The Eldest Daughter Series: A Peek Inside Every Episode | Episode 36

The Eldest Daughter Series: A Peek Inside Every Episode

Eight episodes. One story. And this is your invitation to hear it all.

This mashup is a glimpse into each episode of The Eldest Daughter Series — a peek inside the moments, the truth, and the becoming that lives inside this body of work. If something in here stops you, if something lands a little too close, that is the episode calling you in.

The Eldest Daughter Series — All 8 Episodes

1. Awareness is Not the Work: How to Stop Watching Your Patterns and Actually Change Them
2. The Eldest Daughter: Where the Cycle Comes From
3. The Narrative She Was Handed and Carried Alone
4. The Wildfire and the Ember
5. How Losing Everything Became the Beginning
6. The Eldest Daughter Lie: Why You Can't Save Your Family
7. Motherhood Didn't Make Me Lose Myself - It Revealed Who I Really Am
8. Motherhood, Visibility, and Reclaiming Your Voice

What You Will Hear a Glimpse Of

• The moment Ashley stopped minimizing her dreams and shrinking herself so others could hold her more comfortably
• The truth of the firstborn daughter — the parentification, the perfectionism, the people pleasing, and the desperate need to finally be held
• What it cost her to carry the eldest daughter role for 16 years — the silence, the cycle, the recklessness, the destruction
• Packing three suitcases, moving across the country, and bringing every shadow along for the ride
• Losing her job when COVID hit and being forced — for the first time — to stop running and actually look at herself in the mirror
• The hardest conversation she has ever had: looking her mother in the eye and drawing the line in the sand
• What rebuilding actually looked like — therapy, coaches, shadow work, and finally learning the map of herself instead of punishing herself for not following the path right
• The moment she stopped being an audience member in her own life and stepped into the story she was always meant to tell

Who This Series Is For

• The woman who has been making herself smaller so the people she loves do not have to feel uncomfortable
• The woman who recognizes herself in the eldest daughter role and is ready to understand what it has cost her
• The woman who has been aware of her patterns for years but has not yet taken the step toward truly changing them
• The woman who is in the breaking right now and needs to hear that the rebuild is worth it
• The woman who is done asking for permission to take up space

Key Quote

"The feral little girl, the eldest daughter, the reckless martyr, the cycle breaker mother. The woman who is repairing, rebuilding, adding on to herself, to her narrative, to the movement in real time. All of her is here with me. All of her has always been with me, ready to shine."

Each episode lives on its own — start anywhere, or start at the beginning. Follow or subscribe so you never miss what comes next.

If something in this mashup stopped you mid-scroll, mid-commute, mid-whatever-you-were-doing — go find that episode. Your story is in there somewhere. And it is ready to be heard.

RESOURCES + CONNECTION:

