I laid in the sun on my deck today. I was listening to Brene Brown and Glennon Doyle talk on Brene’s podcast Unlocking Us. Glennon was talking about her book Untamed. I have read the book several times and plan to order the workbook when it comes out. It is a beautiful book that helped me be brave this year.
This year I decided that I was going to untame myself. What does that mean? It means that I decided to listen to the wild part of me that knew there was more to life than I was living. It means that I was no longer going to do what all of my training in life had led me to believe was the right thing to do.
I decided to disappoint everyone in my life to honor myself and my knowing. My marriage was over. I had to move on. I could not live in it anymore. I was going to break up my family, disappoint my children and our extended family and friends who thought that we were all so good.
Glennon touches on so many things in untamed that resonated with me. When I first read the book, I was still denying my knowing. I was trying so hard to fit into the box I had outgrown and I wasn’t ready to give up. I felt the knowing that I couldn’t stay but I wanted it to be wrong. I had a good life. If anyone were to look at me, at my family, they would say “How could she be unhappy, how could she want more?”.
My training on how to be a woman and how to be a mother told me to shove that restlessness, unhappiness down and to be grateful. My training told me to swallow my wants and needs for the comfort of my children and family. So I swallowed and swallowed and I suffered. At one point in Glennon’s book, she talks about rationalizing that she was staying in her marriage for her children, but that she wouldn’t want her marriage for her children. I felt that so deep in my heart. I wanted to show my children that their needs are important even if they don’t make sense to the outside world or their partner.
At some point in Untamed, Glennon says that she had to learn to disappoint everyone else before she would ever disappoint herself again, and her words are guiding me through my life right now. I am making decisions everyday that disappoint other people because I am proving to myself that I will honor my own wants and needs first.
There are days that my old training makes me feel so guilty for breaking up my family and changing my children’s lives forever. Days when I try to convince myself that I should have just kept my knowing buried because I miss my kids and not seeing them everyday is hard. When I watch them pack their stuff to leave me for a week, I feel like a failure as a mother. I know it isn’t true, deep down, in the place of knowing, but I hear the whispers of my training as a woman telling me that a good mother would have just sucked it up for her kids to have a stable home.
I tell myself often that I am teaching them to be true to themselves and to choose what is best for them, no matter how it disappoints others. I am teaching them that. They are watching me navigate my life, like I always have, bravely, wildly, and always knowing that there is so much out there for me that is beyond my wildest dreams if I am willing to follow my heart.
On mother’s day I am giving myself permission to disappoint others. I am giving myself permission to be wild and to untame myself from the training I have endured that taught me that to mother is to be a martyr. I am embracing whole-hearted, brave, honest living and I hope my children are watching me. I hope they notice my smile, my lightness, my frequent laughter and dance parties. I hope they see that honoring yourself allows your spirit to soar and frees others around you to soar too.
In a year when I have disappointed many, I am proud to say that I did not disappoint myself. I may have scared the heck out of myself, but I’ve also gained a reverence for my bravery. Glennon says that “a woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter” and I’m glad to say I am a responsible parent-maybe a disappointing one, but certainly responsible.