Tag: healing

Reclaiming Myself: A Weekend of Meaningful Moments

This weekend was a weekend of exploration.

It began on Friday with something simple but intentional: a bus ride to the gym. Zumba with friends. Music, movement, laughter, and the quiet satisfaction of showing up. Nothing extravagant, just choosing to participate in my own life.

Saturday brought a change in plans. The scheduled hike was canceled, but instead of staying home, I still rode the bus and MAX to the park. I wandered a few trails on my own, unbothered by the shift. There was something grounding about moving forward anyway, about not needing a group or a perfect plan to enjoy being outdoors.

Sunday carried the momentum.

I reconnected with an old walking partner, and together we took a walk through Emy neighborhood, shared steps, familiar streets, conversation that felt easy and unforced. Later that morning, I made my way to Pittock Mansion, standing high above the city and taking in Portland from up top. From there, everything looked expansive and calm, as if the city itself was reminding me to breathe.

That afternoon, I met another friend for brunch. Over food and conversation, we decided, just like that, to plan a spring break road trip together. And then came the unexpected gift: she offered to drive. Support doesn’t always announce itself loudly. Sometimes it shows up casually, generously, and right on time.

I ended the day with one more moment of discovery: a visit to another Thomas Danbo installation. This one was right in my own neighborhood, hidden in plain sight. I had no idea it was there until today, and somehow that felt symbolic too, reminders that wonder can exist close to home, even when we think we already know our surroundings.

What stayed with me most wasn’t any single activity, but the way my time unfolded. I moved through the weekend with intention. I noticed how useful my time felt, not rushed, not wasted, not overextended. Just lived.

Lately, I’m paying attention to how I spend my days, who I share them with, and how I choose myself within them. This weekend felt like alignment, small decisions stacking into something steady and affirming.

Exploration doesn’t always require distance. Sometimes it looks like boarding the bus anyway, taking the walk, saying yes to brunch, or discovering beauty where you already are.

And for now, that feels like enough.

This feels like the beginning of a new phase for me.

Not one defined by urgency or proving, but by presence. By choosing how I move through my days instead of reacting to what’s been handed to me. I’m learning that my life doesn’t need to be loud to be meaningful—it needs to be intentional.

This next phase looks like paying attention. To my body. To my time. To the people who walk alongside me without pulling or pushing. It looks like exploration without pressure, connection without obligation, and momentum that feels sustainable instead of exhausting.

I’m no longer measuring my days by how much I give away, but by how rooted I feel in myself at the end of them. And if this weekend is any indication, I’m heading somewhere steady, curious, and wholly my own.

That feels like a beginning worth honoring.

This season feels less about reinvention and more about reclamation. After years of centering motherhood, survival, and responsibility, I find myself standing in a quieter space, one where I get to ask what I need, what I enjoy, and how I want my days to feel. Daughter. Mother. Me. has always been about holding all of those identities at once, but this chapter asks something new: that I finally make room for myself without apology. This weekend didn’t just fill my time, it reflected a shift. One where my life is no longer on pause, waiting for permission, but unfolding in real time, exactly where I am.

If this resonates, I invite you to pause and check in with yourself. What season are you in right now? What does exploration look like at this stage of your life? Share it—with a friend, in a journal, or in the comments here. We’re allowed to evolve out loud, and none of us has to do it alone.

From Survival to Truth

I no longer shrink myself to fit his version of the story.

He told me he hopes I don’t get in trouble for “lying” to the domestic violence program. In his mind, because he didn’t hit me, there was no abuse. That’s what he clings to. That’s what he throws back at me, as if the absence of bruises erases the years of damage.

But I know better now. Abuse isn’t just a fist. Abuse is the way he controlled the money, the way he isolated me, the way he made me question my own sanity until I couldn’t tell which way was up. It’s the fear that lived in my chest, the shame that kept me quiet, the constant shrinking of myself just to keep the peace.

People don’t see those wounds. They see me standing, functioning, surviving, and they think maybe it wasn’t that bad. Some even question me to my face, or worse, behind my back. But those unseen scars follow me into every part of my life. They shape the way I make decisions, the way I trust (or don’t trust), the way I still fight to believe I’m enough.

So no, I didn’t lie when I asked for help. I told the truth of my experience, even when it felt small compared to what others survived. I told the truth of years lived in survival mode. And asking for support wasn’t deceit, it was survival. It still is.

I didn’t lie to survive. 

I survived to finally tell the truth.

