Each moment describes who you are, and gives you the opportunity to decide if that is who you want to be. Some of life’s events are much bigger and when, they happen, you know life has changed forever. The question then becomes “Who are you?” “How do you let this define you?” and “What do you want to gain from it?”
While I do believe that everything happens for purpose, I am not always able see that purpose in the moment. This blog series is about my journey to becoming a coach. Some of it is so very painful, and hard to relive. I am at peace with each event that I am going to talk about, I have accepted them as part of who I am. This is not a pity story, nor is it a story for you to judge the people in my life who have traveled his journey with me. In all of these events, I found that the world is full of people who think everyone but themselves is broken, and they know how to fix others. The flow may appear to be haphazard, because, no part of life happens outside of others. There are events that happened that I didn’t realize how much of an impact they had until something else happened.
Growing up as a child, I have always been “sensitive” and cried easily. I have been ridiculed and made fun of. It was the part of me, I hated, what I wanted to change most. While, I am not going to delve into this, it will come up later from time to time because it is also the very reason, I am who I am, and plays a huge part of my coaching journey.
I was born to a teenage mother and my biological father left. Some say my grandfather ran him off. Its probably true, but he never admitted it to me while he was alive. I have always wondered how life would have been different if he had stayed. I can tell you. Momma would not have married my daddy. I would not have my sister, and my Daddy’s family would not be mine. Life with Momma and Daddy was not always easy. They had an alcohol problem and there was a lot of arguments.
I remember very vividly a time when they were arguing, I was about 12 years old, so my sister would have been around 7. Height-wise, it feels like we should have been younger because she could not see in the window. One day, they were arguing at the top of the stairs, both of them in full FIGHT mode. I watched as my mother jumped on his back and clawed his eyes, THEN, I watched him toss her off his back and down the stairs. I was so scared. Shockingly, they stood up at the bottom of the stairs and kept on fighting, except now the words shifted and it was all about blame. My sister kept wanting to see but there was no way, I could let her see this. Hearing it was bad enough, and even as a kid I knew that I was never going to get that image out of head.
For years, as I have done therapy and healing work, this image comes to mind. I learned in that moment how to blame others, that I never had to accept responsibility for my actions as long as I was reacting to what someone else had done. In that moment, I vowed that my sister would never be part of that kind of pain – I was going to protect her at all costs. Something as a child, human really, I am not capable of doing.
It has taken a long time for me to get to a place of acceptance with this event. I can now recount It without the emotional trauma that used to be attached to it. My parents separated that day, but ultimately, they reconciled for a short time. We moved because the house was the issue, if only we could start fresh. A few months after moving, they would separate for good and start the ugliest divorce, I had ever seen.
The divorced fractured all of our relationships greatly. My sensitivity turned to anger, and I was not an easy teenager to live with. For much of my life, I went through years of not speaking to one parent or the other. It is not something I am proud of, and if time could change, I would have reconciled those relationships sooner.
My mother is living with us. She has been sober for 21 years, and our journey has been bumpy. We have finally turned a corner. I accept who she is and all of her mistakes, because in essence, we really grew up together. She was young and did the best she could. It took a long time, but as I raised my children, I found myself doing much of the things she did, some of the bad, but a lot of the good. Part of my healing included remembering all she did right – she was always there at every event, it didn’t matter what state her mind was in, she SHOWED UP. She was at every ball game and school event. I participated in life without any complaining from her. She made sure I was surrounded by a village who could take care of me when her mind couldn’t. She loved me enough to allow my grandparents, aunts and uncles to have a huge place in my life for those moments when she fell short. It may have been subconsciously that she did these things, but she could have been a control freak and tried to stop my relationships with them. Most importantly, at 17 years old, she said YES to a baby instead of choosing to get rid of me. While she may have done many hurtful things, she was reacting from her own place of hurt, and she loved the best she could.
My daddy committed suicide September 2, 2008. My aunt was dying of cancer, so when the call came, I was not expecting the words I heard to come out of my aunt’s mouth. She kept saying “April, you have to go somewhere private and you need someone with you.” I complied but argued, I was sad but prepared for my aunt’s passing, then it hit me mid-walk, she was talking about my Daddy. If I am completely honest, I have none of my own memories after this. I don’t know what memories are real and I certainly don’t know what memories are fake. What I do remember is the love I felt as we navigated such a hard time of funeral planning and grieving. What I do remember is in the middle of the funeral planning – the call came, Aaron would be leaving for Iraq in six weeks. Could life give us anymore heartache? Yes, it could because the year of grieving suicide and the after effects of WAR would change the trajectory of life probably the MOST. I will leave that story for next week.
