Follow the dots...
Life has a funny way of connecting the dots, as long as you are paying attention. Most of my life, in fact quite a big chunk of my life has always danced around the subject of mental health. Whether experiencing issues surrounding the subject myself or within my close family. As I have gone through life, I never realised my chosen career would centre around children and the fire behind that passion would be their mental health,
As a young girl I have vague memories of visiting a lady and talking to her about what seemed like random subjects at the time. Looking back now, I fully understand they were assessing my mental health after living through my parents divorce. Do I blame them for everything we lived through? No. Do I hold onto that story as the strong women that I have grown into today? Definitely not. I do however, use that experience to create a career that I am passionate about today, to have an understanding of what a child may be living through. Let's face it, when we are going through a tough time, as much as we try and protect those we love around us, we do slip up. We aren't perfect after all.
Growing up with a parent who didn't know how to communicate emotions, express feelings, show love openly, or know how to react when shown love by someone else, made it hard for me to figure all this out myself. My life has taken me on a giant round trip of growing up in a certain environment where love was scarce, to having to burst open my heart with the arrival of my first born. What I didn't realise at the time, is that love comes naturally to every single on of us if we step out of our own way. Let go of any fear attached to the idea of love and know that we ALL deserve it. Even now as a single parent, I choose to enjoy my life and love every second of it, but every now and then my inner mean girl tries to pipe up and say that I won't find someone who wants the same in life AND take on 3 children too. Thankfully, when she pipes up, she also get's given some love and the thought goes just as quickly as it comes.Â
As I look at my choices that have been made with and sometimes for my children, I know they are the right ones because I took the time to make them from a place of love, rather then what everyone else was doing or telling us to do. Home education is such unknown territory, especially here in the UK, but in reality our whole family benefits from it. I have amazing relationships with each of my children, I watch them grow and learn every single day, I can take the time to explore their interests so they can find who they are as individuals. The positives are endless. overall though, their mental health as improved so much from being taken out of mainstream education, they have blossomed and no longer feel a pressure to be the same as everyone else. I can't think of anything better... can you?
 So to wrap up my short but sweet blog post, I decided to write again, because writing is what makes me happy and along with a few other things keeps me on the track I am paving myself. Although I won't mention the person's name, I want to personally thank them for just their presence, for it was them who inspired me to take the time to get back into something that makes me truly happy.