I Am Worthy

Full Circle Moments

There’s a certain weight that comes with watching your child parent—especially when they reach the same age you were when you were trying to hold it all together.

My oldest daughter (33) is now the age I was when I had two toddlers, a teenager, and a husband with a terminal illness, pulling at me in every direction. I see her now, caring for her children, and I can’t help but remember my own chaos, my own lessons, my own growth.

She has one fussing toddler right now, but the exhaustion, the overwhelm, the trying-to-keep-it-all-together, those parts feel familiar. And while I know she’s doing her best, I also know how hard it is to show up fully when you’re carrying pain and just trying to survive.

With her first baby, she may have missed some things, not out of neglect, but because she was hurting. I saw it then. I see it now. And I don’t say it with judgment, only with understanding. Because I’ve been there.

But now, grown. She’s learned. And this baby, “Fuss,” she’s special. Just like my youngest, Syd. There’s something about the youngest, maybe it’s that they come into our lives when we’re wiser, more rooted, more ready to do better. They’re our quiet reminder that we can change. We can break cycles. We can show up differently.

Brooklyn and Sydney, our two youngest girls, hold a sacred place in our legacy. Even their names are stitched with meaning. They are maps. Markers. They speak to places these girls may one day stand in and make a difference.

My hope is simple: that there is no more struggle. That we’ve done the hard work so they don’t have to carry as much. That our pain has paved a smoother path. That love, not survival, guides their way.

This is the legacy I dream of: daughters who mother from a place of healing, not harm. And granddaughters who know their names mean something.

We’re still writing the story. But I’m proud of the women we are becoming.

Berries on the Vine

Things No One Said: Part 2

Cast Aside

No one said that grief wouldn’t be the hardest part.

No one said the real heartbreak might come from the living.

When I became a widow at 35, I expected sorrow. I expected silence at night. I expected missing him.

What I didn’t expect was to be discarded, not just by death, but by family.

I learned my husband had left nothing for the girls, including me. His mom, the named beneficiary, looked at me, when I asked her what she planned to do, and said,

“If he wanted your name there, he would have put it.”

That sentence still haunts me. Not for what it said, but for what it didn’t care about.

I watched her upgrade her home while my daughters and I tried to recover from a hurricane the year before; still missing doors, still patching up what we could. Still broken.

And still I showed up. I forced my children to visit her. I thought proximity might build something back. I thought pretending might make it real.

Until I couldn’t pretend anymore.

It was another trauma, another mother figure casting me aside. It didn’t matter that I had her grandchildren. It didn’t matter what we had been through.

And just like that, the isolation closed in.

I was estranged not only from her, but from my own mother. From my siblings. From his siblings.

1.5 years after becoming a widow, I wasn’t just grieving a husband, I was grieving the whole web that should’ve caught me.

But no one said that part.

No one said that loss could echo louder when you’re still breathing.

From 5 to 50. Fall is coming.

Things No One Said

I became a widow in the dark.

Weeks earlier, I had finally moved out of the FEMA trailer.

It wasn’t a fresh start. It was just another chapter in survival.

No one pulled me to the side and said,

“Are you okay?”

“You don’t have to figure this out alone.”

I made a new partner in the dark, in 2013.

Not with intention, but in response to the weight I was carrying.

One moment of unmatched intimacy, and the direction of my life shifted again.

But not once did someone say,

“Let’s talk.”

“I’ll walk with you through this.”

“I’ll help you see clearly when the world feels blurry.”

No one said,

“You’ve been through enough.”

“You don’t owe anyone your performance of being okay.”

I had a friend who got a luxury car.

She called her friends from the dealership, hype in her voice.

I showed up. In the dark.

I was already behind on what I drove to that lot.

And still, I traded it in.

Left with another debt—26% interest.

No one pulled me aside and asked,

“Why are you doing this?”

“What are you trying to fill?”

People looked at the survivor’s benefits I received for my children and assumed I had it good.

But they didn’t see what it was costing me to stay afloat.

What I was carrying.

What I was trying to unlearn.

It’s taken years for me to admit this:

I didn’t know how to not struggle.

Even when things got better, I’d wait for the ground to drop.

Because that’s what I’d been taught—by experience, not words.

I wonder sometimes—if people from my past ever think about the version of me they encountered.

The one trying to hold it all together.

The one doing what she thought she had to.

The one who needed guidance, not judgment.

Presence, not praise.

There’s so much I wish someone had said.