Find Ashley on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsashleycrabb/ 

Download the Tell My Story Firestarter: https://ashley-crabb.mykajabi.com/opt-in 

Book a Vibe Check Call with Me: https://calendly.com/itsashleycrabb/30min 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This has been really hard for me lately. And I think it's also been why I have been hesitant to fully share the story from the inside is because not everyone who means the most to me in my life right now understands what I'm building or who I'm becoming or why this is so important to me. And I wouldn't I wouldn't say that it's a total lack of support. On some level it is, but it is a lack of understanding. And I have recognized moments where I have still been finding the need to defend myself, to minimize my dreams, to make this journey and what I want and why I want it smaller so that it's easier for someone else to hold. And as mothers, as wives, as daughters and friends and partners, I don't think I'm the only one who has been doing that. But I do want to say that I refuse to do that anymore. Like I I can no longer take any of those roles that I have been carrying. And when you when you are in relationships with people, when you are in a marriage, when you have a close family, when you're, you know, like I said, a mother, it is genuinely hard because you are doing this out of love to see the people around you not understand that. It's genuinely hard when you choose to finally tap into the higher version of you, and you feel like the people around you can't hold it, and you're already holding it yourself, right? So you want them to put in the work, you want them to put in the effort, you want them to put in the intention that you're putting in. And I've I have been trying to force the people in my life to do this with me. And one of the one of the heaviest things I have recently let go of is feeling the need to worry about if they can hold it or not. And that's hard to say when you're married to someone that you love and care about and want to do life with because you want them to be on the same exact level as you. And we can't forget that we're all human beings. And I've had to forgive myself for wanting to take on the responsibility of making someone else change because the only person I can control is me. And that's the whole point, is that we as mothers are leading by example. We are leading by living our lives the way that we are. And so when we actually start doing it, when we start changing, the people closest to us get uncomfortable, and in some way they have to change too. And that's what's hard for them. And I genuinely get that because people change, we all change. Becoming a mother changed me. This work is changing me, and not everyone moves at the same pace, and I have to accept that, but I also have to accept that I'm only willing to hold my own discomfort, I cannot hold theirs, and that's that's the fear that I was holding on to, and what I was allowing me to stop doing this work is that I thought I had to hold on to that in order to show love and to show care to the people in my life. But by letting that go and and by saying out loud, I'm sorry, I can't hold your discomfort. That's not being cruel. That's not abandoning the people I love. That is modeling the work of saying out loud what I want and what I need. And I'm no longer willing to manage or smooth or make myself smaller, so you don't have to feel that. How did I never know this before? The social and the emotional traits and like the development of the firstborn daughter, this excessive caretaking role that I took on, this parental responsibility that I lived with at such a young age, parentification, overachieving, my anxiety and my risk taking, perfectionism and people pleasing, like this hyper need to be so independent and also crave help and nurturing and for someone to hold me. And like being the family therapist, never being able to say no to anything. All of these things sound like sound familiar. Have you been there? Have you done that? Um on some level because like me too, me too. And so because we know that honesty is really the only way I know how to do this, um something I came to connect with recently during a meditation was the fact that I from a very young age was told that I was not planned. I mean, like what the fuck? From a very young age, I was told that like I was never in the stars. I was I wasn't planned, I was the reason my parents got married. And if it wasn't for me, like they probably wouldn't, they wouldn't have stuck together. And just just like let that sink in. Um because wow, like wow. No wonder I have limiting beliefs of not being enough for worthy and just wanting people to love me and stick around, right? Makes sense now. But I wouldn't have come to that realization, I don't think, without this meditation. That's for another point in time. But my parents split up when I was in the fifth grade. Um my mom struggled with alcoholism. My dad didn't really do at that time as a young kid, like what I felt was anything. Um, and our lives were were total fucking chaos. I mean, there were very few sporting events. I remember my mom not being drunk yet. I remember growing up thinking that like drinking and driving absolutely blitzed was an okay thing to do. I saw my mom get arrested and had to stand at the front door questioning the state trooper if he was allowed to enter our home. Um, the list goes on, right? And so from a very young age, I stepped in and raised my younger sister. And