Will Life Always be this hard? [my story continued]

Transcript:

Hello friends, thanks for joining me today. Super excited to continue my story with you. And if you're not familiar, I'm your host, Corinne Powell. Empowered to Thrive is meant to be a safe space for you to show up however you are and for me to show up however I am. It's not everywhere that we get to do that. We always have the option, but it's not always safe to do that. So this is one place I always want it to be as safe as possible for both of us to show up however we need.

And as I share more of my story with you today, If you didn't hear the first episode featuring parts of my story, you may want to listen to that. But I want to just continue to talk, yes, about some of the life events that have shaped me, that have even propelled me in doing the work I do. But I also want to touch on some of the components that are driving this transition in my content where I'm also talking about church and say you're somebody who wants to be in church, but you also feel like sometimes you just don't match.

First off, just want to say that is okay. You don't need to look like the other people there. You don't need to act like the other people there. You don't need to think like the other people there. That's okay.

But anyhow, let me continue trying to remember where I left off. I know I had talked about my childhood and had gone into the college years and... Perhaps I'll just launch into bringing you into what it was like as a new mom. And of course, if you heard my story, you know that I was a parentified child. So I was acting as a mother to my younger siblings, but they weren't my own children. And there's nothing like having your own children. I home birthed my four babies and I am proud of that, and if you had a caesarian birth, if you had a birth in a hospital, a birthing center, a free birth, a birth however you went about it, you can be proud of that too!

We can all be proud of ourselves, of what we've gone through, of the choices we've made. So know that when I say I'm proud of my four home births, it's not because I am lifting up one form of birth more than another. It's simply because I'm proud of myself and I'm super pleased and so grateful that I had the opportunity to birth my children in the comfort of my own home, surrounded by the support that I chose, going about things in a manner that felt aligned for me. And I mean it when I say I'm grateful… I'm grateful.

So anyhow, becoming a mom, you know, I didn't even know if I actually wanted to have children right away. I didn't know because I had already been so entrenched in that role as caregiver that I remember saying, I just don't know. I don't even know what I want right now. And so often that's been the theme of my story is I haven't known what I want. Maybe it's when I go to the coffee shop or the restaurant, I'm not sure what I want. Maybe it's when I'm decorating my home. I don't know what I like. And when it came down to being a parent, I wasn't sure if I was ready for that. I wasn't sure if I wanted the responsibility of it, but I also believed there was a joy in it, that there was a gift in it. And so I left it up to science. I left it up to whatever will happen, will happen and I can sit here and tell you, I am a very fertile person. And I, as you'll find out in my story, even got pregnant on a birth control that's 99.9 % effective.

I laugh because the idea of not preventing a pregnancy is funny. But even when I said, I'm not looking to get pregnant right now, I still got pregnant. So my story goes that within 37 months I had my first three children and in the middle of that time I was a foster mom to one of my nephews. And then after being a foster mom for about six months, and the previous six months, we were actively involved with the Department of Children and Families every single day, even on the weekends, trying to get our nephew into our home because the state had promised us that they would choose family over others initially, but then they didn't stick to their promise. So we fought hard and once he was in our care, we were very committed to him. And so even though he wasn't our foster son for very long, we were his daycare providers for the next two years. So about three years of our life, we're very focused on him, his well-being, and him being a part of our family. And as you can imagine, having other littles myself, the demands were many. All children need parental support, but young ones, of course, need even more. And I worked part-time separately as a crisis coach for a nonprofit organization. And it was actually my break.

To go there to work was a break for me because I love being a mother, but the demands are never ending. Night or day, I feel the pressure of being a mom. I know what it is to wake up during the night, to nurse babies during the night, to have interrupted sleep, to have not a moment in your day to take care of your own needs because there's so many other little people who need you so desperately. And I'm a committed mother. I give my all. My go-to isn't putting my children in front of a screen. If anything, I've had to learn that sometimes I need to do that for my own sanity sake to give myself a break. I've never had tremendous amounts of support. We've always struggled to find childcare because when you have so many littles and when they're not all perfect little angels, as some people need, and they don't all cooperate - as no child should be expected to always cooperate -things gets even trickier. And I will say, I had some friends who tried, who really tried, and they are people that I will never forget. They came and tried to support me and Evan, and they did support us, but you can't depend on only a couple people. A support system, a community needs to be more than that when someone is as desperate as I've been. When somebody is barely staying afloat, having help once a month, once every three months, even once a week, is just not enough for the amount of stress, the amount of exhaustion that an individual might be feeling. And I know many of you listening get it. Your parents yourself, you've been a parentified child, you know what it is to maybe be a single parent. My hat is off to you. I cannot imagine. I cannot imagine. I truly feel for you because I know even having a partner, the struggle it's been for me. I bow to you and I want you to be able to have support as well. I can only imagine how hard that is.

