Author: theendangeredmamabehr

Fear has been such an enormous part of my life.  I can remember my first nightmare when I was a toddler.  It involved the devil, hell, and being poked on the feet with a pitch fork.  It can’t be too much of a shocker that the message that God is love and loves us unconditionally was lost in fear.  So much of my religious upbringing was based in fire and brimstone and control via fear tactics.  I truly believe that by the time I received this message, (circa 1980-something) it was a deeply rooted belief.  Despite why it was started, how it started, or even who started this type of religious experience, I believe those that taught it to me were so ingrained in this way of life that it wasn’t meant to be harmful.  Yet, it was extremely harmful to me.  It led to self-hatred, extreme anger, and intense/overwhelming/all-encompassing fear that lasted for decades.  I am 41 now.  I am still working on ridding fear from life, soul and mind.  As I wrote in my prior blog, I am learning to love myself.  This means that I must learn to love the fear within me.  I love it for the time that it served me well.  It helped me make safe choices as a teen and young adult.  But, FEAR – YOU ARE NOT MY FRIEND ANYMORE.

There is a season for everything.  My season for a fear-ridden life is over.  Bye, Fearlicia!  I refuse to live with fear any longer.  I rebuke the idea that I have to please people to make them like/love me.  I don’t need fear to make smart, safe and healthy choices.  In fact, fear drives me to make choices that are NOT smart, safe and healthy.  Instead, it leads me to worry and anxiety which drives erratic, dangerous, and damaging choices.  I will not live in fear.  I will live in love instead.  Love for God, others and myself.

The first step in learning to do this, will be to discover the fear that sits deeply below the levels of happy, sad, anger, resentment, and the list goes on and on.  So, what am I afraid of? I am going to take 30 seconds to write out a list and I am going to promise myself that I won’t edit it.  I believe this will be a start to listing my real fears.  Here goes…

• Being caught as a Poser or Fake (when I am acting confident)
• Being seen as poor, messy, trashy or gross
• Being beautiful or sexual and not knowing how to handle it
• Being too much and not enough – simultaneously
• Being too loud
• Being too sensitive

I would say that about covers it.  These are my deep fears.  Now, I’d like to dissect each of these and figure out how they manifested themselves in the way I navigate my daily life.

Being seen as a Poser or Fake when I am acting confident – Here’s my dilemma:  I am writing this, but probably won’t market it in any way after I publish it.  Why?  Because my co-workers, Leadership, and potential Leaders are on my social media accounts.  In corporate America, there is so much positive emphasis put on confidence and in my experience, when you are vulnerable and/or do not show confidence, the outcome is not in your favor.  In fact, I have seen confidence lead to promotions, raises, positive perceptions, credibility, reliability, etc.  I’ve also seen the lack of confidence do quite the opposite.  As a big fan of Brene Brown, I believe that vulnerability is where growth begins.  And I love that even in the face of corporate personas, I have committed to myself that I would choose vulnerability over both acting confident and/or believing that I am a poser or faker.

Being seen as poor, messy, trashy or gross – I grew up on the low socio-economic side of life.  My Dad supported the family as a grocery store chain butcher.  My Mom was home when we were little, worked odd jobs here and there, and eventually began teaching again.  After Mom went back to work as a teacher, financially life was much easier for my family.  But being aware that our neighborhood was mostly poorer people, I had the fear that the kids at school would realize that I was poor, trashy, or gross.  I felt this way really young.  And as an adult, even though we have a nicer home in a nicer neighborhood, I am afraid if I don’t keep my home picked up that my secret that I am gross will be seen.  This fear makes my heart hurt.  It hurts because if I feel this way about myself, how can I ever show true love and kindness to someone who may be poor or messy.  Prior to our adoption, my daughter grew up in extreme poverty.  The only way that I can build her up to being her true self and not defined by her early childhood circumstances is to learn to love this in myself.  I choose to love the poor as it showed me adversity and that I could rise above.  I choose to love the messy as it means that I won’t obsess over perfection as it is just an illusion anyway.  I choose to love the trashy and/or gross because this is no longer driving or motivating me to finish school and get a good job.  I have a good job, I’ve proven this to myself and I choose to accept it and smash those old fear tapes that play on repeat in the back of my mind. As a parent, I see how offensive the core of this is towards my parents and how hard they worked so that we never went without. Yuck, this has allowed me to view this in a whole, new light.  This one may be easier than I thought to release.

Being beautiful or sexual and not knowing how to handle it – What a gross beast we as women share with this one.  I will be damned if I will let this fear continue.  I have the most gorgeous daughter (inside and out) and I will not continue with this fear because it’s too important that my child learn that she is beautiful and sexual and that it is normal, healthy and Godly.  (If you don’t believe me on it being Godly, take a quick read through the Song of Solomon.)  This fear was put on me by society and some women in my life.  I say no, nope, not happening … I am holding my fist in the air to resist this crap … End of story.

