Category: single mom

Jaded

About a year ago, I was at a dinner party with some friends, and I was with a couple and the wife mentioned that she was so obsessed with her husband – she couldn’t get enough of him. They were all over each other. And they have a few kids and have been married for a long time! And I was thinking… ew this is not normal, and that they were so over the top. I may have even said EW out loud to her and we laughed and she rolled her eyes. In the following days I couldn’t stop thinking about why I was so fixated on this – was I jealous? But that wasn’t it – then it dawned on me that I was jaded when it came to love. Why? And I remembered! I don’t hate love! I love love! What had happened to me? I used to love the idea of love, it was all I ever wanted. From JTT to Leonardo DiCaprio and Heath Ledger, they covered my walls. I knew if I could just meet Leo we would fall in love and live happily ever after… But, somewhere along the way I no longer felt it was important.

Love had become a distant idea of something that must not exist – at least not in the way I’d always hoped it would. At least not for me. To be clear, I didn’t have a loveless marriage but it wasn’t the stuff of fairy tales or Titanic or anything even close. It was comfortable and no one was trying to woo anybody, it was just probably like how it is in many homes where life has gotten busy and mundane and the stress is swarming everywhere you look and all the fun has been sucked out and we brought out the worst in each other on a daily basis. This was no longer good enough for me.  Which, along with other reasons, is why we were getting divorced.

Well, now that I knew I had become jaded… this really got my wheels turning. 😬 I didn’t want to settle for even good enough anymore – I realized I want the kind of love that makes people say “EW y’all are over the top” or I don’t want it at all. My separation had already started and I knew I was getting divorced and at the time I was just looking forward to peace. I was looking forward to being on my own for real, and not just feeling like I was doing it all on my own.  *** note: these are MY feelings – there are 3 sides to a story as we all know, but this is based on mine obviously, so I’m going to say my side as tactfully as possible without dragging anyone through the mud, this is my blog after all – I’m sure if anyone wrote one on me it could be ruthless – although I’m pretty incredible so I don’t know what they could say 😂 (end note) *** – But now there was a glimmer of hope that maybe I wasn’t done with love. Maybe I wouldn’t think it was only in movies forever. Maybe I’d want to date again. Maybe I’d want to snuggle someone and watch a movie or hold hands 🤢. It was possible, I guess 🤷🏻‍♀️.

So fast forward and I’m divorced. It didn’t take long for me to get on the dating apps – I was curious what was out there and I had felt alone for a very long time. But, while they were absolutely insane the apps were actually quite FUN! Holy crap, it’s like a menu of men. It felt wrong and terrible and at first – I didn’t want to swipe left on the ones I didn’t find attractive or didn’t meet some superficial standard I had, because I’m way too nice and didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings if no one ever swiped on them, but I quickly got over myself and became and expert swipper, or so I thought 😂 I started going on dates. And at first it was crazy scary and nerve wracking – I hadn’t dated in 18 years! I don’t even know how to talk to a man, the last time I did this I was dating boys – not grown men – gross! But then the most amazing thing happened – I realized I was good at first dates! I think I could teach a class actually 😂 apparently I talk a lot and have plenty to say and about a zillion questions to ask, so awkward silence wasn’t a thing. My problem wasn’t the first dates. It was the seconds! I knew I’d bring some of my life crap into my new dating life, but I hadn’t realized these men would bring their crap too. Either I didn’t like them after the first date, or they didn’t know my name on the second date, or they were an ex-cult member turned polyamorous and still married or an addict or I ended up in a crazy scenario on a farm in the middle of nowhere – don’t worry, I learned my lesson… the list goes on and on. But what I became aware of quite quickly is that I have not always picked the best men 😬 I noticed there was a pattern of picking the “bad boys.” What was this? I realized one day when I was in deep self psychoanalysis that I would never tell my daughter to date the “bad boy” so why was this ok for me? I can think of many reasons, and at the top of the list is that they seem fun 😂 and more importantly I didn’t see a good example of a healthy relationship growing up – sorry mom and dad – I know you tried your best – but it wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies, it was scary and stressful lots of the time. Luckily, I realized at around the point when the guy didn’t know my name on the second date – and y’all, I swear we really had a good thing going up until that moment 😂 that I should do some therapy. So that’s what I did. And it has been fascinating! My brain is so complex (don’t laugh) and it turns out all these things that I thought were personality traits actually turned out to be trauma responses 😂 who’d have thought?! So… with the guidance of my therapist I sat down and I wrote a letter to “Little Emily” – I believe this is called shadow work – and I crushed it – if I do say so myself. Little Emily and I worked through so much in one little letter. And I started noticing in my day to day life all the kazillions of times when Little Emily would pop up to protect me. But I didn’t need her to do it anymore – just like she didn’t need to feel like she needed to do it when we were 5.

If I haven’t lost you yet, then I’m going to assume you’re invested now in my silly rambling blog stories so I’ll keep them coming. There is so much more I want to say, but I’m treading carefully so I don’t ruffle all the feathers of all the people. There maybe is even more to this dating/love thing. Maybe I can recover from my anti-love stance. Stay tuned… and I hope something I say gives you the glimmers of hope. Y’all blew me away with the response to my last blog and so I felt like I should do another one and see if anyone wants to read it 🫣 I feel so good on this side of all the hard life lessons I’ve gone through so far.  We’ll see how far I take this blog, please let me know if it’s boring or entertaining 😂 

a re-introduction

I think sometimes my social media may seem confusing 🤪 so many times I’ve been told to set up business accounts – but y’all wouldn’t get the full picture.  So instead, my profile is a mishmash of my life and my 2 careers! I feel like it works but I don’t know everyone on my social media so I figured I’d take a second to tell y’all a little bit of my story. When I started writing this I remembered I started a blog in 2018 that I only posted to once and never shared. SO if you want to take a peak into the old Emily who got me to where I am now, go back to my first ever blog. She’s so different and I’m so grateful for her struggles.