We went through this period where I actually got into a really good groove having my first two babies in 17 months. And my nephew came to live with us when my second born was (he was coming on weekends and other days) but he came to live with us full time when my second baby was five weeks old. He started spending weekends with us when my second baby was a week and a half old. And we got into a groove. Life felt manageable. Days were hard, but I figured out how to manage them. I put my babies to bed really early at night, so I had the evenings. We'd find a park to go to during the day. We would drive there, so that used up some of our daytime. We would oftentimes meet my husband at lunch and do a park in that area. We made it work.

But then when my second born was only a year old, just turned a year old, I found out I was pregnant. And this was when I was, I had an IUD and I was actively trying to prevent pregnancy because I knew my body needed a break. I wanted more children. I wanted two more down the road.

For myself, in my heart, I knew that if I was pregnant, I wanted to deliver this baby, to carry the term, birth this baby and parent this baby. As hard as it was, that was what I wanted to do. Now, in the middle of an unplanned pregnancy, I also felt the desperation, the feelings of I don't know how I'm going to be able to do this. I don't know how I can survive. Because you see, having four babies now, four pregnancies, well, I've had five pregnancies - I miscarried once. And of my four live births, three were girls. All of those pregnancies I felt absolutely awful all nine months. I could say almost all day every day, but I got a break for a couple hours here and there of those nine months. But when I say intense, I mean intense. Think about having the stomach bug. Feeling exhausted, feeling like you can't really get out of bed, but you have to. Feeling constantly nauseous, throwing up throughout the day. Now add to that, eating to survive. I would have to eat at least every hour and a half, night or day and only to keep the nausea at bay. It would still be there. It would just be less. It wouldn't be overtaking me. But it was there. I don't know even if that description is enough, but I suppose in describing it, I do that with a hope that you can understand. This isn't a fabrication. It's simply someone saying that feeling awful, and for any of you who have been very sick, for any of you who have gone through medical conditions and had treatments that you have felt awful, I feel for you because I know what it was like just to be pregnant where you have the hope of a gift in the end. You have a positive outcome. And yeah barely getting through because it's so hard. Now I'm grateful my son's pregnancy wasn't that way, especially because that was when we were actively working to get our nephew as our foster son. So I was able to do visits with him and I was able to have him come over on the weekends and I was able to be involved in that process because I felt well. That was really nice. And so being that when I'm pregnant with my girls, I feel awful, my third baby, the unexpected pregnancy, I felt awful and yet had to take care of these three other little kids at the same time.

But I didn't have to take care of my nephew at that point if I didn't want to. His mom actually said she could put him in a daycare other than my home daycare and I turned it down because I wanted to care for him, because I loved him and because I didn't know how to have boundaries in place to support myself. I was living extremely co-dependent. I still live co-dependently. I was just more extreme in how I lived then where I felt like I needed to, I wouldn't be okay unless everyone else was okay. I wanted to take care of everyone else's needs to make myself feel safer. So I imagined that if my nephew was with us, he was better off than if he was with people that weren't his family. And I mean extended family, you know? We were extended family, but we were family.

And yet I was dying in the process. I was sabotaging myself. I didn't have to have someone getting dropped off to my house at 7 o'clock every morning. An extra child with us until 5.30 in the evening. I will say he was the easiest of the children. I think sometimes it can be… certain personalities are easier. And then sometimes it can feel easier to have a child who's not your own biological child. They can sometimes feel like the easier one too.

Anyways, having my third baby, that pregnancy had spiraled me into a dark depression and it took me about two years before I even felt like that was starting to lift. My body was physically so spent and depleted. My iron stores were depleted, I would come to find out. When that third born was about one and a half maybe, my husband quit his full-time job. We were homeschooling at least our first daughter at that point.

I was so not just overwhelmed, I was exhausted. My body was so worn down from the life it had lived, from me being the parentified child, from me living so co-dependently, from all the stresses and the traumas. I haven't even gotten into so many of them.

I've touched on this story in other episodes and in other times, but it's still something that marks me…

Having my husband's help during the day allowed me to be able to rest. I remember sleeping in and getting up and needing to take a nap after a couple hours of being up and going to bed early and doing this on repeat for weeks and months. Seeing a naturopathic doctor, getting support, understanding some underlying health conditions that were going on that we could address to support my body. It took time. It took years. I remember actually in the middle of the pandemic, the beginning of the pandemic, feeling like a cloud of exhaustion was lifted.

