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What About Me (WAM) is a space for healing the inner child, finding your voice, and reclaiming your power. Join host Emma as she shares her journey of self-discovery and invites others to speak up, stand up, and heal from the inside out.
There are moments in life when everything you believed about love, family, relationships, and safety falls apart. My name is Emma, and I am your host.
Speaker 2:On the What About Me podcast, my guests and I will share reflections, conversations, and insights drawn from real experiences and share our journeys of rebuilding life after trauma. Welcome to What About Me? And yes, it is finally about you. Hello everyone. Welcome to this week episode.
Speaker 2:I am so happy you're here. I don't think I had my son for the reasons most people have children. I just need to talk to someone about this. It's been weighing so heavily on my mind. You see, at 23 years old, I became convinced that I was gonna grow old alone.
Speaker 2:I don't know where that certainty came from. It wasn't logical, like there was nothing that was happening that would indicate something like that. It wasn't based on anything someone told me. It was simply there. And it was terrified.
Speaker 2:Ever since I was a little girl, all I ever wanted was to become a wife and a mother. Well, no, I take that back. That was one of the things that I wanted. I felt like in my freedom, in my living a life outside of isolation that I could have that. Remember, my biggest longing was to have someone who cared, who loved me, for me.
Speaker 2:If I couldn't guarantee one, maybe I still could have the other. So I made a decision. At 23 years old, with two broken relationships, and I made the decision to have a child. It was unheard of. I decided that I would become a mother.
Speaker 2:Notice what happened. We were already emotionally connected before the pregnancy. Looking back now, I know that wasn't a healthy reason to bring a child into the world. I wasn't choosing motherhood because I simply wanted to nurture another life. I was trying to protect myself from a future where no one chose me.
Speaker 2:That reality, it hits like a truck. Every decision I made, every sacrifice, every overtime shift, every move, every hard decision and conversation, every dream centered around one thing, giving my son a better life than I had. The sentence summarizes my heart. Here's the part that's hard for me to admit. Our relationship, it wasn't perfect before the estrangement.
Speaker 2:I wanted it to be, but it wasn't. My son had always been emotionally distant. I have always been emotionally expressive. I craved hugs, words of affirmation, affection, connection. Those things never came naturally for him.
Speaker 2:So I spent years trying to teach him what love looked like. Unfortunately, I think I was probably trying to teach him my love language. And if any of us know, our love language is our love language. We can't teach somebody else. We can share with them what our love language or languages are and hope that they will care enough about us and support that and vice versa, we should learn what theirs are so that we can support that.
Speaker 2:That's what building a health relationship looks like. But I continue to hope that one day he would naturally give back. This is vulnerable. It doesn't blame. It doesn't justify.
Speaker 2:It just lets me sit in the memory of what a mother's heart, of what my heart had hoped for. I recalled one conversation with my son. We were having a disagreement and I said something to him. I said, Honey, I know you. And he said, I have not lived with you for over seven years.
Speaker 2:You do not know me. And I try to minimize that comment over the years, but the longer this estrangement continue, the truer that statement is becoming. As much as it hurts, I have started to acknowledge that he was right. I realized I had spent years loving the son I hoped he would become instead of fully seeing the man he already was. But then the silence continues.
Speaker 2:Weeks has turned into months and months have became years. I finally understood something I hadn't just lost my son. I had lost the future I had spent thirty years imagining. The future where we'd celebrate birthdays, holidays, grandchildren, Sunday phone calls, random text messages growing old together. That future disappeared overnight.
Speaker 2:That's where my heart hurts every single day. During my process of healing, I found an article about estrangement and it talked about respecting boundaries, low pressure contact, processing grief and focusing on your own life instead of chasing someone who has chosen distance. And as I read it, I realized something, without knowing it, I had already begun doing those things. Now the article supports my journey. It does give me hope that I am doing what I should have been doing for myself a long time, actually standing up and taking care of myself, but most importantly, directing my energy and expectation on others in the hope that they will complete my life.
Speaker 2:I still love my son. I probably always will. If one day he chooses to walk back into my life, my doors are open, but I will never again abandon myself while waiting for someone else to choose me, not even my only child. That little girl who spent her childhood believing she wasn't enough, that she doesn't run her own life today, I am choosing me, not because of Stop Loving My Son, no. I am choosing me because I have finally learned how to love myself just as fiercely as I had loved him.
Speaker 2:What about me today? I finally have an answer, me. Thank you everyone for joining me this week. Have an amazing week.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If anything you heard resonated with you, if it made you pause, reflect, or feel a little less alone, know that you are in the right place. I am so happy you're here. Join me again as we continue to share in honest heartfelt conversations about self love, abandonment, trauma, and the countless ways that these experiences shape our lives and relationships. To stay up to date on new episodes, subscribe and follow on Apple, Spotify, Audible, or anywhere you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1:Please consider leaving a review as it helped others who are hurting find this community and discover that healing is possible. Additional resources and my contact information are included in the show notes. This is What About Me? And yes, it is finally about you.