, to mean that she meant less.   But the opposite was true.   She meant so much more, that my heart wouldn’t allow me the words to describe it.   She isn’t larger than life, she is life.

But she’s turning 86 this week.  And I know I can’t avoid it forever.   I don’t want the first words I write about her to be a eulogy.   I want her to KNOW.   So here is what feels like a feeble attempt at describing what she means to me.

I think, perhaps I can explain some of it through who I have become by being loved by her.  If you are my husband, or child and you are sick.   I am there for you.   I will climb mountains, sacrifice both my own health and my sleep, pray deeply and spare no expense…to do all within my power to restore you to health.  I will not think twice about this.   I consider it my greatest honor and my duty to be able to love you.  For when you are hurt I am hurt.   This I learned watching my mother.

Thinking back to the times when I was sick during my childhood, I can still hear my father in the middle of the night, waking up my mother….”Beverly, she’s calling you….”   I never called for him.   Always her.   She knew how to soothe.  How to comfort.   Her hands were always cool and refreshing to a fevered brow.   It seemed she could make me better just by willing it to be so.

When I grew and left home, it took me years of dealing with late night illnesses, before I stopped longing for her presence when I was sick.  It was one of the hardest things to give up when I moved away.

And my mother KNOWS things.   She always has.   Still to this day even.   “Are you alright?” she’ll ask.   I have revealed nothing, yet she knows.   I love that.   It’s an instinct she has.   Cultivated over years of having to read between the lines with her children.  And no matter her age, this instinct is as sharp as ever.

My mother is a part of everything I have become.   When I am like my dad, I am noticed.  But when I am like my mother, I am loved.  People just love her.   She’s the person you bump into in the grocery store and end up telling your life story to.   You don’t know why you did it, she didn’t ask, but something about her openness compels you.  She is a safe place to reveal yourself.   This is part of what always made her a great secret keeper!   I could tell her anything.

The funny thing about my mother is that she doesn’t even grasp how much she is loved.  She struggles with feelings of unworthiness.  Her life long focus has always been so much on others that her world is off kilter when the emphasis is on her. She often thinks people are catering to her out of the goodness of their hearts.   When the truth is they are responding to her in love and with love – a love that is just for her.

I can’t change this about her, but I have tried.  I’ve tried to impress upon her the significance she plays in her children’s lives…but she can’t hold on to it.  She struggles to understand her own great worthiness. Recently she said to me, “Won’t you be so glad when I’m gone?   You’ll have some free time!”   These words hurt, but she doesn’t mean them to.   She hates to impose.  Hates to take.   And she so values me and my time that taking up some of it feels like a tremendous burden to her.

Will I be happier when she’s gone?  Not a chance.   There is not one moment of time that I have spent with her that I would exchange for something else.   And I know, no matter how many more moments I have, there will never be enough time with her.   I will always want more.

I grew up being told by her (repeatedly!!), “You should never hate anyone.”   I was the dramatic child who hated everyone and everything when frustrated.   Her words drove me crazy.   Didn’t she understand, some things deserved to be hated?  But I regularly hear her saying that in my head these days and the older, less drama driven version of myself, recognizes the beauty in what she tried to impress upon me.   She was right.  Little did I know, she was shaping how I see others.

But she has also shaped how I see myself.  I showed her something I wrote the other day.  She read it, smiled and responded with , “You are really something!!”  And when she says it, I believe it.  I feel like something.   Who else on this planet thinks of me and thinks, “She is really something!!” in the way my mother does?  All blinders to my faults, seeing only the good…..when she says it, you know it’s only a part of who you are but she sees the best part.   And it makes you want to be even better.

My mother has always been a kind, gentle soul.  A fierce protector of those she loves.  There have been moments though, where she has had to rise to tough challenges.   Like the time when I was hit by a car at 16.   My leg was shattered.  One bone in a million little pieces and the other coming right out of my leg.   My foot torn up so much that the bones could be seen.  My mother entered the emergency room and the doctor put her to work.  I don’t know where the rest of the staff were that day, but while I lie awake on a table, the doctor and my mother proceed to clean my leg.  It was a slow, painstaking process.   I know I was in agonizing pain but I don’t remember the pain.  What I remember from that moment was my mother.  She was a rock!  She assisted the surgeon, did everything he asked and did it well.  How on earth, did she do it?  I still don’t know.   But the image of the strength she portrayed that day has stayed with me ever since.

Yes, she’s a kind, gentle soul who did whatever she needed to do for those she loved.  I’ve been the beneficiary of that love and devotion my entire life.  So when I’m spending time with her, I’m not thinking about where I might rather be or what else I could be doing.  Instead, I’m thinking….I love this woman.   Every moment with her is a gift.  And it’s a gift I can never get enough of

Happy Birthday Mom.  I love you.

 

 

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comfort, diet, doctors, healing, hope, living and growing, moving on, struggles

Waking up to a new reality

After a lifetime of stomach issues and medications that solve one problem only to create others, I decided I had had enough.   I couldn’t just keep doing what I had been doing and expect different results.

But I liked tried and true.   I liked mainstream.   I trusted it.  But the reality is that mainstream was getting me nowhere.   As a patient in my current health plan…the same health plan I have been at since I was EIGHTEEN, I have no less than 8 doctors.   All but my primary care doctor are specialists.   But it seems they never talk to each other about me.   Despite having access to my files, each one treats me independently of the other.   Each specialist only sees in me, their specialty.   The stomach doctor, treats my stomach, the skin doctor, my skin, the eye doctor my eyes…etc.

If any of my symptoms were ever connected, I would never know.

So I threw in the towel and headed to a new place.   A Holistic, Integrative doctors office, where one doctor wanted to know ALL my symptoms.   He did not want to know my diagnoses, he wanted to hear about my symptoms.   And once I started, I discovered the list – when taken as a whole, was pretty daunting.  And perhaps, very much connected.

He made suggestions, I followed them to the letter and….I am NOT cured!   Crazy, right?  Here’s what is really crazy.   For the first time in 51 years, I felt LISTENED TO.   Someone acknowledged my symptoms and really thought about a treatment plan.   I tried a 30 day elimination diet.   This is where I ate absolutely nothing I was familiar with, gave up everything that had previously got me through the day and tried a brand new way of preparing food, all at once.

I won’t lie, I hated the process and I complained…a lot!   What I didn’t understand when I started was, that this journey was going to change my life and my thinking.   Slowly over the years, I have developed better eating habits.   Got rid of soda, added fruit and veggies….but what I didn’t know is how much I DIDN’T KNOW!

Lately I feel like I’m living my very own science fiction story.   It’s like I fell asleep knowing how to feed myself and my family and I woke up realizing that nearly everything I ever thought I knew about food was wrong.   I hadn’t only been making bad choices for myself but I had been training my kids in poor food choices, their whole lives.

It was, and continues to be, overwhelming.   I still am searching for what is causing my stomach problems.   And I am still working on that elimination diet, even though I am well beyond the initial 30 days.   I have learned tons about my body.   And I have learned even more about food.   Real food.   It’s been a huge adjustment.   But there is no turning back.   Processed foods, sugar, additives, chemicals….I don’t want them.   But my repertoire of replacements are slim because I still have a lot to learn.

I consider myself lucky though.   With so many resources available at this moment in time…books that give me the real scoop on food and grocery stores that finally offer good choices, I feel like I ‘woke up’ at just the right time.

Food defines us in ways I never really thought about.   But so do illnesses.   If I can use food as a way to help my body to heal from a lifetime of less than stellar choices…I am determined to do so now.    The path is uphill, but I think it will be well worth the effort.

 

 

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