THE JOURNAL
A safe and brave space for intersectional conversations around sex, love, relationships, parenting, and life.
How My Divorce Inspired Me to Become the Matriarch I Always Wanted to Be
Choosing divorce meant finally choosing me.
They say divorces are a chance at a new life, an opportunity to reinvent yourself or find yourself again. For me, it was a chance to write a new story and break cycles of intergenerational trauma — a pattern I witnessed among all the mothers in my family.
Divorce was an opportunity to rewrite my own story of motherhood and entrepreneurship, centered around ease, pleasure, abundance, and the feeling of being held as a mother. I had no idea how to achieve this because none of the women in my family had.
How to Deal With an Anxiety Attack
Anxiety is a state of unease, uncertainty, and fear resulting from the anticipation of real or imagined threat. Having anxiety and a history of depression is an interesting thing. Although I don’t talk about it much as I have in the past it doesn’t mean that I’m not dealing with, I’ve just picked up many tools and techniques to help me overcome it day to day.
Here's a few things that have helped me in a state of anxiety:
Mom shaming, something that affects us all.
The pressure women carry for having to keep up with society standards around beauty, fitness, and careers. Throw motherhood into that mix and you can only imagine the anxiety that can manifest by the innocent act of simply "trying to do you boo." I became a mother at 21, just when I was starting my very first career as a hairstylist. I wasn't married at the time and both my husband and I were barely adults trying to figure out this thing called "adulting." We both didn't come from families with money so a household with two working parents was our only option. Thankfully our parents were close enough to watch Airis at the time, which saved us on childcare expenses, but it was HARD AF! Not only did I have the pressure of building a clientele, learning how to become better at my craft, and being a decent adult, but now I had the pressure of raising another human life.