Episode 47:45 Years, One Turning Point

I turned 45 years old this month! As I was thinking on what I wanted to write and talk about today as I am approaching this somewhat of a milestone birthday, I realized that I have shared very little of my background and story with my podcast listeners and that you may be curious to know more about me personally.

Today in celebration of surviving 45 years and being in a beautiful place in my life, I thought I would share more intimately and vulnerably about who I am, where I’ve come from and what has brought me to the point of becoming a health coach specializing in helping women recover from IBS. 

I hope you enjoy today’s special episode and how magical it feels to me.  

 Find the full transcript for this episode and other resources at healingheribs.com/47

Transcript

Episode 47- 45 Years, One Turning Point

 I turned 45 years old this month! As I was thinking on what I wanted to write and talk about today as I am approaching this somewhat of a milestone birthday, I realized that I have shared very little of my background and story with my podcast listeners and that you may be curious to know more about me personally. Today in celebration of surviving 45 years and being in a beautiful place in my life, I thought I would share more intimately and vulnerably about who I am, where I’ve come from and what has brought me to the point of becoming a health coach specializing in helping women recover from IBS.  I hope you enjoy today’s special episode and how magical it feels to me.  Find the full transcript for this episode and other resources at healingheribs.com/47

Who I Am Early Days

The early days of my life were spent in Upstate NY, in a little tiny town that was so small they had to combine two towns together to have enough kids for the school that I went to. I had such a beautiful childhood there in Upstate NY in the 80s and I was allowed to run around and play freely with my sister and my friends without supervision. The image I have of my childhood is riding barefoot on a banana seat bike with one friend sitting on the handlebars and another on the back, resting on pegs----of course all of us without helmets. The life I had in this way was so free and joyful and I’m honestly a little bit sad that kids don’t get to experience this much anymore because our children now are much more protected that I was. I was a very shy and reserved child as well and quite introverted in many ways. When I was playing with my friends, I was exuberant and loud but at home with my parents, or at school with teachers—I had an entirely different personality. I was a very nervous and worried little girl when it came to authority figures, and I was very concerned about doing the “right and good thing” . I look back at my school days and have such a blank slate when it comes to memories of school compared to the in-depth memories I have of playing outdoors with my sister and friends .I think this is because at school I was thinking all the time about what the teachers thought of me, preoccupied with  if I was doing everything right and if I was being “good enough”. During the school day, I felt quite frozen ;  concerned constantly with pleasing those around me and fulfilling that role of a good girl student. Now, at 45 I can see how that tendency developed over time, how that personality trait deepened for me over the years. I can see how I’ve wrestled with it and I can see where it lead me in part to develop IBS. For me, there’s a direct through line between that nervous “little miss perfect” –which was what my sisters would often call me, and the kind of woman that was trying so hard to be perfect, to be good and the more authentic and free part of me was getting squashed down in the process. 

