The Evolution of a Confident Woman: Making Fear Your Bitch

When I got married, I truly thought it was going to be forever. Maybe that’s not true. Maybe something inside me understood that I was marrying the wrong person. There were clues…..many, many clues. The fact that he couldn’t let a woman pass in the street without turning his head to really check her out. I mean, who does that? An even better question is: Who puts up with that? The fact that he once told me that he didn’t love me the same way that he had loved a previous girlfriend. “I mean I do love you but with her it was different. You and I don’t have that same chemistry.” Who sticks around after someone says that?

I did. I stuck around for a very long time because I didn’t know any better. I didn’t understand that it was totally disrespectful to be holding your girlfriend’s hand while trying to make eye contact with the woman walking toward you. I didn’t understand that telling someone that he loved an ex with more passion was his way of saying, “You’re not the one.” Or maybe I did understand but I was so desperate to be part of a couple, a wife, a significant other that I just kept trying harder. I truly felt that I could morph into someone that he would feel passionately about. Instead of his words being a warning, I turned them into some sick, unwinnable challenge. “I can make him see how great I am. I can make him love me.”

After we were married and had children it became a whole new different set of fears centered around the fear of breaking my family apart. I had been raised by a single mother and I knew how difficult it would be. I didn’t want that for my children. So I stayed. I kept making excuses and I stayed through the many affairs, through the emotional abuse, through the controlling, through the bullying. I stayed until I felt that my children were old enough to survive a divorce. I worried about them being alone with him on weekends. He wasn’t always nice to them and a part of me always felt like I needed to protect them. Nothing physical. He just wasn’t a warm and fuzzy dad. He bullied the kids into submission. “Stupid.” “Lazy.” “Worthless.” All words that he casually threw at our kids with no understanding of what it was doing to them.

Twenty-five years, two children and one divorce later things are crystal clear. I have met, engaged, wrestled, pinned and conquered my fear. I made fear my bitch. I started respecting and loving myself and understanding my own value as a woman, a wife, a mother, a friend and a human being. If the “Today Me” met the “1990 Him” she would have walked right by him. She wouldn’t even notice him.

As I got healthy, so did my children. We found therapists that we felt comfortable with and went every week, sometimes twice a week. For my part, I put in the work and really dug deep to try to figure out why I put up with such a schmuck for so long. I now understand how my upbringing created the weak woman that I was but I refuse to let that be my excuse or crutch. Every day I do something to strengthen myself and make myself a better woman. Not for any other reason but because I can.

Things are good now. My children are grown and away at college. I have a great career, the best friends a gal could ask for, my health, my peace and happiness. Best of all, I live unafraid. I voice my opinion and speak my mind. I don’t calculate my worth on whether there is a man in my life. There currently isn’t but only because I haven’t found someone who deserves me…..yet.