Ep 9: Five Lessons I've Learned from my 12 Year Old
===
[00:00:00]
Jo: Hello, beautiful soul and welcome back to the podcast. Today's episode is gonna be a little bit different in honor of my son's 12th birthday. Yeah, he's 12. Can you believe that? In honor of his [00:01:00] birthday, this episode is going to include five lessons that my son has taught me over the past 12 years. So when I got pregnant with my son, I was 17 years old. I had just graduated high school. I had moved in with his father who was in the Navy. I really didn't have my life together. I had no clue what I was doing if I'm being completely and totally honest. I had absolutely no clue. I had no real life experience other than all of the trauma that had occurred in high school. So I found myself pregnant living with my son's father in Washington State, I'm from Texas, so we moved to Washington State because that's where his first duty station was, and the night that he went underway for the very first time. He left a text message open on his phone face up on the couch that said, Hey, when do you wanna file for divorce? W [00:02:00] T F what? Excuse me. Right. When do you wanna file for divorce? To his, at the time, current wife. Right. I didn't know that he was still married. He told me he had had it annulled because it just wasn't working out. They had never. Dissolved their marriage. So here I am, 17 years old, pregnant, no job living with my boyfriend at the time, who was still married. So that's fun. I stayed in Washington State, made sure all of the bills were paid, everything was good up until the week he was due home from his deployment, I bought a plane ticket and I sent myself home back to Texas. So when he got home, he assured me that she was his past and Maverick and I were his future, and yet I had found out that he had other girlfriends back in Texas also. So at this point, [00:03:00] I am still kind of clinging onto the hope that we can be together and we can be a family unit because I know what it's like to grow up in a broken home. I know what it's like to not have your parents together. And I didn't want that for Maverick. I didn't want that for my child. But long story short, he and I did not work out. He is now happily married and has a a whole family is still in Washington state and Maverick and I have been in Texas ever since. So the way I see it, I had a couple of options, right? I could have let this situation. Destroy me and define me. I could have become a statistic. And statistics for single teenage mothers are not favorable at all. I knew that I had all of the odds stacked against me. I knew that it was going to be tough. I knew that it was going to be [00:04:00] the biggest challenge that I had ever faced in my life. And I was okay with that. I was willing to put myself up against all of these odds, despite the fact that it could have worked out a lot differently than it did. But I was determined not to become a statistic. I knew that I was gonna have to succeed. There was no other option for me. So the very first thing that Maverick taught me was that there are always choices. There are always choices. You always, always, always have a choice. And whatever choice you make to stick to it 100%. And that's what I did. I made my decision, and then I stuck to it. I did not give myself another option. I didn't give myself an out. I didn't allow myself to fall back or to make excuses. I was all in for this decision. That was the very first lesson that he taught me was to be all in and in that lesson, in that being all in. What also came with that was that you [00:05:00] never truly know how strong you are until you are forced to be strong, right? You don't know how much shit you can take until you have no other choice you don't know how much your body can take. You don't know how much your mind can take until you are forced into that situation, and we are a lot stronger than we give ourselves credit for. After I had Maverick. I was still 17 at the time. I didn't turn 18 until a couple months after he was born. I was still living with my mom. She was helping me out. She was watching him at night so that I could work. So she was working at the school during the day and then she'd come home and she'd take care of him while I went to work at night. For the majority of his infancy. I was working at a restaurant. I was a server at a restaurant, so I would work until close, which was about midnight, one o'clock, and then I'd come home. I also decided to take some college classes online at that [00:06:00] time, so I was working until midnight. Staying up until three or four to do homework, going to bed, sleeping a couple hours, and waking up with him in the morning to watch him during the day. I would try to sleep when he slept. It was a whole deal, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Right? And I knew that this is what I had to do at the time, and I knew that there was a light at the end of the tunnel. I knew that there was an end point to it. After he turned one, I enlisted in the Air Force Reserve and I ended up going through basic training and tech school and then I did, the seasonal training program. So I was on active duty for about nine months and I was able to come home during tech school and the seasonal training program on weekends and see him and be able to love on him and let him know that. I was still here. We'd FaceTime and I'd talk to him, but it was still pretty challenging. [00:07:00] Not being able to be with him was challenging, but I knew that I was doing it for him, which made it a little bit easier. They say that if a woman has a boy first, she needed to learn the true meaning of love. And I 100% agree with that because up to that point, I had no idea what love truly was. The kind of love that I had experienced up to that point was full of toxic patterns and jealousy and possessiveness. It was not a healthy love at all. And then to learn. To be overcome