Read inspiring essays by three women unbound after embracing the challenges of change
By Diane Oatis, Alaina Sheer and Laura Munson
Whether it’s self-doubt, a bad marriage or simply a life stage, we all have things we want to—or need to—let go of. Meet three women who have given themselves permission to make changes. Even when the decisions were difficult, they walked through the hard stuff to come out stronger and happier.
Parenting
In a few weeks my son, Jay, will be off to college. And I will tell you, in a lot of ways I could not be happier. No more waiting to hear the front door slam at night, which means he got in OK. No more eleventh-hour runs to buy a white T-shirt or a piece of posterboard. No more pencils, no more books, and none of the grief that homework entails, at least not under my roof.
Jay is so ready for this—he can’t wait to start fresh, study what he wants to and meet new people. And my husband, Jon, and I will be leaving the suburbs and moving back into New York, the city we love. We’ll be living the kind of life we had pre-child, when time was ours. Great for everyone, right?
Great, for sure, but also really different. From day one, Jay’s been full of energy, and there’s so much life in the house when he’s around. There’s always something new he wants us to check out: music, a video, an article he wrote for the school paper. And he’s always got a scheme up his sleeve. One year, when he found out that a creek in town fed into a network of creeks, he got the idea that it might be fun to canoe through the state down to his summer camp, 70 miles away. Another time he decided he wanted to take harp lessons, so he looked into buying a harp-building kit online. Pipe dreams, maybe. But for every crazy canoe dream, there was something he actually did make happen, like the rock band in seventh grade and the brownies he always seemed to be making at midnight for some school fundraiser. (Yes, I did the dishes.)
It’s rewarding but also challenging to raise a high-energy child. You don’t want to quash his spirit, but at the same time, you know you have to rein him in. It takes a lot of patience to explain why you can’t canoe through New Jersey or why there’s no way you can fit harp lessons into an already overcrowded schedule. And one way or another, you end up doing a lot of dishes.
Now that the three of us are packing, our stuff going in different directions, it occurs to me: So this is the calm after the storm. After all this time, I can finally let go of being so responsible, so adult all the time. And the more I think about it, the more I like it, my new impulsive life. I’m going to rewind to 1987, the year Jon and I first got together. Me in the bad perm and the jacket with the shoulder pads, Jon in his acid-washed jeans, Madonna and George Michael in the air. It’s not the ’80s I miss (especially not the hair), it’s the things we used to do: the weekends of going to late movies, never setting an alarm, grabbing or savoring meals depending on our mood.
Imagine walking out the door in the morning without wondering, Wait, isn’t there someone who needs me for something? No, there isn’t…so, sweetie, take my hand and let’s go. Let’s rediscover the city where we met. We can revive the spirit of exploration that made us fall in love in the first place, and smile when we run into memories along the way. We’ll go at our own pace, frenzied on some days, lazy on others. We’ll turn off the alarm. On a good day, it’s going to feel like flying.
Diane Oatis is copy director at Woman’s Day.
Fear
As soon as my head hit my mother’s pillow, the hurt I’d been holding in all day, all month, all year rose up from my stomach to my chest, pouring out in a cascade of steady tears and heavy sobs. The reality of my situation had finally consumed me.
Hours earlier I had been calm and collected, keeping my composure and smile intact as I packed the last of our things into the back of my SU V. The boxes and laundry baskets fit perfectly, leaving just enough room for my 4-month-old, who, in his complete innocence, had no idea his mother was in the process of leaving his father.
“This is for the best, baby,” I whispered as I tucked him in tightly. A fter two years of gasping for air, of trying to survive a marriage that had fallen apart as quickly as it had started, I left my husband in spite of his promises to change. Instead of listening to him I listened to my instincts, which told me, in no uncertain terms, to get myself and my baby as far away from him as I could. But freedom had a price. He refused to move out, forcing me to make a decision—I would have to move in with my mother.
During the two-hour drive down the long, hill-dotted road from Columbus to Athens, my small hometown in rural southeast Ohio, I felt with every inch of my body that I had made the right decision. But now, in the darkness of my mother’s bedroom, in the quiet still of the night, I wasn’t sure.
I had left my broken and destructive marriage, but I had also left my budding career as a marketing executive, my friends and my life in the city. In this moment, escaping the piles of boxes in the guest bedroom by hiding in the folds of my mom’s peaceful bed, I didn’t hear a movie soundtrack roaring in the background and there would be no galloping off into the sunset of freedom as a single mom. No. This was my life now and it wasn’t pretty. In this, what would prove to be one of the lowest moments of my divorce, I saw no hope of ever recovering from the damage my marriage had done. Sure, I had survived, but looking down on the rubble I could only see shattered pieces of dreams, faint reflections of what could have been, and off in the distance, a formidable mountain of divorce debt. For the first time in my life I didn’t have any answers.
The answer, as it turned out, was sleeping right next to me, breathing softly in his crib.
As impossible as each day seemed, they soon sped by with Benjamin growing—inch by inch, smile by smile and then laugh by laugh. Together, we were surviving and soon he was a crawling and then walking and talking baby boy; my evidence that life could and would go on.
