Katherine Baldwin
The moment I understood that my life was always going to turn out this way, my healing could truly begin.
I’m a perfectionist, you see, and I have a fierce inner critic.
My default belief is that I can’t get anything right and that everything is my fault – messages that took root in my childhood, when it was safer to believe that I was in the wrong rather than accept that my parents weren’t up to the task of caring for me.
Naturally, then, I gave myself a hard time for ending up as a 40-something, childless, single woman with a string of broken relationships behind her and a career she’d fallen out of love with.
You’ve made terrible choices, I told myself.
If only you’d done things differently, then your life would be the fairy tale that you’d dreamt of – with a husband, a couple of kids and a white picket fence.
Now, at 53, with a wonderful partner by my side but with zero kids and no picket fence in sight, I can see the whole picture.
I can understand how and why my life ended up like this and I can let myself off the hook, because with my childhood, this was how things were going to turn out.
I was always going to be ambivalent about motherhood after growing up with a mum who, I sensed, regretted having kids and who struggled to stay afloat, financially and emotionally, as a single parent.
How could I be anything but ambivalent about taking a similar path (because I assumed I’d end up in the same boat)? The message I took away was that motherhood equalled misery and that freedom and joy lay outside family life. But for years, I didn’t know this was how I felt because the message was lodged deep in my subconscious.
And I was always going to battle to find, form and maintain a healthy romantic relationship after hearing my parents say they should never have got married, after knowing they’d had affairs and after seeing their marriage fall apart.
Experience is the architect of the brain and those early life experiences led to self-harming patterns and attachment issues in my romantic relationships.
How could they not? But again, I wasn’t aware of this for years. I was bemused about my disastrous love life.
This isn’t to say that I am a victim. I believe in agency. I believe in taking responsibility for my life. And I believe in our power to transform.
But some wounds run deep, and they take a long time to heal.
It’s taken me twenty years to get to this point: to overcome a binge eating disorder, to stop the cycle of self-harm and to change my unhealthy relationship patterns, starting with my relationship with myself.
Over that period, I’ve lost two parents and grieved broken dreams, whilst also finding love and healing through a marriage I never thought would happen.
Miracles have come to pass, and I deserve to celebrate them and then continue to change what I can, rather than give myself a hard time for what has gone before.
This is my challenge today: to like who I am and to want what I have, rather than stay in regret and self-recrimination – to stay present to my life as it is, rather than get stuck in the ‘what if’.
It’s not always easy but it’s so much easier if I can accept that my life turned out like this because of factors outside my control – because of the adverse conditions I grew up in.
It’s so much easier if I can accept that I did the best I could with the knowledge and the tools that I had at the time.
It’s so much easier if I can celebrate the strong, courageous, emotionally intelligent and determined woman I am and the remarkable resilience I have shown.
And it’s so much easier if I can continue to shower myself with kindness and compassion, rather than berate myself or beat myself up.
Self-acceptance – it’s a powerful and empowering force.
It accelerates our healing and it turbo-charges our growth.
It’s a gift we can give ourselves, every day.
I promise to give myself this gift, to the best of my ability.