by this sense of love, like you don't know what love is until you have a child. Honestly, I, I 100% believe that because there is not a single thing in this world that I would not do for my children. And I thank him every single day for showing me what love truly is. And he is such a kind and compassionate person. Inherently. [00:08:00] He's just one of those kids that has so much empathy and he. And wants everybody to be happy around him, and he'll like open your car door and holds your hand as you're getting in. And he's done this since he was like two years old. It's the sweetest thing on the planet. I'm truly so blessed to have him as my son. There is truly nothing like the love that you have for your kids. It is the most pure love that I have ever felt, and it's taught me so much about the kind of love that I'm capable of and also the kind of love that I am capable of receiving. And that's pretty huge. Especially in the times that we have today where love seems so fleeting. We can claim to love somebody one day and then throw them away the next, and that's not the kind of love that I have ever wanted for myself, because that's not truly love. And Maverick helped to teach me that. So the third thing [00:09:00] that he taught me was how to be present. Kids love just having your attention. And there were so many times where I was more concerned with studying for a test or trying to figure out how to make ends meet and pay the bills and make sure that we had a roof over our heads and. Make sure that all the paperwork was submitted for food stamps or the childcare program, or the government assistance for childcare, there were so many things that were pulling at my attention, and all he wanted was for me to play with him or just be there with. He just wanted my presence this lesson was huge for me and I've brought it with me. I feel like once I learned it, I can catch myself now when I'm not being so present and pull myself back into the present moment because all that they want, all that my kids want from me is to be there with them, to hold them, to love on [00:10:00] them, to play with them. And you know, sometimes playing with your kids, like grabbing a doll or grabbing a toy car or whatever it is that they're playing with for just 30 minutes will not only satisfy them, but it will also satisfy your inner child. Let me just tell you that inner child work, just satisfying your inner child like that you'll be pretty mind blown. So if you have kids, go grab a doll or a toy car or whatever, get on the floor and play. I promise you, you will feel so much better afterwards. We should all just go have play dates with our kids and play on the floor and stuff. I digress. Anyway, so that was number three. Number four, the fourth thing that he taught me was the courage to follow my dreams. He gave me the courage to actually go out and follow my dreams, and one of those dreams was being in the Air Force and at the time that I was enlisting into the Air Force, there was a rule that [00:11:00] you could not be a single parent and enlist active duty. So I had to go in as a reservist, and then there was like a workaround where you could go active duty after that. But what I found was that I loved the reserves and I actually loved the fact that I could go to school and I had the GI Bill to help pay for it. So what I ended up doing, because I wanted to be in the Air Force, is I picked a job that had a kicker for the GI bill, which meant that I got a little bit extra money every month because of the job that I chose in the Air Force. So what I did was I got my associate's degree in general studies completely paid for by grants and the Air Force. So I got that one degree, in a year and a half While I was still in the reserves and working part-time at restaurants, and then I decided to go to nursing school after that. Nursing school, if you don't know, is like a full-time job. Having [00:12:00] a job outside of nursing school. Especially during the first semester is nearly impossible. So that first semester of nursing school, I didn't work. I took out student loans. I received my grants and the GI bill until it ran out. The first semester of nursing school. Great. And then I got the childcare assistance so that he was going to daycare for like $5 a week, which was insane and absolutely what I needed to help me get to where I am today. So my dream was to be in the Air Force. My dream wasn't necessarily to be a nurse, but while I was in tech school for the Air Force, I was learning how to build giant munitions. I'm not sure that I can say what I actually built on here. They were big things that go boom, so, One day during tech school, while we were in class, we would watch these videos for motivation and to boost morale, and these [00:13:00] videos were literally planes, carpet bombing cities, or Apache helicopter shooting missiles and unliving a whole bunch of people. And what I noticed in that moment was like, oh shit, this is, is this really okay? Like one of our mottos as an AMMO troop was giving the enemy the opportunity to die for their country. And during this class it kind of just all hit me at once and I was like, oh my gosh, I have to figure out a way to reverse my karma because I am building these things that can kill so many people at once and cause so much destruction. I need to reverse my karma. Somehow. I need to even it out, balance it out because this is not okay with me. And at the same time, I absolutely loved what I was doing in the Air Force. It, it was this weird dichotomy where part of me was like, I feel [00:14:00] like I'm a part of something bigger. I feel like I'm doing something good for my country. I feel like this is always something that I wanted to do. Maybe not in this specific capacity. But being in the Air Force gave me that sense of belonging that I had been missing for a long time. And also looking back at like basic training and things, looking back, it's