Brave Enough To Be Bliss

Chapter 2 — Blessing God, Being Blessed, Blessing Others

“As we work to create light for others, we naturally light our own way.” Mary Anne Radmacher

I have worked extremely hard in my career, but I have also been compensated very well and I am aware that is not the case for everyone who works just as hard. This is another way that life isn’t always fair. I want you to know I am aware of that fact and realize how fortunate I am. It may not have been enough, but I have always tried to be generous in my personal and professional life. And as a leader I have advocated for increases in employee compensation and/or benefits, looked for and instituted cost savings measures organizationally to support those increases, developed employee appreciation programs, and supported and provided leadership training. Money isn’t everything, but the stress of not having enough of it for basic human needs can create an overwhelming amount of stress. And when one is in a financial hole, it can be very difficult to climb out of it. There are a variety of reasons people struggle financially, but just like with everything in life, I don’t feel it is my place to judge anyone else whether they have nothing or they have everything. I just try to help where I can, hoping to help make people’s lives healthier and happier whenever I have the chance. As parents, I think my husband and I were like many in our generation, and we intentionally set out to give our child everything we didn’t have growing up , thinking that was a good thing. And in some ways, it was. We were physically and emotionally present with her. We told her the words, “I love you,” multiple times every day. We expressed physical affection, holding her hand, cuddling on the couch, hugging, and kissing her. We had fun and laughed with her. We were balanced in having rules and also allowing her freedom to make choices and experience the consequences. We tried hard not to shame her when she did something wrong. As an adult, however, I have seen how difficult it has been for her to realize how much things really cost. We didn’t make her save for the things she wanted. We might make her wait for a holiday or birthday, but most often, if she wanted something reasonable, we gave it to her and justified it because she was a well-behaved, respectful, thoughtful, and helpful daughter. We just weren’t thinking about how that wouldn’t help her as she transitioned into adulthood. She did take a class in high school that was extremely helpful to her in better understanding money, interest, banking, etc. And after the divorce, I earned enough income on my own to provide our housing, food, etc., so I had the child support deposited into a checking account for her to manage and pay for her gas, clothes, any food outside the home and into a savings account for college. It gave her experience at managing her expenses prior to being away from home and an opportunity for us to discuss budgeting and spending. I have heard her indicate she is going to do things differently for her future children, though, so that tells me we leaned too far on the giving. Perhaps her generation will swing back and land in the middle, which I think is the healthier place for parents to be. Making children work for everything they get, including attention and love, because that’s the way we were raised is one end of the spectrum . Giving children everything because we were expected to be little adults and work for everything is the other end of the spectrum. I’m hopeful that the next generation of children will have parents who land in the healthy middle. While these are sweeping generalizations and there are certainly exceptions, I can now look at the generation that raised us and have compassion for them not knowing anything differently and thinking they were doing the right thing, and for my generation as well, thinking we were doing better by giving so much. I have a theory that the people who say life is flying by are overall pretty happy people, but for people like I was who really don’t want to be alive, life goes by very slowly. It always made me feel like there was something terribly wrong with me when someone would say how fast life was going, and all I could do was wish I felt the same way. But it felt like life had already been quite lengthy, and I was just so tired.

While I never actually had any specific plan in place for suicide again, it was just an ongoing thought that it would be nice to be taken out. I didn’t really care how it went down; anything would do. I just wanted this long

324