Middle Life
When I was 13 years old my family and I moved to a small town in Central California, near Sacramento. Moving at 13 was not great for me because of my very shy and introverted nature. It took me a very long time to make friends and no one talked to me at that very small school for at least six months. I ate lunch alone, feeling incredible self concious at that age. After awhile, I adapted a bit to life in California and can see now that being there opened me up to a new world that I wouldn’t have known and I am grateful that we made that move. I was an athlete in school and a top student, and this tendency to want to be perfect, get perfect grades, and be the fastest runner on the cross country and track team was center stage for me during those years. Also just left stage to this self(or whatever the theater metaphor is I’m not sure) was me also being a very rebellious teenager; which was a complicated part of me and I was the part of me that was trying to balance out the rigidity of the little miss perfect side, trying to take up space. After high school I attended college at UCSB which was my top pick college based around its very good reputation as a great UC school,  but also the campus was right on the beach and it was Southern California and I was over the moon to be accepted and to go there. In college, I think my perfect side relaxed a little bit more but I still put a lot of pressure on myself to do well in school, as I had done in high school. I was still living very much in sort of divided state, with two very distinct sides of my personality that competed for airtime. I partied a lot in college, which to a certain extent was normal, but I feel I often took it a little bit further than my friends did—as if I was overcompensating or making up for lost time —completely letting go of responsibility and sense so that I could feel free and unburdened. To tell you the truth, though I wish I could have given myself more permission to just be myself in those younger years instead of feeling the need to perform and exaggerate, I truly did have so much fun in college and I don’t regret a single thing I did back then. I don’t look back at that time with any sense of wishing it had been different. I see now how my life was playing out and though I know today I’m a much saner, healthier and happier person than I was in my 20s, I also admire how brave and self-confident I was in many ways. I was adventurous and passionate and intense, and I was finding my way. My junior year of college I studied abroad in Alcalá de Henares, Spain which was a town about 45 minutes outside of Madrid. That experience was life changing for me in so many ways and the main thing I walked away with that has stayed with me throughout my life—was the sense of seeing a life so different from my own, and learning how to navigate there. I learned that my way of seeing things was just mine. I got a taste of slowing down, of not caring so much how well I did in school. After I graduated college, I went back to Spain with my sister to teach English—but this time we moved to Barcelona. I taught English there for many years and towards the end of my stay, I met my husband who was from Southern Spain. We fell in love very quickly and got married within a year, even though we were quite young -like 25 years old. We moved back to California together and I pursued my teaching career while my husband was back in school to become a marriage and family therapist. We lived in San Francisco for twelve years, going to school and starting our careers, saving money for a down payment on a house and dreaming about our lives as they unfolded before us. As I moved further into teaching and started teaching my own classrooms in public schools in San Francisco, my job took up a big portion of my life and my sense of who I was. I found teaching to be extremely demanding and stressful but, in the beginning, I thought that was because I was a new teacher and so I worked really hard in my career around teaching best practices and excelling at classroom discipline. I did become a better teacher, but it never became easier for me. I was determined to make my new career work because it was what I had decided to do, I had invested so much in it and I convinced myself that it would get easier with time. Honestly though I think I was never very well suited to working in the classroom environment. I am very sensitive to noise and to chaos, which working with young children eventually brings. During this time in my mid 30s I was thinking about whether I wanted to have children or not and I could not realistically see myself having children and teaching full time, it seemed like it would be way to much for me. I pushed the idea of having a child down because I needed to work and my job was very stressful. I couldn’t see how these two things would work together, and I could see no realistic “third options” for me. 

Recent Life -Career Change
When I was around 36 years old, my niece, who was one years old at the time,  came to live with us in San Francisco because her mother, my sister, was having a lot of health issues and she needed help taking care of her daughter. My father and stepmother and my husband and I worked together to take care of her those first few years. I loved her so deeply and taking care of her was one of the most enjoyable and pleasurable things I had ever done in my life. Seeing her little face light up, teaching her new words, helping her sleep---all of it filled me with a deep sense of happiness and purpose and I knew very shortly after she came to stay with us that I wanted to be a mother. When I was 36 I officially changed my mind and my husband and I had our first and only son in December of 2017. As I have mentioned in other podcasts, while the pregnancy with him was quite easy and enjoyable (til about the last month) my birth experience with him was traumatic for us both and my body and spirit went through a lot in that first week that I couldn’t fully process at the time. His entire first year was beautiful and terrible as I worked to through many health problems while taking care of him 24/7. He was not a great sleeper, and I was very anxious about co -sleeping, which he insisted that we do. For the first 6-8 months of his life, I was in bad shape—extremely sleep deprived and my body was working hard to recover from the injuries I had sustained during birth and then the complications that came from the c section. Shortly after his first birthday is when my IBS symptoms started coming on very strong in my life. Shortly before his first birthday, I returned to working full time teaching first grade in a bilingual public school classroom in a new city, in Santa Rosa, California. Going back to work destroyed me in a new way as I had to bring my son to daycare and that was emotionally way more difficult than I had expected. Also, I was still breastfeeding my son at the time and because of the demands of this job, I was offered to pump in the toilet during my lunch break while I ate at the same time. That was literally the only time my boss could find for me to do this legally protecte activiy. Please if you are a new mother in my same position-push back agains this ridicoulsness if you at all can. I regret allowing my desire to not be difficult get in the way of wanting to continue breast feeding my son. The years when I was working full time and my son was very young, I did my very best in every part of my life. Though my job was stressful, I took it very seriously and invested enormous efforts into being a great teacher for those kids. I worked hard too at being a great mother and keeping our new beautiful home clean and organized, which was another part of my life which was hugely important. All the while, I was struggling immensely with IBS—confused and flailing –trying my best to resolve the issue and manage the constant flare ups. 

