Becky Vollmer - You Are Not Stuck: How Soul-Guided Choices Transform Fear into Freedom

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For The Sisters,

the ones

who changed

everything.

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it.

Cheryl Strayed

On an exceptionally bright and warm January morning in 2013, a friend and I walked the beach at San Franciscos Crissy Field toward the Golden Gate Bridge. It was abuzz with walkers and runners, dogs with their Frisbees and their people. I suspected most visitors would pause to soak up the sunshine and bountiful view, but all I could do was wonder, with more than a hint of scorn: Its Friday. Why arent all these people at work?

For me, it was the start of a long-anticipated girls weekendwith Napa Valley wine tastings and a Calistoga mud bath in our futureyet there I was, my St. Louis feet in California sand, spending what should have been quality vacation time pissing and moaning, once again, about my job. My specific lament: the never-ending, emotionally draining push-pull between work and family.

Maybe I could reduce my schedule even more? I speculated to my friend Chelsey as we strolled. Or work exclusively for one client or move to human resources or something?

But every idea was a square peg in a round hole, and I knew it. Sometimes bad cant be made better.

At that moment, I spied a family playing at the waters edge. A man threw a ball with his young son, who I guessed was almost the same age as my younger daughter, then just three. The man scooped up the giggling boy, tossed him high against the sun, and hugged him in close. I immediately felt a pang from having missed too many of those moments with my girls.

Thats what I want. Not this. THAT. I stopped walking and sobbed.

Listen, Chelsey said firmly. If youre that unhappy doing what youre doing, then do something different. And if that doesnt work out, do something different again. Youre smart, youre marketable. Youll figure it out.

I swear my jaw hit the ground so hard that sand stuck in my teeth. I was a nearly forty-year-old mother of two who counseled C-suite executives at Fortune 500 companiesand I truly hadnt realized that choosing another path was an option.

Was she suggesting I could walk away from something I didnt like, even though Id spent more than a decade cultivating it? Did she just give me permission to quit?

Permission to quit, to change, to live in alignment with priorities that had evolved as I had evolved, to redefine what success looked like for methat was the permission she gave me, all right. And from the moment just four days later when I sat down in my bosss office and resigned, it has been my mission to give that permission to everyone else.

Because we all have choices; we just have to be brave enough to make them.

The Backstory

For almost a dozen years, Id toiled at one of the worlds top public relations agencies, grinding my way from an entry-level account executive to a partner-track senior vice president leading a multimillion-dollar global practice. I was good, and I was going places. Yet I was fried. I could barely string two sentences together. My polished persona was nothing but a veneer.

Other people liked me and my work. But I didnt like the person I had become.

I tried to blame work-life balance, or the lack of it. Before children, I was a workhorse, an Energizer bunny, a machine. I. Did. Not. Stop. When I ate lunch, I usually did so at my desk while continuing to work, what my friend Hannah likes to call dining al desko. In my earliest years at the agency, I was among the first in the office, often arriving before the sun, and among the last to go home after the sky had turned dark again. I always felt a lonely pang when someone from the late-night cleaning crew knocked on my door and took the days trash.

Once, when I was still pretty junior, I told my supervisor I needed to work from home the next day to wait for the cable guy. There wasnt anything that resembled working from home back then, at least not at that agency.

Youll have to take a vacation day, he said.

But Im not going on vacation, I said. I have tons of work to do. I just need to do it from home while I wait for the guy to show up.

Youll have to take a vacation day, he repeated.

What utter bullshit, I thought. Without fail, I work far more than the mandatory minimum of fifty hours a week and dont complain when the clock starts over at zero on Monday morning. Im available to you 24/7. Wheres the give and take?

Things got trickier after I became a parent. I had been at the agency for about six years when my husband Dave and I decided to go for it. Funny thing was, Id never planned on being a mom. In fact, for as long as I could remember, I was adamant that I did not want to have children: Theyre loud, theyre expensive, and theres nothing I want to teach anyone, I thought. Throughout my twenties, my mother encouraged me to at least keep the door open to the idea.

You never know when you might change your mind, she said. And she was right. I arrived at my early thirties, looked around at my friends with kids who didnt seem completely miserable, and decided to try.

The runup to motherhood had been difficult. My first pregnancy, at age thirty-three, was a complicated one due to whats called an incompetent cervix. (I really cant think of a worse way to get a cervix to cooperate than by calling it incompetent, can you?) That meant two key things. First, I had to get a pessary, which is kind of like an inflatable rubber donut that gets inserted through the vagina and past the cervix to sit at the base of the uterus so that baby wont, essentially, fall out. And each Tuesday for roughly six months, Dave would haul me to the doctors office to have that lovely little pessary taken out, sterilized, and put back in. Ill spare you the details, but let me just say that having someone screw around with your very sensitive cervix on a weekly basis isnt exactly how one hopes to spend a pregnancy. I maintain that self-medicating with Harvest Grain N Nut pancakes from IHOP after every visit was an entirely appropriate response.

The second thing this meant was that, at all times outside of Pessary Tuesday, I was confined to bedrest. The doctor limited trips up and down the steps to once a daya restriction that would have been more manageable had our lone bathroom not been situated on the second floorso I spent most of my time in my bedroom. On the rare days that Id move the party to the first floor, I peed in a medical commode my husband lovingly placed in the dining room. This went on for three months (also not the way one hopes to spend a pregnancy). I did work from home for a while, but only because the doctor insisted, and then shifted to long-term disability status until the baby came.

Waiting for my daughter to arrive wasnt the only thing that marked this period with uncertainty and concern: my dad, Leo, whom I loved so dearly, was dying of colon cancer. It was a slow and painful and tragic time. He spent nearly two long years in hospice care; hed rally, then decline, so they kept extending his services. As my belly grew, he grew sicker and sicker. So, weekly, I broke the bedrest rules to sit on his couch while he took a codeine doze in his red recliner.