Navigating Being a New Mother, Entrepreneur, and fighting for my mental health.
Being an Entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. Heck being a mother isn’t either.
Most of my friends and people I know had their kids in their 20s. My brothers, nephew (crazy, right, but my half-brother is older than me by 20 years), and parents. So I am left to navigate being a new mother in my 30s without much insight into what it's like to be a mom in my 30s.
I spent my 20s chasing. Chasing unrealistic dreams, chasing a high that would never satisfy me, chasing destinations to nowhere, chasing just for the sake of it.
Having a child was never on my list of things to do. Working for myself was in my mind, but it wasn’t something I was pursuing myself. It wasn’t something I was capable of doing. I would change directions as much as I would breathe. So many dreams, but I lacked the stability in my life to follow through. I was filled with anger, anxieties, depression, and doubts. I never felt that I was enough.
It didn’t matter that I was able to have a thriving career in technology. I couldn’t hold down a solid relationship with anyone. I couldn’t even hold down a positive relationship with myself. Thankfully my friendships were solid. My friends were there through it all.
So what changed in me? What changed to where I could get married, have a child, and build a company?
Me. What changed was me. I had to search inside of myself to make changes that I didn’t believe were possible. The reflection I did had to come from a dark place. I went to a place where it was so dark that I promise you a flicker of light or even a spark of hope could have been considered a hallucination in my mind.
I found myself in a dark place. This dark place was when I got to the top of my career in Tech. I was a Sr Infrastructure Consultant. I was able to design systems for companies, travel, work with teams, have access to get all the certifications I could have wanted. People looked up to me and came to me for advice on how to get things done. I wasn’t the best out there, but I had enough to where my career was really taking off.
I got to travel around Europe to tech conferences on my own dime. I was really making it. Then, I got to live in a hacker house in San Francisco. I moved back to DC and was able to take vacations in Mexico. I finally lived in a luxury loft in the city. I had everything I thought I could want. This is where my breakdown started.
My Father died in 2017 on Fathers day. I had no intentions of calling him. I didn’t know how I felt about things or how to deal with my emotions about him. He was there, and sometimes he wasn’t. Most times, when I would visit him, he would find ways not even to be around. I was able to see him not even a year before he died. Regardless of how I felt about the relationship, I tried to make an effort to build a connection. I didn’t know-how. I couldn’t even navigate a real relationship with myself; how could I navigate one with my own father, who appeared to not want one with me?
Well, in 2017, it was too late. One of the last conversations I had with him was that I planned to move to NY next ( I did, however get a job in Manhattan. The first fell through, and that’s a story I will get into another time)
When he died, he left a bunch of documents. These documents were about my Mother. The divorce and everything that was going on when I was a child.
Now mind you, at this point, I am in my 30s. I had suffered mental health issues for years. I had doctors tell me that I had PTSD from childhood trauma. I couldn’t pin down what it was or where it came from.
I have a toxic mother.
Someone who wanted to control me. Someone who didn’t want to see me do well. Just well enough and never better than me. She would make friends with my friends to talk negatively about me. She would befriend my boyfriends to be the intermediate between them and me and tell them I have “mental” issues. She would share my personal information with people I knew through passing. Basically, she would try to interject herself into parts of my life to tear me down to people around me. I was also letting her.
When you are a child, you grow up in an environment where someone has a push-pull relationship. When they would put you down and make jokes and poke fun and tell you that you have issues, after a while, you start to believe the things that they tell you. You start to believe you are the things they make you out to be. Not that you are becoming these things because of how they are towards you.
This carried with me. It carried with me to the point where I was drowning my sorrows in alcohol. I was drowning myself in everything I believed I was. It didn’t matter what I achieved. It was never good enough for me. I couldn’t be happy because anytime I shared the happy news with my mother, someone I thought I could trust, she would find a way to tear that joy away from me. The realization came to me after my father passed. He fought for me as a child and let the courts know that she would constantly scream and mistreat us. The courts, like usual, ruled in the mothers' favor.
So I took what my father left to heart. I took it and realized that many of my toxic behaviors came from trying to survive a toxic environment. I had to search real deep because everything I had in my life wasn’t bringing me joy. I was chasing an image. Not a passion. I had to let it all go. I had to let my addictions go; I had to let the career that was just an image go; I had to let go of what I believed love should be because I wasn’t taught a healthy way of what that should look like. Now, none of this was as easy as I am writing it. I am just explaining what happened mentally to me to make the switch. There was a lot of therapy involved, and the thoughts and realizations didn’t come overnight. I had to chase it. I had to seek it out the same way I sought out my toxic behaviors.
I had to chase my own redemption because no one could do it for me. They couldn’t outline it for me. So my Journey was mine alone.
So what is it like trying to navigate this new world being a new mom? First, realizing that my own mom took out her issues on me and caused me damage.
It’s nerve-racking but filled with hope. Joyous and beautiful
What’s it like building a company in a difficult economy?
It's nerve-racking but filled with hope. It gives me drive and fuels my passion and ambitions.
What’s it like to be a wife?
It’s like I am still learning to love myself, but I know I am no longer alone.
So here’s to 2020 and learning myself on this new Journey
Meka Couch ❤