Covid happened shortly after when my son was around three years old and I was broken in a new way, terrified of what was happening and being forced to learn how to teach remotely which I had never done and take care of a very energetic three-year-old boy at the same time, all day and all night. My husband went into his office in the day and continued to work remotely while I juggled my son and my job full time for almost two years. During these Covid years, my husband and I would often go for walks around our neighborhood when we could and we would often talk about our worries and our dreams for the future. One things that he would consistently bring up was his desire to move back to Italy, he had done a year abroad in Florence in his 20s and felt a strong pull to continue with his Italian, and to move back to Italy. Because of our jobs and the Italian economy the way it was, I would often respond that it was a beautiful dream and that I would love it too, but that we would have to wait until we retired to move to Italy. While my husband dreamnt of Italy, I talked a lot about the stress of my job and the stress of my life and what I could do to make it better. Though a bit part of me loved teaching, it had become even more stressful after we returned to school from Covid. The kids that I taught often had very serious problems that I felt hugely unsupported in how to help them, and to protect the others in the class. I became disillusioned as my attempts to get more support were met with silence. My desire to be a “good teacher” I felt was floating away and was beyond my control, as I realized after fifteen years in the classroom, that the inequalities that existed, and the great needs that were there ---could not be met by me. It was greater than me and I too was getting sucked down into pain and worry and helplessness. I needed to get out and I didn’t know how. However, one day I just knew it had to be done. I was done with teaching and I didn’t have a plan and I didn’t have a bridge for the following school year, I just knew that I would do what I had to do to help financially support my family, and I would not go back to teaching. I would wait tables, or work at the supermarket, I would do whatever. I had given up. It may sound silly to you all, or maybe not?, but that letting go—that surrender, the admitting that my job was untenable and I had to agknowlede that, let go, and move on—was an incredibly hard thing for me to do. I realize now that I had built my identity a lot around my work and also around “making it work”. I spent years and years investigating in therapy and experimenting with how to make my work life less stressful and more manageable for me. I employed boundaries, I did seminars, I changed grades, I improved my craft of teaching and worked digligently on my classroom management. I got to the point where I knew I was an excellent teacher and I had done everything that I could to make my work life work for me, and it just wasn’t going to work for me. I gave up. When I gave up, my husband mentioned maybe now we could go to Italy. Maybe now we could save up and take a three month leave, like a short sabbatical. As we did the numbers and worked through everything, the three month leave turned into 6 months and then a year off we were planning to take. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I had woken up from a nightmare and was now living out and planning out this dream. During Covid, many people who did therapy moved to doing therapy remotely, and after Covid resolved, many of those people wanted to continue doing therapy remotely and the rules were changed that allowed therapists to work remotely. This law changed as we were planning out our Italy sabbatical. We realized that my husband could work from Italy and that our sabbatical could instead be a permanent move, and right away. I couldn’t believe what was happening and yet it was. It was sincerely like a dream—my husband getting to realize this dream of his to move back to Italy while my dream to take a rest and reset and figure out what my next career move would be, without the enormous pressure of doing that in California –which is a very expensive place to live. Italy offered me a soft resting place, and much more economic spaciousness to figure it all out in time, to figure it out slowly. So here I am, two and a half years into living in Italy. I’m now a health coach specializing in helping women heal IBS. I work when and how I want and my stress levels are around 60-70 percent less of what I experienced in CA. I can breathe now. Not everything is perfect, life is life and Italy hasn’t prevented that. What I can say is that sometimes the most beautiful things in life come floating out from the wreckage of life, and that sometimes the bravest things that you can do are admitting what you can’t do and admitting defeat. Giving in and letting go because trying to make it work and using your control to do so has its limitations. 

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode.