I'm still here. Yup. Still working on this. Today's challenge is to explain the meaning behind my business's name, "Unlabel My Love". There is a corresponding website for my biz, that's still in development (published, and always under construction), called Living Without Labels. Similar, and in the same theme, there's a story behind the name. Isn't there always? So, as I love to tell stories, get comfy, and I'll share the story behind Unlabel My Love.
I have always been a people pleaser. You know, that needy little person who bends over backwards for the smallest bit of praise? Doing everything to please everyone around them... Being "the good kid"... Striving for the goals set for me by other people. I worked my butt off in school to get the good grades, so I could get into a good college and get a good degree to open the doors to a good career. As defined by someone else.
What did I really want? Meh.. As I'm knocking on the door to 40 years old here, I couldn't even tell you what I really wanted because I was so busy trying to make others happy. I do recall wanting to be a race jockey, but by 4th grade, I was already taller than most professional riders, and heavier by at least 20 pounds. But that wasn't what killed that dream. "Girls don't do that," I was told. So... I shifted focus a little... "I'd like to be a veterinarian when I grow up," was met with girls don't do that kind of work.
Pshaw... Really?
Fast forward 15 years, and I'm married (to the wrong person and miserable for it) with two kids. I wanted to stay home and raise them, but I was, instead, working 50, 60, 70... sometimes 80 hours a week for a paycheck I didn't have time to spend, yet we never had money. But I was "a good Christian wife" and didn't believe in divorce.
Give me another 5 years, and I managed to overcome that belief, remarried, have another beautiful daughter with my military husband, and I'm living with the label of "Army Wife"--which honestly, I never minded so much. But O.M.G.! The labels they use in the military (and I'm not just talking about the soldiers--those labels are useful and necessary to maintain discipline, order and chain of command so that things don't get uber messy and ugly!). "Oh, your husband is only a [fill in the blank, complete with condescending tone from an officer's wife]?" Wait.. since when did my husband's position define me as a person? Hmm...
Another 2 or 3 years down the road, and our little one has started school. I've developed several debilitation medical problems that all fit hand in hand with each other, and I'm dealing with disability paperwork, medical appointments, drugs of all kinds, pain like you wouldn't believe (or maybe you would?), and my daughter is showing signs of her own problems. Like ADHD, autism, and a speech disorder. She's having trouble with learning to read, and I'm fighting tears with every lesson, because she's just not getting it. I'm overwhelmed because I want her to enjoy school, to love reading, and to savor learning (a tall order for any 5 year old, I know... but what can I say?), and I'm on the phone, crying my heart out to her teacher that I just don't know how to make this work.
You know, the teacher we had for our daughter's kindergarten and first grade years should be nominated for sainthood. She stood by our daughter, advocating for her long after we were no longer in her class, advising me as mother and "learning coach" (the online public school title for a parent who does all the teaching, but doesn't have teaching credentials, so the school gets all the credit for the student's actual learning). This woman was a phenomenal force in our daughter's early education, and her best advice to me was this:
Sometimes, you have to throw away the manuals, and do what's best for your child. If she's not learning it the way they want you to teach it, find a new way to teach it. The end result is really what matters the most--that she knows you love and accept her as she is, and that she grasps the material and how to learn even more from what she already knows. Take away the labels and the stereotypes, and let her be herself, let her learn in her own way, and you'll all be happier for it."Take away the labels and the stereotypes..."
We did.. we did just that. We did get her into speech therapy and get an "official" diagnosis of ADHD so that the school would allow us to let our daughter learn the way she learns best (sometimes, she moves really fast through information that she gets, sometimes, it takes her a while to get a concept if she's resisting it and the school just wasn't going to allow that without "a medical reason"). They slapped her in special education classes, even though she's extremely bright (she developed a love of Shakespeare in 3rd grade). And it took some really extreme measures to get her special ed teacher to stop treating her like an imbecile (test scores are everything, and my daughter tests low on standardized tests for reasons I won't go into here). Those measures earned her the label of "twice exceptional," which really just meant that they expected even more from her in areas outside of school, adding pressure, and they didn't take me seriously when I said that this kid learns at her own pace. She might fall behind for a month while she fights to understand a new concept in math, but then she'll make it up in the next two months, and be 5 months ahead of her peers. The labels that the school slapped on her restricted her (and us as her parents) so much that we finally said to heck with it all, got our certifications and decided to homeschool her completely. (The best choice we ever made, by the way, though it's been a difficult road of it's own.)
Around 3rd grade, the school started pushing us to pursue getting our daughter tested for high functioning Autism spectrum disorders. I started that process. And then, when we got to the point of calling to schedule that appointment, my daughter looked at me and asked "So, if they decide I have this, what other labels am I going to be stuck with?"
There are moments in a mother's life, that change everything.
This was one of those moments. Getting this diagnosis wasn't going to change anything for her. We were already planning on pulling her out of public school, and this label wasn't going to change how we parented, or how we saw her or handled her education. What's more, I had researched this thing, and talked to several parents who had children diagnosed with this. I'd talked to teachers about it, And I was dealing with a couple people in my life at the time who used ASD as an excuse for some really poor behavior (perhaps this is ignorant of me, but if you know that you abuse people because of a medical or mental disorder, it's time to get some professional help. It's never okay to use or abuse others and excuse it with "I have [fill in the blank], so you have to put up with it."). I excused myself from the abusive situations, moved on with my life, and after careful discussion with my husband, we opted not to move forward with having her tested for ASD.
The bottom line, was that our daughter simply didn't need another label on her life. She is who she is. Period. And that's how we want her to see herself, and how we want to see her. That time in our lives led me to really start looking at my own life, and my own beliefs. I found that there were dozens of times every day that I would label others and myself. I was hiding behind my own labels, and using labels others had stuck on me as an excuse for not following my own passions and taking care of my own needs.
Long story short (I know, too late, right?), Unlabel My Love and Living Without Labels are the brain children of a woman who has spent the last few years peeling stickers off of her energetic life, trying to find peace within a space where stereotypes and labels aren't welcome, where people are free to be who they are without restriction, and where my dreams, and the dreams of others can take flight in a peaceful place filled with love and nurturing for spirit and soul.
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