A bit about me

Thanks for joining me!

I grew up on a farm in Southwestern Ontario. In many ways, I had an idyllic childhood. I was lucky; I had a loving family. My parents were role models who taught my younger brother and me that marriage was hard work, but you could make it through even the most challenging times if you put in the effort. We didn’t have much extra money, but we were never without and always made to feel special. Living on a farm, I probably learned earlier than most what it took to work together as a team to get the day’s work done so we could relax and spend time together as a family. To this day, I bet I can muck a stall faster than most, even if I’m wearing heels - and just ask my husband what happens when a bull gets out his pen and I need to round him up. The truth is, I’m not sure how that experience didn’t send him running. Imagine a 5-foot-4 (and a bit) young woman standing in front of a bull weighing a solid 1200lbs with nothing but a steel rod to use to help move him. A particular pinging sound happens when you hit a bull between his eyes. Needless to say, I got the bull back in his pen.

My brother and I had a love-hate relationship, as many siblings do. Living in the country without cable TV, we learned to use our imagination. When we were younger, it was pretty benign. We made hay and straw forts in the barns and played Dukes of Hazards (riding bikes rather than driving cars, of course). As we got older, our imagination became more advanced. We would climb one of the cedar trees that lined the laneway to see who could bend the top of the tree over the farthest. We were both above average in terms of intelligence - I was in a gifted program at school, and my brother was forced to repeat an IQ test because the principal thought he cheated. To be fair to the principal, my brother does have dyslexia, and in the early 1980’s it was assumed you were a “slow learner” when any form of learning disability was diagnosed.

Simply put, we were a dangerous pair. If we thought of it, we successfully executed it, including making gasoline bombs using old prescription bottles and intricate boobytraps. I wanted to qualify that nothing ever caught anything on fire when we threw the bombs out of my brother’s bedroom window. We managed to escape my dad’s wrath when we let a pile of manure free from its precarious perch - an old gate door placed strategically above the entrance to the feed room. The manure landed precisely as we planned, smack dab on the top of his head.

As a child, teen, and adult, if I set my sights on doing something, I did it. I liked to push boundaries. I could also be reckless; to this day, I rarely shy away from a dare. I’m a Taurus. I’m stubborn. I’m not very good at doing what I am told, unless you provide the why and there had better be enough detail to make me agree that what you’re suggesting is the right thing to do. I’m a perfectionist who sometimes sets impossibly high standards for myself. I am never satisfied with just ‘good’ and assume others expect the same from me.

But most of all, I have a big heart, and when I feel things, it can be overwhelming. Eventually, my façade was going to crack. Ultimately, the need and drive to be the perfect wife, mother and employee would become too great a weight to bear. As the saying goes, hindsight is twenty-twenty. I wish I had acted on my feelings that day a few years ago when a meeting with an executive coach sparked my inkling that I might need a therapist. If I had been more receptive to that thought, I could have prevented myself from hitting rock bottom.

Originally published on October 24, 2020 (https://girlintheredhatblog.wordpress.com/)