6: How I Overcame The Depths of Depression and Became “The Happy Mom”

This is why I do what I do today. This is why I’m here to teach you all these mindset shifts and life changing ideas. This is why I’m alive and passionate about helping other moms who find me “relatable.”

This is how a Steller’s Jay saved my life.

June 2020 was the last time I hit a major depressive episode. I was really ready to leave it all behind and take the express ticket out…Honestly, I chose not to mainly because I don’t trust anyone else to raise my kids.

I want to be here for them and to raise them in a home that they feel okay to feel. As a boy mom its really important for me to allow them to express their emotions, to let them cry and to feel supported in that rather than shamed. The only time I won’t let them cry is when they throw a fit because they want a toy or a snack – my mantra for them is “it’s okay to cry for sad, but it’s not okay to cry for want, that is not how we ask for things.”

I grew up in a home that didn’t talk about feelings. I watched my mom struggle with her own depression and she never told me what was going on, but tried her best to hide it from us. That’s probably where I got the idea that I needed to hide my own struggles and had depression for 8 years before I ever got help for it. I want my kids to have a different experience, I am open with them when I’m not feeling right – not just with depression, but with anger or burn out, I make what I’m going through clear to them and want them to feel comfortable talking to me if they ever experience anything like this. I don’t just want to make them aware that I’m going through something emotionally or mentally challenging, but I want to show them how I’m getting through it. I want them to have these tools too.

When I decided not to end things, I felt like I’d been baptized in the rain – it was raining that day if I didn’t mention that already. I heard God speaking to me that I wasn’t done and I had a work to do.

He’d pulled on my heart for years, literally years to use my writing as a platform for Him and I just never figured out how or what exactly I was supposed to be doing. This is why I already had a blog going, but content was all over the place… I took some months to work on myself and put together my mental health toolkit – if you don’t have one of those, you definitely need to put one together, it’s like having a first aid kit for your brain, you wanna have it before you need it.

At the beginning of 2021 everything kind of clicked together and I heard from God again and He told me what to do. Pretty loud and clear. He wants me to be open and vulnerable about what I’ve experienced, because I’m not the only one. That’s why I’ve converted my own mental health toolkit into a 3 week workbook to help other moms.

Sometimes we just aren’t in a place where we need therapy, but we need something… We need to be proactive about our mental health and we need to have our mental health toolkit on standby. The Happy Mom Brain Workbook is that something. It’s already been really helpful to a handful of other women, with a lot of others who are really excited to get to work in theirs.