It was the most incredible feeling to recognize what I had lived under for so long actually didn't have to be my reality. Such a hope-filled experience when you've lived with something for so long and then you discover, wow, it could be different. There's nothing like it. And I would say now I still am not living under a cloud of exhaustion. I am very fatigued, but it's been now three years of very interrupted sleep because of my pregnancy and having a two-year-old who I still nurse. So my nights have been interrupted for the last three years. And that does take a toll on anyone's body. And I'm still breastfeeding. So that's another way my body is exerting extra energy, working very hard to nourish another life.

Again, for those of you that have gone through it, you do understand. For those of you that haven't, this my story. I own it. I know each of us have had difficult things. Our stories are different and they're hard in their own right. They're beautiful in their own way. This is just my story. I don't mean to make it more dramatic than someone else's. I also won't sit here and minimize how it's been for me.

Being a mom is one of the greatest joys and it's also one of the hardest jobs. And I think sometimes I know it's just because being on all the time, day and night, and not having a great support system, not having great childcare. Though recently we've actually secured some wonderful childcare for my youngest and that is helping! So giving ourselves some traction and some time down the road I hope that I will be able to say, it's so helpful having dependable childcare. It's too early on for me to know. But it is hard being a parent.

We chose to homeschool our kids until my oldest was going into fourth grade. My second born was going into third and my third born was going into first grade. And they've been in school now for the last few years. I only had a short break before I got pregnant, miscarried, and then got pregnant again with our now two-year-old.

It was a choice we made to have one more baby. And I really had felt for all the years that I wanted one more. I was meant to have one more, someone was meant to be given life and to join our family. I don't regret it. It is hard. It's a choice. But I can tell you that I felt the deepest satisfaction. I had the strongest inner knowing that that was the choice that was right for me. And nothing has shaken that.

So in the moments where it's hard, I never think I wish that I hadn't chosen that. I more so hope that I can find ways to support myself well in the process. Sometimes I feel like my husband gets the brunt of it because he'll hear how hard it is for me. And I don't want to see myself in the role of the primary caregiver. Because the work I do I love, and I actually hope one day that I can do the work I love and also be a caregiver for my children. Right now, I am much more a caregiver and the work I love to do within Change Radically I get to do a little bit, but not nearly as much as I hope one day.

I say that and I also want you to know that also is meant for your ears to hear because perhaps you've been thinking about meeting with me for sessions or purchasing one of my courses to do independently and you haven't yet. Now might not be the time or now might be the time, but when you say yes to that inner pull, you're partnering with me in my hope to do more of the work that I love. Now, please understand, this is not me trying to put any pressure on you or manipulate you. Not at all! It's just simply me verbalizing what I can feel in my spirit as I was saying what I was saying two minutes ago. :)

So, yeah, where could I go right now? There's so many directions I could go. I think I'll wrap it up at this point.

But I want to let you know that I'm going to be touching on some of the marker moments in my life that have helped to form who I am or why I see things the way I do, why I hold the perspectives and the beliefs I hold. But also, some of them I've experienced deep healing in, and that has changed my outlook. For instance, I was sexually traumatized.

For all of the life I can remember until, I don't know, my early 30s, I was afraid when I was around men. I was very uncomfortable around men. I am not anymore. And there are many times I actually forget some things I remember and I feel gratitude for. Some things feel so distant, I don't remember them, but when I reflect on it now, I feel deep gratitude. Because until a handful of years ago, let's say five, I couldn't be around most men without feeling uncomfortable. But I've become empowered and I know that I'm safe and I also know that I'll protect myself and I've become the wise loving parent that I always needed and didn't always have.

So the inner child, the little girl part of me that felt afraid around men, now has me, the grownup Corinne with her, helping her, standing in between to be a bodyguard if she needs that. It's transformed my life to not be uncomfortable and afraid around men all the time.

That's just one of the things. There's more things we're gonna get into. So I hope you'll stick with me, even through the boring parts of my story, the parts where I share more details than maybe you care to know, and I drag it out. Thank you for giving me your ear and listening with your heart. I so appreciate that.

And if I can be a source of support for you and listen to your heart, that's what I'm here for. Until we connect again, I hope that you will remember how much you matter; how valuable you are - not because of what you do - but because you are here. You are valuable. I'm so glad you're alive. Much love, my friends.