Rebecca Grows Up (At 40)

My mother. At times she was my best friend and at other times, she was my worst enemy. It took me a long time to decipher what was going on between us. As I got older, I realized I had to take what she told me with a large bag of salt. You see, it was always about her.

Your early years are the ones that shape your identity. And with just a single parent as my main communicator and nurturer, my mother inevitably shaped my relationship with the world and with myself. I knew from an early age that there was something wrong, but was too young to identify it let alone find the solution. By my teenage years, I had worked out the dynamics of our relationship and had started to realize how it was shaping my mind and my character. However, knowing something about a problem, and effectively doing something about it, are two quite different things. It took me another twenty years to not only define how I had been shaped, but what it meant, and how I could change it to be the woman I wanted to be. Hence, "Rebecca Grows Up".

The journey has been enlightening and ultimately freed me to be the person I choose to be, not the person whom I had been trained to be. I finally took charge of my life and it has been an incredibly liberating journey. Almost all of us face the same problem. We are shaped by our early years, intentionally or otherwise, by the roles we play, the behaviors we observe and the relationships that force us into narratives about ourselves. Then later, we have the chance to become the people we are really meant to be through our consciousness, choices and courage. I want to share my journey because in one way or another, there's also a good chance that it's your journey, too.