My story- intro

 I was 16 when I got my first job working as a teacher’s assistant in a daycare center with four year olds. Because I had never taken child development, I was required to take it during Saturday School in my junior year if I wanted the job. It was in this child development class that I learned about the different forms of child abuse. 

Working with children and taking the class made me look forward to being a mother someday. However, this was frowned upon by almost everyone I knew. They say the left and the right are two sides of the same bird, and I can’t think of a truer example than that of the pressure on me to give up on my dream of someday having my own children. The very religious people in my family and friends was heavy on the idea that the will of God isn’t “your will”. Therefore, to them it wasn’t the will of God that I have a family since that’s what I wanted. The others in my family took a more radical feminist perspective and wanted me to focus on career and education instead of having a family, despite the fact that I always wanted to work and did poorly as a student due to undiagnosed ADHD. 

Many will argue with me about my own experiences, saying that right winged religious people actually want people to have families and that feminism is all about choice. I have no doubts that these people simply experienced both sides of “the bird” differently than I did. The pressure by on me was so extreme from both sides that by the time I was 21, I ended my relationship with a man I was engaged to and decided that I would make my entire career goal to be an advocate for children. In my mind at the time, this way I could satisfy the pressure to have a career, I could say it was a calling from God, and I already had experience due to my first job in my last two years of high school.

I sat down at my desk one evening to brainstorm and eventually just decided that I would do whatever I could in a career sense to help any child I could in any way I could. The rest was “up to God.” In the next 20 years, I was a caregiver at a children’s crisis shelter, a CASA volunteer (advocate in the court system), worked in a children’s museum and in a children’s hospital. I involved myself in state politics and went to the capital several times for organized events advocating for certain legislation. I even eventually got married and had a child, got divorced from her father, got into a relationship with a single dad behind everyone’s back and became a stepmother to two, dealt with many demons and overcame them. I never seemed to be off the hook for the arbitrary expectations put on me by the left and right wings of the same bird in my family and friends. Many around me always seemed to be against my relationships and the fact that I had my children, even though my children themselves were always loved. 

I hope this blog can be a place where I daily recall my struggles and accomplishments as an advocate for children. I hope that you not only laugh and cry with me, but I hope that I can teach you what I’ve learned along the way. 

#daycare #daycareworker #feminism #godswill #purityculture


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