Being too much and not enough – simultaneously and also being too loud and too sensitive – This fear is upheld by some people in my life now.  I am an extrovert, I am talkative, I gravitate to the center of attention some times, more often than not.  I am sensitive.  I take things too personally sometimes.  I am an empathetic person.  I see this worry in my son.  He’s also extroverted and talkative and these same judgmental jerks shush him, too.  After the jerks are confronted, they always say we’re being too sensitive, (because this is what jerks say so they don’t have to take an personal responsibility for being jerks).  Seeing this in my child revs up the Mama Behr in me.  Back (the #$%&) off  of my cub or I will claw your ($%^&*#@) eyes out.  What if I looked myself as a Mama Behr looking at her cub?  It makes my heart soften to my little girl self.  It makes me want to scoop my little self up and hold her and tell her she’s perfect being her perfectly imperfect self. In Emma, by Jane Austen, she says:  “Perhaps it is our imperfections that make us so perfect for one another.” These jerks are not MY people.  That’s ok because they have their people. I’ll have mine.  And they don’t need to be the same.  So, I’ll learn to love this part of myself as it leads me to my people – the perfectly, imperfect ones that are like me, my son, and my whole perfectly, imperfect family!

This activity has been really healing for me.  I feel a release just writing it all down.  Mama Behr out – for today!

I am learning to love myself.  The good, the bad, and the ugly … that’s what I am supposed to love.  I am pretty good at loving the bad and ugly.  I do self deprecation at mastery levels.  In fact, it’s even shown up on my work evaluations – more than once.  I have had a lifetime of pointing out my flaws to others, all in an effort to beat them to the punch.  I suppose I thought that if I could say:  “Hey, but about this second stomach…” Then I could be in control of the thought that this girl is not perfect.  In general, my approach is met with laughter as the “comic” is the my most comfortable persona.

However, I have been on a several year journey to stop the unhealthy patterns in my life and eliminate the junk that isn’t serving me well.  And currently I am reading a book that is telling me that if I learn to love myself, (and I mean REALLY love myself) that I will be able to live life fully and truly experience life.  I am not sure if this makes me want to barf or do an excitement cartwheel.  I think a little bit of both.  And I feel confident that a cartwheel of any kind would likely end in a barfing sequence, so I guess that works itself out!

So, if we think about that statement “I need to love myself”, what does it even mean?  It means that instead of beating anyone to the punch with my self deprecation, I need to learn to love the parts of me that I need to control.  (Here comes that barf…) That’s hard to do.  For more than 40 years, I have had my go-to methods and I am not sure how easy it’ll be to change these very established behaviors.  But, I am going to try.  I am going to try to learn to love myself through imperfections, lots of junk, a really tired mind and body, and all the other things that I carry around each day.  And I am going to use this blog to write about it.

Sometimes it feels really lonely in the Mama Behr world.  The messages I receive, especially from social media, is that “parents these days” are less than because our kids are not outdoors like we were as kids.  However, in subsequent posts the same folks will complain if they see a group of kids in the alley ways.  Another camp of adults will believe that our world is so dangerous that if you dare let your children play outside without a constant overseer, then the only logical next steps are to call Child Protective Services on you as clearly you are a terrible, unfit parent.  Mixed messages are received on what it means to be a good parent and frankly, it is maddening.

My husband and I have considered ourselves “free range parents”, however studying this further (just like almost every word in our vernacular) it can mean many different things, to many different people.  We defined “free range” as giving our children a longer leash to learn the natural consequences of life.  We used the principals of “Love and Logic” https://www.loveandlogic.com/ as our guide and found it to be successful for us and our family.  (Albeit NOT easy!) We have since realized that “free range” can be viewed as many things including the following:

• 1980’s style parents (check)
• Fewer rules than other families (check)
• Sometimes children without t-shirts or shoes on in the yard (check)
• Occasional chaos (check)
• Constant chaos with no rules (hard pass)

Now I realize how the term can have implications that I was completely unaware existed.  When our son’s teacher came to eat dinner with us, she said she was surprised by the atmosphere at our house because we had explained that we were “free range parents”.  I was surprised by that comment, (not in any way offended, just taken a little back.)  We eat dinner at our dining room table every night.  We each get a turn to tell the best and worst parts of our day with each other.  We are rarely allowed to leave the table until we are all done eating and certainly until we are done speaking.  We have great conversations with each other and often end the conversations with our youngest daughter’s fantastical stories of her day, (which often includes unicorns and rainbows, but were actually spent with her friends at daycare).  I now realize that this term may have conjured visions of dirty kids running around with matches and sharp objects.  Dirty kids – um, yep …. got ’em sometimes!  Matches and sharp objects – sometimes, but please allow me to clarify.  We let our kids explore things they are curious about.  However, there are strict rules and expectations with these such as a match or lighter is something that is only used with a parent around.  But I believe in teaching them the correct way to hold matches, how to light them, and all the rules around what can be set on fire and what can not, (i.e. a candle on the counter can be lit and a piece of paper can not.)  You can have a pocket knife, but you have to learn how to handle it and to be incredibly careful with it.  Of course, our son picked up his pocket knife and had a small cut within the first 30 seconds.  That said, he learned a vital lesson. We saw this as a natural consequence. I understand this may be the most horrifying to some parents. And I have to be ok with that.

I want to say that I am terrified to post this to my blog. I am worried that I will be opening myself to harsh judgements on my parenting and my choices. But something in me needs to fight through the fear and be brave, (thanks Brene-you have inspired me like no other!) Please be kind in your comments. 🙂