Every night after Benjamin fell asleep I would start writing, determined to discover what had led me to this situation so that it would never happen again. I started by plotting out my stories and words like a map, retracing the steps before and during my marriage that had led me here. With a bird’s-eye view I could soon see an unhealthy pattern. I had been choosing the wrong men over and over. Suddenly it hit me—I had never known real love because I had let fear guide all my decisions: the fear of being alone, the fear of being without a man to validate my existence and, finally, the fear of being with someone who actually cared. And if my choices in men were any reflection of how I felt about myself, then clearly I had self-esteem issues.
You don’t know yourself at all, I thought. Who are you without these men? And then the most frightening thought of all: If you don’t know yourself, how can you be a good mother?
The tears were uncontrollable, but they were good. I had finally diagnosed the issue and now I could learn to move forward.
I sought out new friendships by going to social groups and meet-ups. My goal: to surround myself with people—both men and women—who were genuine, fulfilled and happy. I refused to date anyone with even the slightest hint of the characteristics of the men I had dated in the past.
Above all, I started to fall in love with myself, this new woman I had become. As it turned out, I was strong and capable and just fine on my own. After one year at my mother’s, all of the pieces fell into place.
I accepted a fantastic job offer back in the city, and Benjamin and I moved into an adorable little apartment. Two years later I met my boyfriend, John, who, unlike any other man I’d ever been with, taught me that love, real love, feels comforting, secure and stable—growing not worse, but better with time. I learned to again believe that anything is possible if we trust in ourselves.
As for my son Benjamin, he is now a beaming, breathtaking little 4-year-old who has more wonder, curiosity and happiness in his heart than I ever imagined anyone could contain. And fear, as it turns out, is not a word in his vocabulary. Or in mine.
Alaina Sheer writes about relationships and dating on her blog, MsSingleMama.com.
Self Doubt
“This does not meet our needs at this time.” It’s the sentence that every writer dreads. It comes in the mail along with our bills and our junk mail, and just to add insult to injury, it’s announced in our own handwriting—in a self-addressed stamped envelope that we’ve blessed like a child off to college when we sent in our writing, hoping to get it published. We’ve tried to forget about it. But that’s impossible. When we meet with that envelope again and the dreaded sentence, we try not to let it ruin us, but there’s always a sad sigh. I’d been heaving those sad sighs for 20 years. The final one was so sad that it woke me up and changed my life.
I had everything I’d ever wanted: two great children, a supportive husband, a beautiful home in Montana and time to write. I was a novelist. It was my passion. I’d spent 20 years hard at it, completing 14 books. But in all my efforts, I couldn’t seem to get one published. I’d get very close, but things would always fall apart.
Friends and family let their eyes glaze over when I’d talk about my latest project. For comedic relief, I started calling myself “the girl who cried novel.” But inside, it was tearing me up. I knew better than to let something outside of my control define my self-worth, but I did it anyway. I just couldn’t shake that inner voice constantly critiquing and keeping score. How was it possible to feel so driven but fail so miserably?
The final straw for me was just after Christmas a few years ago. I’d recently overhauled a book for a big New York publisher—took 300 pages out of a 500-page book and rewrote another 200, at their request. But it did not meet their needs at this time. It felt like a death. I’d just spent a month at my father’s deathbed; I simply didn’t have any more grieving room in me.
I had a choice. I could let the grief consume me and the life I’d built, or I could choose to finally commit to letting go of the pain I was in, which meant that I had to let go of the past and the future—because I finally saw it, crystal clear: That’s where the suffering lies. The past and the future don’t exist, yet I’d let them rule my life—always trying to get to somewhere or away from somewhere. All I really had was the present moment. And therein was freedom, a place and time without expectation.
Freedom to write. To mother. To love. To live. I decided I’d commit to the act of creating. Moment by moment, sometimes breath by breath. And I had to start being kind to myself—mostly in my mind. I had to cut myself some slack, and look around and see what was really important in life. For me that was whom and what I love; how I love. Starting with number one. So what if I got another rejection letter? I could still sit down and practice what I love; I could still write. Nobody could take that away. I would choose to control what I could control, and surrender the rest. When that voice screamed, “You’re a failure. You’re wrong. You’re bad. You’re a fool,” I simply, and sometimes not-so-politely, pushed it away. Maybe you know this voice too.
So many of us court, invite and even welcome in this destructive voice until it becomes our normal. But once we identify it, and believe that it truly serves us no good purpose, we can make the simple choice to say, “No more.” And guess what happened? The minute I began to exile that voice, that’s when real change started happening in my life, in my career, in my marriage, in my relationships in general. My husband chose to be a loving partner after a rocky period in our marriage, I wrote a book that landed on the New York Times Best Seller list, and I have a new perspective on life that brings a freedom I’ve never known. I have to believe this was all a direct result of letting go. Eleanor Roosevelt said it so well: “No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.” We have to allow people to make us feel this way. I think so many of us really are our own worst enemies—I was mine. But we don’t have to be. We can instead tell that voice in nouncertain terms that it, after all, in the moment and forever onward, does not meet our needs at this time.
Laura Munson is the author of This Is Not the Story You Think It Is.
