Be Your Own Hero

What’s your favorite childhood memory? I was asked this recently at a conference I attended and I was totally stumped! Here I am 49 years old and I can’t remember one memory that I would consider a “favorite”.

It was my first time attending an in-person conference since 2019 and it was amazing to be in a room filled with over 300 women that had all come for the same reasons: connection, inspiration, support, self- care, and to learn something new.

So here I sat in a room full of other women I had never met before being asked to answer the question, “what is your favorite childhood memory?” After nervously searching my mind for an answer, I was able to access one memory that stands out as a positive experience for me. It was the memory of taking the train to Florida from Maine with my mom and my brother.

My Great Grandmother had been staying in Florida and had invited us down for our first visit. The train was a long, exhausting experience, which seemed to last forever.

When we finally arrived we were greeted with sunshine, palm trees, beautiful beaches, and we got to escape the cold Maine winter for a while...that in itself was a gift! I believe the real reason why this memory stands out the most for me is it was my first experience on a trip with my mom without my Dad. Looking back on it, I remember feeling nervous for my mom as I watched her navigate the train station, our luggage, and the long train ride ahead.

It was especially challenging when we had to change planes in Grand Central Station. Here my mom was in a new city hundreds of miles away from our hometown with two young kids in tow. I watched her looking around as she kept my brother and I close to her. I remember feeling a little scared at the time, wondering if we were going to be able to navigate the situation. As I look back on it as an adult, I’m amazed at how she handled that experience on her own.

My mom didn’t make the choice to leave my dad, he left her for another woman. Not only did he leave her suddenly, he left her with very little money, no job, and with no choice other than to sell the home that we had lived in for 13 years. She had married my dad at 18 when she was pregnant with my brother and she had never gone to college to obtain an education beyond high school. Her only work experience had been working serving lunch at our local Elementary School.

As I look back on this trip to Florida, I now realize that this was an experience that my mom wanted to give to us, but that she also needed to give herself. So she scraped together every dime that she had and she bought us train tickets knowing it would be a long, challenging adventure for her to do alone with two children. She also knew it would be a new adventure for us, a new memory for us to create and she would do it on her own with her chin up, putting one foot in front of the other. I don’t have a ton of pictures from my childhood before my parents got divorce, but I have many with my mom and brother making memories with what we had...LOVE.

My mom has taught me many things over the years, but the one that I will be forever grateful for is her resilience. In 1982, with very little work experience and very little money to put food on the table, my mom walked into the Naval Shipyard and applied for the Machinist training program. Not only was she one of the only women in the program, she was top in her class!

She became a machinist working on submarines and ultimately worked her way up to a manager, leading other men in the Planning office at the Shipyard.

This wasn’t the life she had envisioned for herself, but she wasn’t going to let the setbacks of life prevent her from moving forward. She had the courage to get up and become her own hero.

I came across this quote from a recent meditation and it really resonated with me;

“You are your own hero’s journey. It’s the adventure and the growth that makes a hero. It’s far braver to move forward, to go beyond comfort levels, to enter into what hasn’t ever been before then it is to stay stuck, to cease to grow.”

As parents, we often question our decisions and whether we are showing up as the best mom we can be. We want to leave a legacy for our children and hope that one day they will look back and say, “thank you, mom”. We don’t want to “mess up” along the way and make a mistake that will forever change them or harm them. However, the best thing we can do is to model the kind of life that we would want them to aspire to someday. Things like kindness, integrity, strength, resilience, and to never compromise their own values.

I never thought I would go through divorce myself in my mid-40’s. I had always told myself that once I get married, I’m never getting divorced. I won’t do that to my children!

Looking back, I realize that this was the wrong thing to do to myself and my children. Here I was living small, letting someone else make every decision for me, never putting myself first and I thought this was better than leaving because leaving meant I was hurting my children and being “a bad mom”!

What I have learned is that putting myself first, facing the fear head on, and venturing out on my own has been the best decision I have ever made. My light was so dim and I could no longer see the forest through the trees.

Once I left that life behind, while it was scary, I finally reignited that flame from within and found joy again. I found laughter again, I rediscovered my love of a sunrise, and the peace within the silence. I also found that my children finally discovered the real person that was underneath all of that stress and anxiety, which has drawn us so much closer. The mom that could love them unconditionally and love herself at the same time.

There have been many times in my life where I’ve been asked the question, “who is your hero?” and I’ve often struggled with the answer. Not because I didn’t have many great role models in my life, but because I thought a hero was someone who saves you or protects you when you need help or need to be rescued. What I didn’t realize is that my hero is the one that looks back at me in the mirror every day.

How will you make the most of this journey? Are you ready to be your own hero? Take the first step. Reach out and schedule your free discovery call today.

— Crissy Freeman