How The Women In My Life Have Shaped Me
A love letter to the women who have helped me through the years
I was looking for blog topics and A.D. suggested the following:
“In celebration of Women’s History Month, would you mind sharing the women who have made the greatest positive impact in your life, creatively and beyond?”
This question really resonated with me, and I spent some time thinking about it, turning over which women have made positive impacts on my life, who has shaped me creatively, and who has given me comfort when I needed it.
When I was little, my mom would tuck me in with a tuck tuck tuck and sing me songs. She taught me how to tense up the muscles in my body and hold it as tight as I could, and then release it. This would help soothe me when I was feeling anxious, which was most of the time. It taught my body what RELAXED felt like. My mom had/has a lot of struggles, but these quiet moments of stability and routine anchored me.
When I was around 10 or 11, I went through traumatic separations. My mom remarried and overnight, my brother was forced to move out and move in with my dad. I didn’t understand what was happening, or why, I just knew my brother was gone. And then later my stepdad left my mom. I was watching Emo Phillips on TV, and I heard fighting, my stepdad’s footsteps leaving the house, the car screeching. I never saw him again. Then in school, the girls I hung out with had a meeting and decided I couldn’t hang out with them anymore. This was the tipping point for me: my brother was gone, my 2nd dad was gone, my friends were gone, and my mom started spiraling. We moved six times that year.
One day in school, I lost it. I was alone and scared and during class I just started crying. I couldn’t stop. I felt alone. Invisible. I didn’t know why the people I loved didn’t love me back. Why they left me. My teacher took me out of class and talked to me. I couldn’t talk. The words were stuck. And then Mrs. Welch did something incredible. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Come here.” And she hugged me. She. Just. Hugged. Me. I cried and cried and she hung on. She wouldn’t let me go. And, somehow, magically, all the pain and the stuck words and the fear abated for a moment, and I felt safe and cared for. The tears stopped. I breathed. I could speak again.
I don’t remember anything specific I learned in that class, but forty years later, I still remember Mrs. Welch and that moment of kindness and connection.
My Aunt Connie has been a huge influence on my life. Not just in our relationship over the years, and our many conversations, but how knowing her, seeing her be a professional woman in the world, a stable a loving parent, a kind and empathetic person, showed me the kind of person I wanted to be.
Once, on a scary drive in the winter, my dad was driving me home from Grand Rapids to Coopersville, 30 minutes away. We were caught in a huge blizzard. We could only go about twenty miles an hour, and it was treacherous. We couldn’t see a thing. Snow swirled around us. I held my breath, terrified we were going to crash. Moments later, the snow lifted and we realized that we had been driving behind a snowplow, the snow swarming all around us. There was so much snow, we didn’t know we weren’t in a storm, and there was clear road all around us. We just didn’t know until it lifted.
Sometimes, I think of this. How can you know what a healthy person is if you’ve never seen a healthy person? How can you know what it is like to live outside of a storm, if you’ve always been behind a snowplow? My aunt showed me what healthy is. What is achievable. The value of learning, connecting, and loving. My aunt modeled possibility for me, and it was the belief in The Possible, that pulled me through years of hardship.
There have been other women over the years who have shaped me: writers like LM Montgomery (all of her books, not just Anne of Green Gables), Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Shirley Jackson. Musicians like Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan spoke to my spirit in college. Ina Garten’s cookbooks and laid-back attitude shaped my approach to food and cooking.
My friendships with women (in college Sarah, Kim and Rachel, and later K., Erin, and others) taught me what resilience is, how to laugh, how to celebrate, how to cry and mourn and fight, how to put on makeup, how to eat dessert at every restaurant, how to be grateful, how to be loved.
For a long time, I didn’t know how deeply women have affected my life. I didn’t acknowledge it or understand it, but looking back now, I see all these women around me, watching me, helping me, supporting me, loving me up close, loving me from afar. They have taught me about life and how to live with an open heart. They have taught me forgiveness. They have taught me understanding. Some have come into my life, and then left. Some have stayed. But their imprint is part of my fingerprint now. They are part of me.
I think, sometimes, of sea glass and how a shard of glass can be rubbed smooth and beautiful by the sand around it. Maybe it doesn’t even know its edges are being smoothed, but years later, there it is, smooth and round and beautiful, letting the light shine through.
That is how I feel about the women I’ve been lucky to know.
Here’s to celebrating women: our strength, our energy, our bodies, our minds, our souls. Here’s to being exactly who we are and being surrounded by those who inspire us and cheer us on. ]
If this post resonates with you, who is a woman in your life that has made an impact? Who has shaped you?
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Tanya Eby is a daughter, a mom, a friend, a partner, and a fiancée. She lives in Michigan.
Beautiful. And to think our simplest acts could have such a lasting effect and make such a meaningful impact on a child. Thank goodness for all the Mrs. Welches.
"Tuck, tuck, tuck." My mom did this too. Then, I said this to my stepdaughter. Then each of my three granddaughters.
The most influential woman in my life was my mother. She had me late in life, in her 30s. I'm the youngest of four kids and the surprise kid. 🙂 My mother was an independent woman who raised all her kids pretty much on her own. My dad was a pilot for the Navy and traveled the world. Then, they separated when I was about 10 years old. She was a registered surgical nurse. You can probably imagine the "be calm in chaos" she portrayed with that job. That is only one of the wonderful traits I inherited from her.
Another is an incredible work ethic. Mom worked until her mid 80s. After nursing career, she took a job at a pharmaceutical company transcribing doctors orders. She had mobility issues at this stage of her life, but that didn't stop her. She'd toss her walker in the back seat if her car and drive to work every day. Finally, after much coaxing from me, she retired and moved in with me. I remember her telling me "One day I won't be able to walk any longer and I'll need to go to a nursing home." Always the realist. She did have to go when I couldn't care for her any longer. She left this world at the age of 96.
I thank her often for the traits I inherited from her: optimism, independence, tenacity, confidence, fearlessness, empathy.
Thank you for another wonderful article. I look forward to reading them.