like no one, no one ever said, Hey, Ashley, can you do this? Right? No one ever stopped it. No one ever stepped up for me. No one ever said, You don't have to do this. But I did it because that's what the eldest daughters do. We see the gap and we fill it, we see the need and we need it. We see the chaos all around us that we don't know how to handle. And we become the coordinator and we learn how to live in that chaos, how to be comfortable in that chaos, how to carry that chaos with it. Like it is the comforting holding space that we have been craving from our parents this whole freaking time. And then the guilt sits in for all of the resentment because I love these people. I love these people, and I'm supposed to save these people. These people need me. I can't abandon them. If I abandon them, no one, no one will love them like I can. That martyr that needs to save everyone, the the role of being perfect, of being capable of being together, of easygoing, of being the one to hold the room steady. I held the chaos for so long. I held on to being able to read people and energy and tones and how to stay ahead. I learned how to outrun the chaos until I couldn't outrun it anymore. The fucking chaos caught up. And instead of being the chaos coordinator that I once was, I was the chaos creator, not feral and free and fun and joyful. I had spent enough years being mature and responsible for everyone else that I decided I was done being responsible for me. I finally saw how wonderful it was to no longer hold myself accountable, to no longer have to be the martyr. And I became the victim. I saw how the drinking, the drugs, the reckless decisions would carry me the way no one else ever did. When you spend years carrying everything, managing everything as a little girl, that fire that was once in you that has been building and building and building, it wants out. It wants to fucking blow the performance up. I wanted to stop being the one that everyone depended on. I wanted to be stronger than the destruction. And the only way I knew how to do that was to numb myself, to numb myself from the pressure, to numb myself from the performance. That was the cost of the eldest daughter role. For 16 years, that was the cost of our family cycle. That was the cost of silence. That was the cost of handing down this role over and over again. The narrative that I had been living for so long and decided I was going to continue writing. That chaos no longer had to be contained in Washington. It no longer had to be contained because no one has seen me play on this stage before. I didn't have to contain the chaos. I didn't have to be the chaos coordinator. I could create the chaos. I didn't have to just live in other people's chaos anymore. I could live in my own. I was the chaos queen. The drinking, the driving, the drugs, staying out all night, lying, making the same damn decisions I saw my mom make over and over again. The same decisions that I knew were destructive. I decided to do them anyways. And one of the hardest things for me to admit is that I decided to do them anyways. I knew what I was doing and I just didn't stop. Because stopping meant I had to face and feel everything. The childhood, the silence, the split, the seed of resentment, the way that I decided to disconnect, not just from myself, but from reality, from everyone around me. Stopping meant that I had to let go of the fear. Stopping meant I had to take responsibility for myself, that I had to hold myself accountable. Because when you get to be the eldest daughter and the reckless martyr and everything in between, no one in my life had ever truly, truly held me accountable. And I wasn't fucking ready for that. Chaos was easier than taking radical responsibility for my decisions. And so I chose to play the fictional character who was thriving. But what was really happening was that I was destroying myself. I was destroying my future. I was destroying the mission, my design purpose for being here. And I did it until I couldn't anymore. And when it caught up to me, it wasn't loud. But it wasn't quiet. It was something totally different. It was another hit of chaos. COVID hit and I got laid off. I couldn't find a job and I lost control in a way I never, never experienced. Because no matter how chaotic things had been before, I always had some sort of movement. I always had some sort of monetary support. I always had something to do with my hands and my brain, somewhere to go, a way to stay out of my head and ahead of myself. But when I got laid off, when the world shut down, when everything changed, when chaos hit, I couldn't run anymore. I literally couldn't run anymore. There was nowhere to go. There was no distraction, no performance, no version of me that I could hide inside anymore. No one was hiring. No one was looking to bring on new employees. No one knew what the hell was going on. Everything was uncertain. And for a while I sat there like, what do I do now? I went to, I did the things I was supposed to do. I went to the four-year college. I got my degree. I did the internships. I went abroad. Like, who am I now if I can't work? If I can't use my education to make money? Who am I if, first of all, I was married at that time. Scott and I were together. So who am I to not be able to provide for the household? We didn't have the boys at the time, but who am I to not be able to provide for myself? Like, what I wasn't, I honestly in many moments wasn't even thinking about Scott. I was thinking about me. Scott had a stable job. He