For the purposes of this post we’re going to go back to 2019 because the events of that year drastically shaped the person I am today. There was a very clear moment – actually there were 2 moments –  in 2019 when I knew it was past time for my marriage to end. I won’t go into the details, because it’s not fair, but we both played a part in its unraveling. On the day I made my decision, I was so scared. I knew I didn’t have a way OUT financially. While my house was in my name only, and it didn’t have a mortgage, I had become a stay at home mom, which meant…. NO INCOME. I could not even borrow money from my own house which was a gift from my father who passed in 2014. When I tried to get a loan and realized I couldn’t without having my husband co-sign I became very aware how messed up our system is and how many women must get trapped in a marriage they don’t want to be in anymore. In my case, I’d given literally everything I had to my husband and children, and I didn’t have anything left for myself. When you find yourself in this situation, it’s easy to feel defeated and I’m sure many women will stay in this place forever.

But, I was desperate and I knew I didn’t want this to be how my story went down in the books, so I think I blacked out and just started putting one foot in front of the other and for the first time “just did the next right thing” I didn’t have a full picture of what I wanted my life to look like or what my plan was but something inside of me got busy. If I had tried to see the whole picture of what it was going to take to change my circumstances, I would have been too overwhelmed, so I just took it one baby step at a time. I don’t know where I found the strength or energy with a 2 year old and a 4 year old at home, but I enrolled in real estate night school and I just put my head down and focused. Within a couple months I had my license and it was time to start building an income so I could find a new life. And that’s how my real estate career was born.

Now to paint you a picture… somewhere in my late 20s my weight started creeping up, I can blame this on many things, I’ll save for later posts, but I have all the excuses – and they are valid. Life happens, I put myself on the back burner and slowly I had faded into the background of my own life. By 2021 I found myself well over 200 pounds. It felt like it happened overnight, but it also felt like I hadn’t been able to look at myself in the mirror in years. I hid in pictures, and when I’d have to see a picture of me I was truly shocked, I can’t look like that – that’s got to just be a bad angle. But when every angle became bad, I knew.  I made every attempt to jump on the latest fad diet and when it failed, I just shifted my attention to my sweet babies who were the picture of perfection in my eyes and I flooded all of my social media with pictures of them. It was easy to hide myself in a sea of beautiful baby and toddler pics.

But eventually you have to see people, I wasn’t able to hide in person. There was not a flowy shirt magical enough to hide the weight I had put on, maybe I could have gone everywhere in a face mask then people wouldn’t notice – and guess what Y’ALL – in 2020 I got my chance to hide behind a mask for a while and I even felt better posting that way. WHAT? What a crazy thing to write. Luckily for Instagram we also now had filters we could use to make you look “better”. Take a second and look back through my old posts and you’ll see… its all my kids and then a select few filtered pics of me and then a few masked selfies and then there is a shift.

A shift when I met the right person at the right time. A time when I was so desperate that I had just spent $3k on red light therapy that was supposed to melt the fat away. This was supposed to be the something magical – totally worth the money if it worked. Welp, when it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And it was. I didn’t lose a single pound with red light therapy. Then, I met my coach at a preschool brunch. I remember it like it was yesterday. I showed up and I was full of personality and funny things to say to distract from just being an overweight, self-conscious and uncomfortable messy mom trapped in an unhappy marriage at home. I was DESPERATE. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back, everyone, who was really looking, must have seen through the wall I put up all around me to keep me safe. That wall wasn’t keeping me safe, it was crumbling all around me and I was suffocating under the weight of everything I was trying to hide.

So luckily, this health coach, who’s now one of my dearest friends, called me after the brunch and signed me up for a mystery program that she promised me would work. She said it with such conviction, and after hearing the cost it was chum change compared to what I was willing to pay to get this weight off. And y’all, it wasn’t just the exterior of the weight – I was pre-diabetic and had gestational diabetes with both of my pregnancies – I WAS NOT HEALTHY. I was slowly dying. Well, just as my new coach had promised, the program worked, thus Emily – a health coach was born.

So now we have the realtor and the health coach portion of what I share. I started taking care of other parts of my life again. I saw myself start to shine again. There was in fact some sparkle left in this Diamond. I wasn’t done. I had more to my story. I had watched myself work my ass off for the last few years and I became aware of my worth – probably for the first time in my life. I was worth more than what I had going on in my house. I deserved to be treated better than anyone had ever treated me and it was time to stop fighting for my marriage. And no matter what anyone says, I fought hard. I can lay my head down at night and know I tried my best. At the end of the day, we weren’t happy and we both deserve to be happy. We weren’t helping each other to be our best selves and we were bringing out the worst in each other. I’m making this seem like it was a simple as asking for the marriage to end and that was it, but it was way more complicated than that. Somewhere in the midst of me fighting like hell for the life I deserved – I found myself again. I remembered who I was and I was reborn into what I believe to be the best version of myself so far. And I know there is even better versions of me coming.

So here we are. Maybe I’ll be the only one to ever read what I write, but if you’re still reading, thanks! Thank you for being a part of letting me break down my walls and live again. And if you’re still reading because you are in a dark place and you can’t see the light, let me be a little glimmer of hope for you. If I can do it, I know you can too.