hilarious while you're in it though. It was terrifying. I also have a theory on basic training and stuff that might end up being a whole different episode, but what happens is you create trauma bonds. With the people that you go through basic training with and I didn't realize this until recently I was just thinking about it and I was like, oh my gosh, those are all trauma bonds and the reason we have such a connection to anybody else who's in the military is because they've been through it too. There's this common connection that we all just share. Anyway, let's get back on track for [00:15:00] the episode. So he gave me the courage to follow my dreams. Being in the Air Force was one of those dreams. Nursing, not so much, but I needed to even out my karma somehow some way. So I was like, I like helping people. Why not just be a nurse? And then I ended up falling in love with the human body. I ended up falling in love with my psychology classes. Ended up falling in love with the whole human experience period. So as I was going through nursing school, I was trying to determine what kind of nurse I wanted to be. At first I thought that I wanted to be a clinic nurse because I wanted a normal schedule. I wanted to go into work at nine, leave at five, and be able to be there for my kids after school and all the things. But the area of nursing that I ended up falling in love with was the ICU and specifically trauma icu. I found that I truly loved being a nurse and helping in trauma situations, even though it wasn't [00:16:00] a dream of mine before. And then after that, as I'm in nursing and covid hit things, got really, really hard, Covid turned everything upside down. And being a nurse during Covid was a shit show. I'm just gonna be real with you. It was like the wild west of nursing. If you worked up on Covid icu, it was insane. I'll just leave it at that there. Uh, it was mentally taxing, physically taxing. There were so many things that we didn't know about Covid in the beginning. Obviously it's new, like we didn't know what to treat it with. We didn't know how, like there were so many unknowns, right? So working in Covid ICU was terrifying, and as I was working in Covid icu, I was also going through a divorce. So there was just so, there was so much at that point. But he gave me the courage to continue to follow my dreams. I had started my coaching business, burned it to the ground [00:17:00] with the divorce, and restarted it under my spiritual name, Jo Fényx. So he gave me the courage to continue to fight for my business, to continue to fight for helping women in the capacity that I am really, really good at and the last thing that I want to talk about today is that he gave me the motivation to continue to grow, to continue to be a better person, to continue to want to be a better person. When you're on a healing journey or a growth journey of any kind. It's like peeling back the layers of an onion, you can start to do the healing process and you can heal something. On one level, and then you peel back the layer and you discover that you have more learning and more growing to do around that particular thing. So he's given me that motivation to continue to do that work, to continue to grow, to continue to better myself, so that I can be a better [00:18:00] person, a better mom for him, for his sister, for my husband, and for everybody else and for myself, because as I continue to grow, I become a lot more at peace. And what I've noticed lately is that when something's presented to me, when somebody says, oh, well they did such and such and it upset me, or somebody brings something up and it's like, well, this is what happened. I find myself. Very quickly and very easily taking a different perspective, taking multiple different perspectives. It's like I can very easily now step into the person who told me I can step into their perspective. I can step into the other person's perspective, the person who did it. I can step into my perspective and I can like remove myself completely and view everything from like a bird's eye view, all in a matter of like seconds, so what I've found is that, Things don't bother me near as much as they used to because I can[00:19:00] see the situation from different perspectives, take a step back and then evaluate it further. I don't see it from a fixed perspective anymore. I don't just see it from a one-sided perspective. Anything that goes on, I'm like, oh, well maybe they had something going on in their life and that's why they're acting rude. I don't find myself jumping to conclusions anymore. Like, oh, that's a rude person. I don't categorize them anymore, and that's given me a whole lot of peace and that's also helped take the pressure off of me. I don't take a whole lot of stuff very personally anymore, which is something that I used to do a whole, whole lot. So this whole growth journey has. A complete game changer for me, and if you are also going through a growth journey or want to go on a growth journey or a healing journey, continue to follow along.
Go ahead and join the Rise Empire community. It's free. It's hosted on Kajabi communities. We do new moon [00:20:00] visioning parties every month. So you get to experience a little bit of Kundalini, a little bit of goal setting and visioning every month, and you get to experience that in a community of other people who want the same, who want to grow, who are ready to see things differently, who are ready.
Live a tuned in and turned on life and really take control again, really take back the reins of their life and start living in a way that they want to. So that wraps up this episode. I hope that you enjoyed it. Feel free to leave me a review. On iTunes or Spotify or wherever you're listening, that helps other people find this podcast also.
So share it with your friends. Leave a review. Let me know that you are liking, listening and tuning in, and I will talk to you next week.
[00:21:00]
