I mastered the art of pretending everything was okay when, in reality, it wasn’t.
I no longer feel shame to admit this, but instead, I feel empowered to share my story. We all have a story, and my hope is that by sharing my journey – you won’t feel alone in yours.
Even though our circumstances may look different, our internal struggles may be similar. At the end of the day, we are all more similar than we are different.
After all, we are all human.
So grab your coffee, start reading (or listening), and I’ll dive right into it. 🙂
My journey to loosing myself and finding myself again
where it started
It all started when I got pregnant with my daughter. I developed all sorts of weird, scary symptoms and doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.
I had everything from blood in my stool, bruising all over my body, migraines, joint pain, dizziness, and more! It’s like my whole body was going haywire.
I felt scared and alone. I felt like no one believed how awful I truly felt. This is when I first developed my coping mechanism of pretending everything was okay, when it wasn’t.
That was in 2014. I wanted to have another baby, so I went on to have my third child in 2016. After he was born, I had to have carpal tunnel surgery, a thumb reconstruction, and nerve releases in my arm.
All of this pain was accompanied by debilitating migraines and constant headaches. At this point, I had already received two out of four of my health diagnoses, but there are no “treatments” for the health conditions I have.
(I’ll share more about my health conditions on another post, another day.)
This is when I truly went into survival mode and started running on autopilot.
For me, my coping mechanism was to show up in every way that a good mom and wife would – while completely dismissing anything that I was feeling emotionally or physically.
And to be honest, I was completely drained.
At this point, my marriage was really struggling as well. But what did I do? I put a smile on my face, put my best foot forward, and tried even harder to make it seem like everything was okay.
That’s why I say that I mastered the art of pretending. The harder life got, the more I tried to uphold an image that things were going well.
This is around the time that I started to focus on perfectionism as well. I felt like if I couldn’t control what was going on inside, at least I could try my best to make things look as “perfect” as possible on the outside.
If my daughter’s hair wasn’t done perfectly, if someone came over and my house wasn’t perfectly clean, if I got behind on yard work, etc., I would beat myself up over it.
The high expectations I was putting on myself was exhausting, but I continued to do it for years. Inside, I was feeling like a failure, unappreciated, and like I was always behind.
This went on for a few years until I got a job at the end of 2019. It was my first time working since I had kids and I had such mixed feelings. On one hand I was finally doing something for myself, but on the other hand, I felt guilty for working.
The truth was, up until this point, I never allowed myself to have alone time. I thought a good mom was always there for her children and me working made me feel like a bad mom. But to “justify” it, I told myself it would help our family financially.
Now, I can see it didn’t need justifying, but that’s how it felt at that time.
finding contentment (the first time)
This brings us to the beginning of 2020. The pandemic came along, everything shut down, and I was no longer able to work.
I realized that working was fulfilling even though it had me pushing myself to my limit – I knew I needed something to work for, for myself.
That’s when I decided to start chasing my dreams for the first time in years!
I had always wanted to write a book or start a blog. However, I had no clue what it would be about. As I started thinking about it more, I realized how much better I was feeling after I was forced to slow down.
This brought me to the realization that I was constantly keeping myself busy instead of truly enjoying where I was in life.
It made me sad that I was letting the days go by so hurried. It made me determined to create a slower, simpler lifestyle for my family.
But, I also knew that in order to move forward – I needed to do the inner work that I had been avoiding over the years.
After much trial and error, I was able to let go of the emotional baggage I had been carrying, accept where I was, and find contentment.
From there, I was able to start pursuing my dreams of starting a blog – while still enjoying where I was at the time.
I took what I had learned and created a system that I based my first blog around. I called it “The Blooming In Contentment Method.”
I was so proud of that blog because I was able to take what I had gone through and turn it into a system for other moms to use. It had pulled me out of survival mode, and I truly believed it would help other moms do the same!
However, somewhere along the line, I switched my blog over to Simplify Mom Life and started a podcast. I had gotten into minimalism and thought that moms would be more interested in minimalism than they would be in contentment.
Now I kind of wish I would have kept it as is, but I am trusting that everything lined up in my life for a reason.
But anyways, Simplify Mom Life was born, and I was consistently posting a new blog post and podcast episode each week. It felt so good to be sharing the joy I was finding with living a slower, simpler lifestyle.
Looking back now, I can see that I was still struggling in our marriage and with perfectionism – but I still felt so much more at peace than I had in years!
I kept working on myself and my goals and was consistently posting weekly for seven months.
Then, we decided to move to where we live now. Little did I know, but this move would knock me back down!
hitting rock bottom
If you listened to my “Am I Coming Back” episode, you know that things didn’t go well when we moved here. Nothing went as planned!
I won’t go into all the details here, but a quick rundown is that we moved in with my sister when our house went under contract. It was in the fall and school was starting soon so I wanted my kids to start the school year off at our current location.
Things were moving forward with our house, so we thought it’d be three weeks until our house closed. Our “three weeks” turned into a few months as the buyers kept falling through.
When we finally closed on our house, we bought our 5th wheel. We were going to replace the flooring and then move in. However, when we pulled up the flooring, we found mold. We had to spend a couple more months ripping it apart and remodeling it.
