Leap of Faith

I have taken a leap of faith.  Faith in myself and faith in you.  Throughout the past year, I found myself deeply unsatisfied with almost every aspect of my life.  Yes, we were still in the throes of the pandemic, but my unease was deeper than that.  On paper, things were good.  I had three healthy children, a stable marriage, and a house and enough wiggle room in my budget to afford the necessary improvements that popped up. I had a job working with a team of people who inspired me and excited me and supported me.  We created work that aligned with my values and that I felt was truly necessary out in the world.  But, the systems that I was participating and LEADING in were no longer in alignment with my values.  I was doing work that I knew was important, but that wouldn’t have great impact until other foundational structures changed dramatically, and I didn’t see that those things would change any time soon.  

Being a person with few boundaries, I was drenched in a stress-induced cortisol bath on a daily basis whenever I was working or thinking about work…and I was always thinking about work.  I was losing sleep, I was losing patience with my kids, and I was dissociating at the end of the day instead of resting or recovering.  The cumulative effect of my work stress led to burn–out and compassion fatigue, where I wasn’t even investing in my most cherished relationships because meeting other peoples’ needs felt too burdensome.  

I had a great therapist who was helping me through this stress, as well as helping me unpack a lot of stuff from my childhood.  I was on an intentional path towards healing, but my dissatisfaction with my work-life balance was a major roadblock to progress.  There were a few incidents at work within a short span of time that pushed me into the realization:  I have a choice in this. I can control this part of my life.  I am incredibly privileged to have enough financial stability that I was able to make the decision to leave my job.  How did that work? 

Well, I didn’t walk in and quit the next day.  Over the next 6 months, I took some very intentional steps to ensure that my family would be OK without my income for a while, as well as steps to ensure that my team and my projects would be OK without me.  I dramatically reduced our impulse spending by putting limits on our credit cards and I squirreled away a bunch of our savings into a high yield savings account.  Meanwhile, at work, I began to rescind my leadership in favor of other team member’s wishes, ideas, and plans.  In other words, I stopped trying to control the things that I perceived I could control, and focused on the things that I *actually* had control over.  My stress level was immediately reduced.  I was starting to see the values of those boundaries I had been missing.  

After several months of saving money at home, sharing power at work, and squaring up my thinking about my next steps, I gave my 6 weeks notice and started watching the clock.  I left my job in early June, just in time to spend my summer caring for my three children without the burden of paying for camps and childcare.  Those three months were full of so much joy, so much healing, so much rest, recovery, and restoration, as well as some frustration, isolation, and worry.  I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  I learned so much about who I am and how I want to parent when I am unburdened by stress and situational anxiety.

Now, I am on a new path.  I am weaving together a new career out of my passion for pregnancy, birth, newborns and new parents, my expertise in early childhood development, my experiences as a parent of three very different children, my progressive values, and my beliefs that parents and educators have a unique power to build justice in this world through the ways they interact with young children.  I am serving birthing people as a postpartum doula, supporting families through parenting guidance and paradigm-shifting, and sharing my own perspectives and experiences on parenting and thriving in a broken world.

I’m not doing this because I want to improve the lives of individual parents and their children.  No, that’s not my “why;” that’s a perk, but not the reason I up-ended my life.  I’m doing it because I truly believe that this is the contribution that I can offer to make the world a better place.  I believe that happier, more fulfilled, more confident parents are likely to raise good people, maybe even great people.  

And the world needs great people to make the changes necessary to bend our arc even more towards justice.  We need today’s kids to grow up to be CEOs who don’t exploit their workers for personal gain.  We need them to become doctors who take everyone’s pain seriously and save everyone’s lives. We need our babies to become teachers who nurture their learners with empathy and understanding, leaving shame and fear in the schools of the past. We need our children to run for political office and use their well-attached, emotionally healthy brains to cooperate with others and build systems that will help our government run well… Either that or we need some of our kids to torch the entire system and recreate it entirely.   

And, I believe, the only way we’re going to get there is to empower ourselves as parents to break free from habits, systems, and beliefs that no longer serve us, and raise our kids from our strength and contentment.  

I am committed to doing that for myself and I am committed to helping you find your way too.  Are you ready to leap with me?