worked for the federal government. He worked for the United States Postal Service. And so, like, that was quote unquote stable. Because I had tied so much of my worth, so much of my value, so much of who I was to my job, my worth, my control, my identity. When that got ripped away from me, it felt like everything, the root of me, my roots, my foundation, it felt like everything got ripped away with it. Everything underneath me went with it. And I didn't handle it well. Shocker, right? But like I didn't immediately rise. I didn't immediately forgive myself or take radical responsibility. I didn't immediately get crystal clear on who I was. I spiraled and I spiraled harder and harder and harder. More drinking, more numbing, more anxiety, more sitting in my own head on that fat freaking hamster wheel, just going, going, going, but not making any movement. More and more trying to escape the fact that I felt like I had no control. Because now I didn't even have the illusion of control anymore. Because we like we've just recently learned, the idea that a paycheck is stable is an illusion. And and that's a different place to be, I think, when you realize you're not, you're not actually holding anything together anymore. One, you're moving fast enough so you can't see what is falling apart. So because I didn't want to see the fact that like I trusted someone and they broke that trust again, but also that I lost another layer of trust in me because somehow I wasn't enough or worthy to keep that job. I had to move fast enough through these moments of not understanding what happened exactly and what was going to happen. So that I couldn't feel anything. And now with the state shutting down, with the world shutting down, with everyone losing their minds, everything did slow down. I was forced to slow down. I was forced to wake up every morning and not just look at it, everything around me. I had to look at myself in the mirror. I started to realize that I was continuing to let it get worse before I was willing to make a decision to do something that would make it different. And somewhere in all of that chaos, it's just like I literally hit a point where I was like, this, this is not it. This cannot be it. This juice that I am trying to drink is not worth the squeeze. Not in my life, not in my life anymore. It's not my path. This is not how it ends. Right before my boys turned one, I looked my mom in the eye, and for the first time in my life, because I've never said this to her, I said, you either choose the booze or you choose us. You either choose to be completely sober or you don't get access to this life anymore. You don't get access to our life anymore. I want you to be in it. I want you to be a part of it. But this is the standard. This is the boundary. This is the line and the sand that I draw. And it was one of the hardest things that I have ever done. It's like my heart broke into a thousand pieces. Because when we give someone a choice, us or this thing, when we force someone to decide, our biggest fear is that they're not going to decide on us. Our biggest fear is that out of the two choices they're given, their decision isn't going to be us. And so that's what I was really afraid of, right? That's why I never had said that to her before. Because what if she didn't choose me? And I know that I'm sitting here and I'm saying my family, our life, blah, blah, blah. But I meant me. I meant me. I really did. Because I'm the root of this family. I'm the foundation of this family. Without me, there is no them. Me, me. And you know what? I wanted the best version of all of us. And so even though that was the hardest thing I've ever done, it's it's the best thing I've ever done. Because I finally started letting go of the woman who would have done anything, anything to keep the peace. Anything to keep everybody close. Anything to be the one who doesn't have to take ownership of breaking it. But I already knew. Like it was gonna break. It was gonna break in one way, shape, or form. And me trying to make sure it didn't break at all was sure as shit not fixing anything. And what it really wasn't doing was serving my family. It wasn't serving me, it wasn't serving my family. I was staying stuck. I was keeping my family stuck because I'm the foundation of the family. Like I said earlier, I I didn't come home to save my family. My boys did not come home to save my family. That is not our role. I get to I get to rewrite the plot. Plot twist. I came home to stop abandoning myself. I came home to build the solid foundation of my family, of my four-person unit. Coming back home to save my family and coming back home to build the foundation of my family, to stop abandoning myself in the process. Those are two very, very different things. And I see now that because in that moment I decided, not even that I was going to be the one who carried everything, but I decided in that moment that I was the one who was going to break it. I was fine with taking on that responsibility and not in a martyr way, not in a victim way, not in an egotistical way, in a way that says everything shifts now. Not because I'm fixing anything, not because I'm fixing anyone, but because I finally got the fuck out of my own way. I got the fuck out of everyone's way. Not because I was reckless, not because I was ready, but because I knew, I knew that the break had to happen in order for the repair to begin. And so I did what every mother, what every woman is afraid to do. I asked for help. I hired coaches, I hired mentors, VAs, podcast