Growing up too soon: the story of my life

Transcript:

Hello friends. Thanks for joining me today and welcome to Empowered to Thrive. I'm your host, Corinne Powell. I am going to share a bit about my life story. I've had some people asking me for that and certainly I weave it into episodes here and there and I include it in my written content on Instagram or Facebook, wherever you might be following me. But I don't actually think I've ever recorded a full episode, or more than one, documenting my life story. I don't think daunting is the word. It just feels like there's so much to one's life story that I'm not sure really how far I'll get today, but I decided that I will just do this in pieces, in parts, and stop when it feels right. Then we'll continue and pick it up with another episode.

I'm really glad you're here with me and thanks for taking interest. I know that I love hearing people's. So perhaps you can enjoy hearing mine.

I'm gonna begin by sharing what it was like for the little girl, the little girl that I was, growing up in a home with two older siblings, two older brothers and one brother who was just a year younger than I. My mom actually had those four babies within four years. And any mother, any parent, listening understands how overwhelming and exhausting it is to have four littles to be taken care of all day long, to be nursing and to be doing that when you don't have great familial support. My mom didn't have a wonderful relationship with her family. Certainly my dad was a very involved father, but he also was working outside the home during the day. And there was a lot of unhappiness and tension between my parents.

As a little girl, I was by nature empathetic. I was very naturally the type of person who would notice someone else's emotional state, would be able to feel the energy of the room. Sometimes that can be wonderful, and other times that can be really hard, scary and heavy.

Four years after my brother below me was born, my mom had another baby. And then a year after that, she had her sixth and final child. And as the only girl at the time, when these younger siblings were born, I'm sure I was very excited. I see pictures of myself holding them and I am motherly by nature. But when you're five and six years old... and you're acting motherly. It might look so wonderful on the outside. We might think, that's so cute. But if we're not aware enough and a child continues to grow up and become the 10-year-old who's taking on more responsibility than she should, we at some point become the parentified child who becomes the caregiver for younger siblings.

This was applauded in the circles I grew up in. Many of our friends had several children. It was looked upon as a wonderful thing to have many children and to have those children help out with the other children and with the house chores. I'm not here saying that's all bad. Again, I'm simply saying if we're not aware enough, a child is meant to live their childhood. Adulthood is separate from childhood, and childhood should be childhood. No child should be losing out on that because their parents decided they were going to have more children than they could actually handle having.

And on top of this, my parents were homeschooling us. So we were at home with our mom all day, a mom who was very overwhelmed and stressed and unhappy. And, you know, as a child, even until I had graduated high school, I really thought I had a pretty great home that I grew up in. And in many ways it was. I had a roof over my head. I didn't have to want for food. I was well cared for in many senses. And then in other ways I wasn't. You see when a child doesn't have a safe place to land with their emotions, we call that emotional neglect - and it becomes very detrimental and devastating.

A child needs to have a safe place to come to with their sadness, their anger, with their worry and their joy, with their excitement. But think about all the children that are hushed when they're too excited, when they're too loud, when they're angry or they're sad. Just stop. Come on, get over it. Please quiet down. I can't handle that right now. Right? Maybe you and I as a parent have heard ourselves saying these things or we've heard other people saying it, but it happens. It's all the time.

Children need to be able to safely express their emotions, the full range of emotions, knowing that there's a parental figure, a caregiver there to help them regulate and just be, to be able to be.

It would be ideal if our parent figures were modeling for us an expression of emotion that was also safe. Knowing that when someone starts to get angry or rage, they're not going to harm anyone. They're going to manage through their feelings and be able to process them and integrate back in to their bodies. Not to dissociate, run off, shove it under the rug, but to actually talk about what just happened and repair or acknowledge. It's important for children to see parental figures and caregivers laugh, enjoy life and be silly - to see those grownups play. These are really important aspects of life.

I've heard a lot of people put it in a way that it's like, I mean, that's not that important. But I believe it's fundamental to a children's experience as they're growing up.

So going back to my home environment…

We lived in a three-bedroom apartment. Sometimes I wish I could go and visit it as an adult now, because as a child, it's all I knew. So I didn't even think of it as tiny. But sometimes when I reflect on what all we fit in there and all the parties we held and all that we did, I think to myself, my goodness, I think it was really small and I just didn't realize it.

Hmm, just thinking about that childhood home right now, picturing it in my mind's eye. A lot of my life was lived there. Technically, I lived there until I was 24. My parents divorced when I was 15. So I also spent some years living partially with my mom at her new home.

But when I think back to my life growing up, I feel a lot of sadness because it was a really stifling environment. My parents did the best they knew how. I don't just say that, I actually believe that. But I also know that I needed more than I received.

Certainly, I've healed in many ways. I've self-parented. I've sought out many resources and I will continue to do that the rest of my days. But I also wish for the little girl that I was, that she had a different experience. I wish she had known that who she authentically is would be celebrated. Because she learned to alter herself in order to be accepted, liked, tolerated.

