I’ll admit it, I’m an emotional and sensitive person. I’ve always been like that. The difference is when I was younger, I let my emotions get the best of me and I wouldn’t manage them well. The older I get, the better I have become at managing my emotions. I also have gone to two opposite ends of the spectrum of sharing my emotions. I learned growing up that emotions are best not expressed. Just keep it in, sweep it under the rug, don’t rock the boat and don’t be dramatic. I believed that if I shared with someone something they said or did that upset me that it was me to blame for feeling that way. Somehow my feelings were wrong. Or if I did share what upset me then I had to be prepared to deal with either backlash or guilt for feeling that way. So my mouth stayed closed. This caused a lot of anger and an inability to trust my feelings. Still to this day I have to consciously allow my feelings when they come up to be heard and give them validity instead of brushing them off and tell myself I’m wrong, stupid or crazy for thinking that way.
It wasn’t until I met Paris’s father did I learn to start opening up. We would get into fights and I would do the typical chick thing when he would ask what’s wrong. I would say, “Nothing.” Well all he had to do was press a little bit more and I would explode with a wave of emotions that had been stewing inside. Sometimes what I would say would be something that happened months ago that I never spoke up about but of course never forgot. That relationship was the first relationship that got to my core crap. It revealed issues that I didn’t even know were there. Because Pandora’s box was opened, I became an emotional wreck for years. I was consumed with my emotions and the deep pain it was triggering. I felt like I was depressed and cried all the time. Those were very difficult years for me.
When I had Paris and after I left her dad, I felt like I was still an emotional wreck with lots of drama in my life. I still had not completely processed all of the hardship the relationship brought on, I saw another emotionally heart breaking relationship come and go and had to figure out how to support not only myself but a kid as well. So there I was still crying, still depressed and now it’s all getting put in front of my kid. There was a part of me that felt ashamed that I couldn’t pull myself up by the bootstraps, wipe my tears and put on the tough chic face that I work so hard to display to the world. That feeling was further engrained when I was told that I shouldn’t cry in front of Paris and it’s not ok to let your kids see you upset. But there was a deeper part of me that felt like this was a real opportunity for me to present a different way of being to my daughter. So what I choose to do was to explain to my daughter what was going on with me, why I was crying and why I was upset. I wanted her to know that it was ok to express your emotions. I made sure that when she was upset that she could feel comfortable expressing them and know it was safe to do so and her feelings would be validated. I wanted to make sure she never felt invalidated for feeling the way she did. That it didn’t matter whether I agreed or not, that her feelings were hers and she had a right to feel that way. And I wanted to let her know that mom’s are human too. And we don’t always have the answers and we aren’t always strong and we are sometimes afraid too. Continue reading »
