I Think I'm Living the Wrong Life

Around 2015, I began waking up to an awareness that there were systems of power in this world that I hadn't created but that were holding me back just the same. 

I was a wife, mama and Deep South Christian woman who had always been a bit inquisitive, but who still wanted to work the systems to create successful and positive change at home, at work, at church, and within. 

Starting a private blog, I began to work out my thoughts online. But after a couple of years, I grew frustrated because I felt directionless. 

Have you ever wondered if you’re living the wrong life?

For twenty years, I hopped on and off the education train. I would take a teaching job, work anywhere from 1-4 years, quit, try to be a stay-at-home mom, get bored, attempt other careers, fail miserably, then return to education.

Sound familiar?

The problem wasn’t that I hated teaching or that I didn’t like children. It was that I despised the various agendas behind educating children in America–a conversation that will someday be a post of its own.

It didn’t matter the system, either. I attended and taught at public schools, but I also taught at the “Christian” schools across the Deep South, started around the time of integration, bussing, and removing the Bible and prayer from public schools. 

I spent a season homeschooling my children and even worked a few years at a classical Christian school.

Both before and after this position, I had traveled down various other career paths when on a break from teaching. I loved to write so I tried freelancing and self-publishing. I liked to visit antique stores, so I opened a booth. Then there was a two-summer stint with a snowball trailer that cost me boocoodles of money–and led to a season I call “the dark night of my soul.”

That trailer became an albatross that revealed my true intentions on starting businesses and failing massively: every choice I was making in my life, not only in my career, but in marriage, in parenting–even in faith–was an attempt at pleasing other people. 

I lived in the land of shoulda woulda coulda, too afraid to live a life that made me happy because I was trying so hard to be like everyone else.

I wanted my own business, on my own terms, that complemented the life I already loved, which was being there for my traveling salesman husband and our four kids and tending to our home and our animals.

Now, before you roll your eyes because you think I’m about to girl boss you or tell you how to live your best life by joining my downline, let me assure you: this is not that kind of podcast.

I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t live a glorious life. I live an incredibly normal life, and just between us? I love it. I’m not looking for cash, clout, or even community.

But I have learned a thing or two in life, and my guess is, you have too. And I bet if you thought about it, you could figure out one or two or even three things that could help you live a life you love by putting a little extra cash in your pockets.

Or maybe you’ve already discovered a life you love. You have a job that makes you happy (or at least, satisfied), and you’re doing well. But there are lifelong beliefs you’re starting to unfold and that’s why you're still reading. 

Whichever it is (or if it’s both), I’m glad you clicked on my blog.

In childhood, I was the circler, amazingly, despite having a mom who couldn’t have cared less if I fit in. But she was also the mom who sewed costumes to pay for me to dance and cleaned trailers for me to take piano, and who sweet talked the convertible dealer so I could ride on the back of the car as the local pageant winner of my city.

I was the girl who bounced from group to group, never quite feeling like I fit in anywhere. In college, I used substances and outer looks to socialize. And as an adult, when I couldn’t find my place among the mommy groups, I took to social media to find community, but after about a decade of posting and scrolling, I realized that social media was just another avenue for the already seen and heard to be worshiped even more. Human beings weren’t meant to be placed on pedestals, but we are stellar at doing so.

I had my first mini-mid-life-crisis at 35. My marriage was over a decade old at this point and growing stale; we’d had some financial and family issues that were opening old wounds; and my oldest two children were entering their teenage years.

And that was just the surface. Inside, I was exhausted from continuously asking questions about my faith but receiving no answer. On a private blog that I then shared to Facebook, I began to write about these nagging questions. Although writing woke up a side of me I knew I always had, it also inflamed all my feelings of being a less than, left out loner who didn’t know how to play the game of life.

My readers loved when I talked sweetly about marriage, parenting, and God. But if I even dared to question the status quo, I feared being labeled a rebellious, blasphemous, apple-eating Jezebel, a vessel of wrath fitted for destruction.

There was a tiny problem: I was a rebellious, blasphemous, apple-eating, Jezebel. Everything I wanted to do in my life–write, speak, dance, eat good food, have good sex, smoke a cigarette, drink a beer, travel, live life completely, love others fully–placed me squarely in a Pandora's box of shame.

So I folded inside myself, feeling horribly guilty anytime I did anything that brought me joy, and I attempted instead–disastrously–to fulfill each item on the Perfect American Wife and Mother Checklist, praying my compliance would ensure a perfect life, family, and eternity.

Why couldn’t I just be like every other wife and mom? Join the PTO, drive a minivan, carry a big bag of goodies to all the travel ball sports.

I tried. Believe me, I tried.

But there was something missing in my life, some dream I wanted to believe I still had time to fulfill. It wasn’t the dream of a big house or a new car or a pair of fancy earrings or jeans.

What about you?

It was the dream of being a fully autonomous woman, able to make her own decisions, choose her own path, forge her own way in the world.

I felt caught between my dream and my actual life: my career in education (that I hated) and my role of being a wife, a mother, and a Christian. I can do it all, I told myself, not understanding that my career, and the wife, mother, and Christian parts of my life weren’t really the problem.

The problem was a mindset bent on believing life was all or nothing, black or white, one way or the other, with no grey or imperfections. I judged my desires and my self-worth and value against what I believed a wife, mother, and Christian woman in the Deep South was supposed to look like and what she was supposed to want.

Instead of digging in deep to sort this mess inside me out, I folded inside once again and returned to full-time teaching. And it was there, at a classical Christian school in 2021 that everything changed for me.

All my life I’d been told to accept my lot. Not only my lot as a girl who could never hold the same value as the privileged girls in my church, at my school, or in my community. I mean, if my Southern Baptist pastor's love for others was an indication of worth, and if his estimation of worth equaled God’s estimation of worth, well… I shouldn’t even bother with trying to be seen, heard, and valued.

But also to accept my lot as a girl who in the future would become a woman, subordinate to a man somewhere, no matter the situation, be it work, marriage, or society in general.

There is no way to win at a game you weren’t meant to play.

Lucky for me, my love of reading, my lifelong inquisitive nature, and my gender–along with my inability to ever quite fit in–became my greatest tools for change. Because the more I learned about my faith and the more I prayed, the more committed I became to living out my most authentic self–imperfections and all–and the more I began to find answers–or at least, a path toward my answers.

Now I feel called to live exactly as I am: I’m a Southern wife, mama, and seeker of something new in Christ. An encourager, and yes, a teacher, but not in the traditional way.

And I want to use my gift of gab and the wisdom gained from a whole lot of trials and tribulations–and yes, a few triumphs too–to help us learn to live and work within these systems that continue time and time again.

If you're here, leave a comment! I’d love to help encourage you on your midlife journey.