Another gift we can give our children is accepting them for who they authentically are. Maybe we don't like everything about them. Maybe we see things that we think they need to grow and develop in this. And they may or may not, depending on their developmental age, some of that will naturally happen. But it is so important for a child to be able to know that my parent likes to be with me. They like who I am. They don't just love me. They like me. I feel that is so powerful, not just to be loved, but to be liked.

And so by age 12, I was helping out with my younger siblings and teaching myself because I didn't have steady help with my education. By the age of 13 I was helping my younger siblings to learn how to read. I liked being independent. I was extremely mature. So I started working some jobs between the ages of 12 and 14. I sold Avon products and I babysat for three children a couple days each week. And I did house cleaning and various other things. I guess I was always an entrepreneur.

Then my parents' divorce happened. I had been enrolled in school starting at ninth grade. So their divorce was a year after that. And even though going to school was a relief in some ways, it brought with it its own set of difficulties because now I had homework on top of making meals and helping my siblings with their bedtime. And I remember barely staying awake and falling asleep so many times doing my homework at the end of the day and being exhausted and that feeling of exhaustion that my body knew so well.

I'll share later in another episode about a point that I came to after I had my own children where my body just needed me to stop and to really take care of it. We really revamped our entire life, me and my husband, for the sake of my health and my body. But even now, as I think about my 15, 14 year old self and all she was doing and how exhausted she was, I feel such gratitude and love towards my body for all it's carried me through. It's been so good to me. It is so good to me. And I'm grateful.

When I started at the private school that we attended, I began cleaning. I cleaned bathrooms there. Maybe not my freshman year, but definitely by my sophomore and junior year. I can't remember if I did it my senior year also, but I was like a part-time janitor. I would clean the bathrooms, vacuum the carpets and earn some money that way. A part of me wanted to play sports after school. And a part of me never thought it was possible. My brothers played. Technically I had the opportunity, but I really felt like my family needed me. And so I just performed and did the things. helped and I pleased and I met all the needs and lived so co-dependently, not feeling okay unless everyone around me was okay. Always meeting someone else's needs before my own. Dismissing my own.

It's a lesson I'm still unlearning, that I need to include myself in the circle. I need to consider my preferences always alongside of others. Because for some of us, it's not that we'll ever stop being kind. It's not that we'll forget about everybody else. It's simply that we've got to start remembering us too. We have to start taking time to consider our preferences as well. And letting those preferences matter and have weight and impact.

And so... I missed out on the sports that I could have played during high school. And you know, this leads into college. I was granted a scholarship, a full scholarship to a culinary institute, the Culinary Institute of America in New York.

A generous couple had met me at a camp where I was the cook and they took me to the culinary Institute and I got a tour and they were generous and kind towards me. And I turned down their offer because my family needed it. How I wish that 18-year-old had someone say, no, no, no. Don't miss out. You go. You go. Learn. Enjoy. Live your life. Because you see, it's not selfish.

The family I grew up in will always be my family. But they weren't my children. No one was my partner. We might say as a parent we sacrifice much or the relationship we have with our partner, our husband, our wife, whatever the case might be, that we sacrifice for each other. It's true. It's true. I do and I will. But in this story that you're hearing tonight, I was the child and I was sacrificing everything for the family that I grew up in. And some of you might still think that's wonderful. But you see, I lived this sacrificial concept endlessly.

So instead of just raising my own children, I helped to raise my siblings. Instead of realizing some of my dreams, or for other reasons, I didn't go towards them because of the great set of needs that I saw.

I still got a lot of experience in cooking because I worked at a camp each summer and sometimes into the fall from the age of 15 up through my twenties, not consistently, off and on. But it gave me a lot of experience and it led me into starting my own catering business. And I did that for a number of years and I enjoyed it while I did it. And I often thought, you know, I still got to enjoy the best of things, even though I didn't go through the culinary institute. And maybe that was me looking for the rainbow in the midst of the storm. Maybe that was the positivity mindset that I grew up around. I grew up in a religious environment where we were told to, you know, see the good in things and really not to focus on what was negative or disappointing to us, but to recognize what we were grateful for and what good gifts we were being given in the midst of whatever was hard. Whatever the case might be, I do realize that I got to experience the fun of cooking. I didn't learn all the things I would have learned at the Institute, but I did enjoy those years catering. And when it was time to let that business go, I felt it and I let it go. And soon after letting that go, I established my company Change Radically. There's much more to even the story I was sharing tonight. I'm now thinking, wow, there's a lot more to that story that I just didn't even think of. And that's all purposeful and fine. It's not all meant to be covered right now.

So I will continue and thank you. Thanks for listening, for joining me in my story as I reminisce and reflect, for just being with me in it. You know, sometimes we hear somebody speak and we think, you know, I need to help them feel better or I need to let them know how sorry I am for what they went through. And I think sometimes that's well and good. And other times it's just nice to know somebody is interested and heard. So as I think about you listening, I see you with interested eyes, actually some tears in your eyes. But I see you with interested eyes, just listening. So thank you.

I look forward to sharing more of it with you soon. Until we talk again, I'm always wishing you only the best. Much love, my friends.