editors. I went to therapy. I got diagnosed with ADHD. I dove into shadow work. I started learning about my human design, astrology. I started learning how the map of me worked. Instead of constantly punishing myself for not following the damn path the right way this whole time. And for the first time in my life, I stopped trying to force. I stopped trying to force myself into methods and systems, routines, and expectation that was never built for me in the first place. Changed everything. Because my whole life, I had been trying to live up to the standard of the eldest daughter role. And every time I failed, every time that I was shown that I wasn't enough or worthy of love, I pushed harder. I tried harder. I overloaded myself harder. And motherhood made that absolutely impossible. Because I can't be a present mother, a quote unquote good mother. I can't create and build and lead and love and heal while abandoning myself. Eventually, my body said no. Eventually, my nervous system said no. Eventually, my soul said no. And I can sit here today and tell you that the breaking is worth it. I didn't break to not get back up. I broke so I could rebuild. And rebuilding, repairing that foundation feels so different than getting that close to that point of breaking for destruction. This type of breaking is quieter. And it's a hell of a lot more painful. It's way more uncomfortable because no one claps for you when you break to rebuild. No one sees the invisible shifts. Everybody hates the boundaries. Everybody hates the conversations. Everybody hates the way that you respect yourself and set standards. Everyone hates the moment you stop betraying yourself. But those are the moments that you have to stick through. Those are the moments where the breaking feels like it is going to hurt so much that you would rather implode. But that's the foundation of becoming. For the first time in my life, I am starting to understand those moments matter. Those moments are building the foundation of becoming. And I had started building that foundation the moment I brought those boys into the world. But it has taken me almost four years up until this point of recording this series to truly understand that I was still living in a state of self-awareness, that I was still able to explain my patterns, my trauma, my chaos, my behavior. But those final actions were still just being observed by me. And I am so done, so done observing of being someone in the audience of my own life. Sometimes with intention, sometimes with not, but the more and more I changed, the closer I got to this point. Now I truly understand that I have no capacity to live in any sort of survival mode anymore. The breakage has finally occurred and the mending can begin. It's that every frickin' room can't hold me. Every frickin' room doesn't deserve me. And I wasn't just made to be in rooms. I was made to create rooms, whole freaking homes, a village from the ground up. That's me, baby, deciding that I'm finally willing to do that for me, for my family, for the mothers that I know are fucking ready. Once I stopped asking for permission to share this message out loud, to share my message out loud, my vision, got so much bigger. The net, the net that I could fish with got so much bigger. This wasn't just about a book, being a published author, speaking opportunities, podcasting. It wasn't just about the conversations and the community and the connection and the collaboration. It was about all of it having a fucking purpose and me finally cleansing it, finally claiming my story. None of this feels random anymore. None of me feels random anymore. None of me feels like an accident anymore. It doesn't feel earned. It feels alive. It feels like every single chapter of my story that I've lived was written to be here. The feral little girl, the eldest daughter, the reckless martyr, the cycle breaker mother, the woman who is repairing, rebuilding, adding on to herself, to her narrative, to the movement in real time. All of her is here with me. All of her has always been with me, ready to shine. And so now when I speak, now when I show up, it's not just a theory. Now I speak because I lived it, but I speak because I'm living it and because I want to live it so loud. That's why our stories have always meant to be the work. My story, my life, my voice. It's impossible to separate from the mission. And for the first time since starting my business, I'm no longer trying to separate them. I'm no longer trying to separate myself. I'm no longer trying to hide the woman I've always been, the woman I am right now, and then the woman that I continue to become outwardly to all of you. I've repaired the foundation and I'm building now. I'm building from her now, and I'm building with all of you, and I'm so ready to fucking go. If this episode resonated with you, share it with another mother who is on a mission, who is building something real. This is how we change the conversation by making sure women like us are seen, heard, and pain. And if you're ready to step into your next level of visibility, leadership, and wealth, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's coming next. You can also connect with me on Instagram, TikTok, my newsletter, where I share daily thoughts and conversations around motherhood, identity, and wealth. I'll leave you with this. You are not behind, you are not too much, and you do not need to choose between your family and your success. You are the woman who gets to have it both. I'll see you in the next episode.