But now I’m learning how to say it to myself.

And maybe, someone reading this will remember the silence they left behind.

And do better next time—with their sister, their friend, their coworker,

Or the version of themselves they’re still trying to forgive.

Summer 2008, flew my girls to Disney World. Today, I still wear that Coach Fanny pack. Alex still keeps her hair in a bun, Eb keeps tshirts on, and Syd still carries a tote.

If this stirred something in you, let it move you into action.

Be the one who checks in.

The one who sits beside someone in the dark, even if you don’t have the answers.

The one who says, “Let’s talk.”

“I see you.”

“You don’t have to do this alone.”

You don’t need to fix anyone.

But you can choose to show up.

That alone can change a life.

Emotional Living, Not Factual Living

I’ve spent much of my life living by emotions, not facts.

Sometimes I think I’ve only understood the world through scenes from a movie. Real connection? I couldn’t tell you much about that, not from firsthand experience. I’ve never really bonded deeply, not in the way that feels grounding.

But in workspaces and parenting spaces, I became who I am. That’s where I found my rhythm, even when I didn’t know I was dancing. That’s where I found women, real women, who taught me what it meant to be a mother.

From 2008 on, Cindy, Trina, Karen, Dorothy, Sara, and Chris came into my life. We were single mothers raising daughters. That was our connection. We leaned on each other. We grew our children together while still growing ourselves.

Those women didn’t just show me motherhood, they walked it out in front of me, and I took notes with my life.

I tried different paths among them. I was always trying to find myself.

But I wasn’t really focused on me. I was focused on my daughters, making sure they made it further than I ever did.

From 2008 to 2012, I was “adulting” the best way I knew how.

I had community.

Mardi Gras balls. Museums. Zoos. Family moments. Parades. Church outings. Sleepovers.

I had a life.

Cyndi, now, feels like what Trina was to me for the past 40 plus years, familiar presence. A tether.

She has her circle of friends, and while I’m not always in that number, I’ve learned to be okay with that.

I’ve always struggled.

Could people could see something I couldn’t, that I wasn’t really pushing myself to grow. I never asked.

I figure that’s why it was easy for folks to throw me away. I carried so much, too much.

There were times that I was lost in the fog of it all.

And here I am, feeling stuck.

I’ve got to get out.

I whisper it every day:

Dear Lord, let me be not only awake… but aware.

Because for so long it was me and my girls.

Then me and Matthew.

Now… I just want it to be me.

It’s never really been just me.

But I want that now.

Dear Lord, guide me.

While I’m here, the truth is, I’m not really into books. Much of anything, really. I do things just to be doing something.

To seem relevant. To feel like I belong somewhere. I want to belong.

Sometimes I buy books just to say I have them. There’s one playing in my ear right now, something about reconstruction.

It’s like my little girl with her jumbo puzzle book for plane rides. Or my other little girl already prepared with her book before takeoff.

Is that what they got from me.

Hmph. I’m just now seeing that.

This is what emotional living looks like.

Not factual living.

But I’m learning.

I’m waking up.

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

Breaking the Cycle: What I Thought Was Love, Was Survival

For much of my life, I mistook endurance for strength and acts of service for love. I didn’t grow up knowing what healthy looked like, so I learned to accept pain, imbalance, and emotional labor as the cost of being in relationship. But what I’ve come to realize is this: love should not leave you depleted.

I spent years in partnerships where rest was one-sided. Where I worked multiple jobs, carried the emotional and financial weight of the day, and still came home to someone announcing they were “off to take a nap.” As if I didn’t need one too.

There was a time I thought cooking daily meals, showing up in routines, and simply staying put was enough to define love. But love isn’t duty. It isn’t simply doing the same thing over and over again. And it surely isn’t one person doing the heavy lifting while the other calls it “support.”

That wasn’t love. That was survival – dressed up as loyalty, normalized through generations, and rooted in unhealed wounds.

But I’ve grown tired of mistaking dysfunction for familiarity. I’ve decided to break the cycle.

I no longer crave partnership for the sake of not being alone. I’m not interested in proving my worth through exhaustion. I’m not impressed by performative gestures that lack emotional presence.

What I want is peace.

Peace that doesn’t require performance.

Rest that doesn’t come with guilt.

Presence that doesn’t cost me my self-worth.

This is my new tradition – and I will not apologize for choosing it.

If you’re reading this and it resonates, you’re not alone. Peace is possible—and you’re worthy of it.