Throughout this time, we started crumbling. Not only were our moving plans crumbling, but so was our marriage and our plans for the future.
This took a toll on us and eventually I was back to living in autopilot.
I had been down this road before, but this time I felt more desperate. I knew something had to change, but I was more exhausted than ever!
I knew I had gotten out of survival mode once before when I created “The blooming in contentment method,” but I didn’t even have the energy to try it again. I felt stuck.
finding myself again
During all of that chaos, we finally decided to seek help for our marriage. Thankfully, things started improving from there.
Not long after that, we finished our fifth wheel and moved in! Things continued to improve, but as healing goes – there were a lot of ups and downs.
That brings us to last summer. My main focus for the summer was to continue working on our marriage, take care of my health concerns, and enjoy time with our kids.
Things were getting better, but I still wasn’t quite sure where I stood personally because I was so focused on our marriage.
Once fall came and the kids were all in school, I realized I needed to do something for myself again. I knew that I had enjoyed doing the blog and podcast, but I felt a lot of shame around not showing up for so long!
It made me feel like I failed. I questioned if I should even try to move forward with it. While I was contemplating coming back to blogging and podcasting, I got a job offer and took it.
After working for a month, I thought I was ready to come back to posting. It felt helpful to stay busy at first, but I soon realized I was pushing myself to the max again.
After all, my health conditions require me to move at a slower pace and I wasn’t respecting that.
I started getting concerned because I could feel myself slipping back into autopilot to keep up.
As luck would have it, though, I got laid off at the end of December. Looking back now, I am so thankful that I did!
During that same time, my husband had started working for another shop, so he wasn’t working from home anymore. And like I said, my kids were all in school during the day.
So, for the first time since becoming a mom, I had hours alone to myself every day.
I crashed. Now I can see that it was good because it forced me to slow down, but at the time, I felt like I was being so lazy and unproductive. I also felt more like a failure when it came to the blog and podcast. Now, I had all this time to do it, but I was only posting monthly.
The truth was, I didn’t feel as inspired. I also felt like a fraud because my life was just smoothing out again – I didn’t have “it together” like I thought I used to. I started to wonder if I should just disappear from the online space, delete the blog and podcast, or if I should just start over again.
I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do, so I decided to leave it how it was and start focusing on myself again – and only post when I felt inspired to do so.
Once I made that decision, I took my Blooming In Contentment course that I had created in 2020.
Everything became so clear. I realized that everything fell in place for a reason and that I was just going to trust God’s timing on when I’m ready to come back full time. Since then, I have done so much inner work and have been truly enjoying my life.
I finally feel like I’m back to a place, more than ever, of contentment, fulfillment, and peace.
What helped
For our marriage we chose to seek help and I will never regret that. Our marriage is now the best it has ever been and my husband is truly my best friend!
It’s not to say our life is perfect and we still don’t have work to do, but I can honestly say I love how our journey is going!
For me personally, I went back to my Blooming in Contentment Method and that’s what has made the biggest impact on me.
I could hardly believe that the same system that took me out of survival mode once, worked again!
I can wholeheartedly say that now I can look towards the future with hope, while fully appreciating where I am now.
helping you on your journey
Writing this out has been therapeutic for me. And with that, it has concreted my belief in the Blooming In Contentment Method and made me realize I need to share it with you!
Not only has it helped me get out of survival mode twice, but it completely changed my perspective on life.
It is a simple method that you can come back to time and time again when you are feeling overwhelmed.
It will help you let go of the thoughts that aren’t serving you, find contentment and peace with where you are in life, and create a simple goal plan for moving forward.
The most important part is that it will allow you to get out of your head and be present so you can fully appreciate where you are in life.
I believe this is the best gift you can give yourself. Not only will it help you, but it will also impact the ones around you.
I taught this course once before, but it was a live class that I had gifted to about 5-10 other moms for free. I called it “Fulfilled Mom – Live with intention while embracing the now.”
My perfectionism held me back from every publishing it, but I want to take the same concept and add some helpful lessons to it. I don’t know exactly what I will call it or when it will be ready, but it is something I am working on.
So if you’re struggling with finding fulfillment, inner peace, and true happiness with where you are – let me know. I want to give this course away for free to 5-10 more moms before I actually put it out.
Like I said, I’m not stressing on a timeline, but it’s something that I’ve slowly been working at.
If you are interested in reserving a free spot in my course before it launches, you can email me at hello.simplifymomlife at gmail.com. Or, if you’re on my email list, you can click reply to any of my emails.
I really hope that we can continue to go on this journey together so that we can find more inner peace and fulfillment.
You are not alone
Whether you choose to try the Blooming In Contentment Method or not, I want you to know that you are not alone.
There are always going to be things we can do to improve ourselves and our lives, but I want you to know that you’re not damaged, broken, or unworthy how you are right now.
Everything you have gone through has made you the person you are today. You can’t change the past, nor can you have 100% certainty about how the future will go.
The only thing you can control is this present moment. And in the present moment, you can choose peace.
Don’t overthink life, let it be easy where it can be, and remember you can only control one moment at a time.
If you need help with this, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. 🙂
— Reminder: I am giving away FREE spots in The Blooming In Contentment Course. Email me at hello.simplifymomlife at gmail.com to claim your spot.