welcome!
Hi! Can you guess my name? Right! Cherie. Starts with a C. Welcome to my blog. My therapy. Maybe it will be a part of yours? Who knows? Maybe we can help each other out a little.
My reason for starting this blog is……where do I start? I’ll start by telling you all a little bit about myself.
I’m a mum. I’m a wife. I’m a daughter, a sister, an aunty, even a great aunty! I’m a friend, a colleague, a team mate, a receptionist. What else? I’m not really sure……the roles I mentioned are the easy ones. Anyone who knows me could tell you all that. For so long I have described myself as “just a mum”. And I certainly don’t mean that in a derogatory way, nor am I taking the fact that I am a mum for granted. It is a privilege not granted to everyone and my heart goes out to those who have wanted to have children but for various reasons, have been unable to. Equally, I celebrate the fact that not everyone chooses to have children.
I wanted to be a mum for as long as I can remember. In fact, I was 10 years old when a young family moved into the house across the road from me. The couple had a baby, and proceeded to have 4 more over the years. I loved those babies as if they were my own. And I still do. They have all grown up, some of them have children of their own. We don’t see each other as often as we would like but they were the reason my main goal in life was to have children of my own. And I did! I met my husband just before my 21st birthday (good story for a future blog!) and we were married the following year. In 1995 at age 23, our first beautiful baby arrived, followed by his two sisters in 1997 and 2002. BLESSED.
As a qualified child care provider I knew about babies. I had experience with toddlers and young children. So mothering came fairly naturally to me. I’d had plenty of practice! Teenage years were interesting but we all survived….no major catastrophes!!
Our children really are very nice young adults. Respectful, grateful, loving, loyal, honest and hard working. People, apart from their mum, dad and grandparents, actually do like them! That’s like winning the lottery!
But what’s next for a mum who has based her whole identity around being just that, a Mum? What happens when they have lives of their own? While giving my all to them, I’ve kind of forgotten who I am along the way. Do I have interests? Hobbies? Goals? Ummmm….not really.
I started thinking….how do I find the old me again? How do I go back to being who I was before I defined myself through my children? And the answer is……….I CAN’T! I can’t ever go back! I’m older, wiser, I’ve experienced so much, I’ve changed, I’ve matured…I’ve even evolved. Holy Moly…that’s a light bulb moment!
So….what’s next for me?
This blog is my journey. My journey to discovering and unearthing Cherie. Not just Cherie the mum, Cherie the wife, Cherie the daughter. But also Cherie the woman.
I kind of want to find my voice again and live life the way we all should be living….lots of laughs and lots of love!
So feel free to join me. I’m going to try new things, set myself some goals and try to stop being wishy-washy about what I want to get out of my life. I’m going to get out of my comfort zone…starting with this blog!
I look forward to sharing my stories with you….the good ones and the not so good ones. And maybe, just maybe, I can figure out who it is that I want to be.
Happy reading!
Cherie with a C. xxx